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“The Imperative of Diversity in Clinical Trials”: Alekhya Pochiraju with Genentech (Video + Transcript)

Transcript of Elevate 2020 Session

Sukrutha Bhadouria: All right. Thank you. Next up is Alekhya Pochiraju. She is a biomarker operations manager at Genentech, where she provides clinical oncology biomarker operations expertise. She believes biomarkers are a critical element of cancer drug development and cancer therapeutics. Alekhya will share with us today how non-Caucasian and underserved populations must be appropriately represented in clinical trials in order to ensure the efficacy of treatments across the board, across all populations. And before Alekhya gets started, I want to just remind everyone that this is definitely recorded. You’ll be able to watch all the talks on our YouTube channel, youtube.com/girlgeekx. And please tweet photos and posts on social media, any tidbits that you feel like you’re learning that you want to share with everybody else, with the hashtag GirlGeekX. So, thank you Alekhya. I want to make sure we thank you for the time you’re spending today. Go ahead and get started.

Alekhya Pochiraju: Hi, Sukrutha. Hi everyone. I’m Alekhya Pochiraju, from Genentech. And I’m excited to share my perspective on importance of diversity within clinical trials. This topic is near and dear to me, and I truly believe it is the best path forward in providing the highest standard of care for all populations, with emphasis on all populations, not just a specific segment of the population. Before we take a deeper dive into why diversity in clinical trials matter, allow me to provide a high level overview on how we get medicines to the patients and the design process behind it. Like almost all good things in science discovery, it starts in the lab. And for the purpose of today, I’ll say the focus of clinical trials is to bring new and better medicines to patients.

Alekhya Pochiraju: After successful lab research, clinical trials begin in phase one, and it involves testing on a small number of human volunteers, for whom better alternate options are lacking. And the focus of phase one, is to understand the effects in humans, specifically the safety aspect of it. After phase one’s success, the trial can move into phase two with a larger volunteer number, to determine both safety and efficacy. Eventually, when the medicine enters into phase three, the purpose is to confirm the safety and the efficacy data that has been generated in both phase one and phase two. The phase four of the study takes place after the medicine has been in the regulatory approval, meaning after it has received FDA approval and it’s already on market. And the purpose is that it’s designed to collect broader efficacy and safety information.

Alekhya Pochiraju: What I have here is a pictorial representation of US population and how it is represented in both federally-funded NIH trials (NIH stands for National Institute of Health) and industry-funded trials. How a patient responds to medicine can depend on different factors. Some of them would be genetic background, ethnicity, gender, and lifestyle. So, it’s important to have reliable representation in clinical trials. Unfortunately, minority populations have been both historically and consistently underrepresented in this clinical trial. As a result, the important information about how the medicine works in minority population is not always available. As an example, I would say US census data says African Americans should present 13% of US population. Yet, FDA reports that these populations constitute only 5% of clinical trial participants.

Alekhya Pochiraju: The disparity is even greater and, unfortunately, more in Hispanic and Latin origin communities. They represent 18% of the US population pie, but only 1% in the clinical trial participants. Because of this under-representation, we don’t know if all of today’s medicines are equally safe and effective for all populations. These disparities in representation magnify it has to be moving to the future. It’s estimated by 2045, most of what we now define as minority populations will be majority. It’s common knowledge that clinical trial process takes years, if not decades, from inception to a commercially available medicine.

Alekhya Pochiraju: What I’m trying to say is that the way the trials are conducted currently don’t represent the patients of the future. The advances in technology we have seen, there is significant increase in the usage of computational modeling and designing within the drug development process. Then, these models use publicly available genomic databases. It potentially amplifies the disparity. And the reason being that, 80% of the existing database is from European ancestry. This is also a challenge and a limitation as health industry is moving towards personalized medicine or precision medicine, which essentially means identifying treatments that work for an individual patient or a small cohort of patients.

Alekhya Pochiraju: So, the diversity in clinical trials is a complex issue, has multitude of challenges and obtaining rights representation. I’ll try to go over few of these issues, and then deep dive on couple of challenges in my next upcoming slides. To begin with, there’s a lack of trained frontline staff that specializes in recruiting diverse population. And they have also seen there’s a correlation between patient and doctor diversity. Currently, both of these segments are not doing very well in representation.

Alekhya Pochiraju: Additionally, the consent that patients have to sign prior to participating in the trials can be hard to understand without the scientific background. We have an understanding you need to make it easier for our patients to understand our version of terms and conditions page. There’s room to improve on building trust and sharing more information on how data is generated from clinical trials and how that data, which is generated from clinical trials, will be utilized. One of the challenge that I have listed here is that race, lifestyle, environment, all of these are deeply intertwined and decoding it isn’t always straightforward. Additionally, assumptions and stereotypes and races also impact patient recruitment in the clinical trial process.

Alekhya Pochiraju: One of the major challenges is out-of-pocket cost. Since not all the costs are covered, it might be harder for patients to take time off from work and routinely visit hospitals for their treatment. We have also seen that the socioeconomic conditions are clustered to ethnicity and race. What I have on the slide is implying they are health deserts, which means that the nearest hospital for disease treatment isn’t really near. Additionally, we need more awareness, we need more education on clinical trials as a safe option. And as I alluded to my previous slide, genetic database isn’t really diverse enough to build on.

Alekhya Pochiraju: The intention of the slide is to highlight how global populations are changing. As you could see, the current population and demographic are not equally ported into the future. This emphasizes that lack of representation, if it continues to be unchecked, will lead to a larger problem of amplifying existing health inequities. This is a little crowded slide, so please bear with me. But, I’m trying to touch base here on few examples demonstrating the need for taking into account ethnicity and ancestry background, actual patient population, while designing trials. As you would see, for Lupus Nephritis, which is an autoimmune disease. And you can see a higher prevalence. However, the outcome of the current treatment is relatively poor, specifically for these racial and ethnic groups.

Alekhya Pochiraju: Similarly, lung cancer, it’s more commonly diagnosed cancer, and it’s also a leading cause of cancer death worldwide. There are higher incidents of specific mutations in lung cancer, that are related to racial and ethnic background. And this was identified because the clinical trial participants were diverse enough. I’m trying to get to, by saying that there’s a correlation between how a patient responds to a medicine and their racial and ethnic background. This exists in asthma, this exists in breast cancer, which I will get to the next slide. But, it exists in a lot of other diseases beyond what you see on the slide.

Alekhya Pochiraju: This is a stark, but also an unfortunate illustration. As you see, how black women have overall high mortality rates, about 41% due to breast cancer. But, they have very little participation in clinical trials. If you look at all the women of color cumulatively, there’s 80% of mortality, yet women of color constitute only 14% of enrollment in clinical trials.

Alekhya Pochiraju: A 2009 analysis revealed that 96% of participants in genomic-wide association studies, GWAS, what I will refer to as genomic database for our purpose, was based on European descent. So, 96% of the genomic database in 2009 was comprising of European ancestry. But since then, the progress has been made. In 2016, the analysis revealed that 81% of the information now is based on European descent. However, within minority population of that tie, African ancestry only accounts to 3%, and it’s much lower than Hispanic and Latin Americans. They only account to 1%. So, there’s still a long road to diversity.

Alekhya Pochiraju: I heard that the audience that have dialed in today is predominantly from tech and health tech. So, I included a small blurb on artificial intelligence. So, AI is now widely used in discovering new medicines. And these AI abilities are built on existing systems that lack full representation. There’s rapidly growing concern, and also evidence, that new analyze technologies could exacerbate the bias in scientific discovery and clinical care. So, this is something to be mindful of, as the industry continues to leverage AI for drug discovery advancement.

Alekhya Pochiraju: Genentech developed the advancing inclusive research initiative, which is led by dedicated people. And their purpose is to understand the study challenges and also, to understand how to develop solutions, to ensure a proper representation of clinical trial participants. So this slide that you’re seeing here is heavily built on their work. While one of the primary challenges has been that site of care, as an example, would be hospitals, assume that minorities are not willing to participate. And a simple solution on the limitation for that, is to set expectations that all of the eligible patients are being asked. It’s also that the care giving sites, example again, hospitals, don’t always have staff that has experience in recruiting diverse population. And tech drug development companies can work with the site or the caregiving sites, like hospitals, to collectively improve this aspect.

Alekhya Pochiraju: Distance and finances can also be a huge deterrent, for which federally, or maybe privately, funding and support can be provided. The other takeaway that I had, is building trust and raising awareness and engaging minority communities that will help mitigate the participation gap. I want to conclude my presentation with this pictorial representation of what equality and equity looks like. Rather than equality, we should strive towards health equity With that, I can conclude my talk and I’m open for questions.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Okay. Are we ready for some Q&A? Okay. So, we have some questions that came in and have been upvoted. So, what do you think contributes to the wide discrepancies in study subjects that you called out in your presentation?

Alekhya Pochiraju: Just give me a second. I’m having a little trouble here. Yeah. Can you still hear me, and could you repeat the question?

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Yes. What do you think contributes to the wide discrepancies in study subjects?

Alekhya Pochiraju: Yeah. Traditionally, minorities have not been participating. There’s many reasons along that. One of the primary … Or two of the primary things that I can think of, is fear. And the other aspect is the logistics. Sometimes it’s not easier to get to the hospital or the finances of taking part in the study, in the clinical study, because even after it being reimbursed, there’s a lot of out-of-pocket costs. And the fear could also be because a lot of times we have seen, in the past history, there have been clinical trials on the minorities, without taking their full consent. So, they don’t know what they’re signing up for. And then, the end of the trial, that is not what they had hoped for. So, that’s one of the two factors.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: What do you think about … Has there been any evidence where underrepresented groups would be more willing to participate if there’s some sort of compensation involved? So, as to increase the data set in underrepresented communities.

Alekhya Pochiraju: There have been studies. And one of the things that I would say, is the lung cancer study between the KRAS and the EGFR mutation. The reason why we knew that these mutations work differently in different ethnic groups is because the patients have been able to participate. So, there are plenty of examples, but there’s still a long road to go.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Alright. Upvoting keeps changing and increasing. Okay. The next question. Are these studies just done in the United States, or are they across the world?

Alekhya Pochiraju: The ones that I had provided stats for, are global studies.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: So it’s a global problem that it’s not representative of actual fact. So, another person asked, am I wrong to extrapolate that without diverse test groups, prescribing medications to those groups not represented in trials puts them at a potentially greater risk?

Alekhya Pochiraju: Yeah. It is true because the outcome is not representative of the minorities that have taken part of this trial, because there’s only a small percentage of minorities that are taking part. So, we don’t know what the effects of the drug is going to be on this minority. There’s a clear correlation between the ethnic and racial background. And if these minorities don’t take part in the clinical trial, we just don’t know how the outcome is going to be for them because there’s not enough data to build on.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Got it. Thank you so much. This was a great session and very insightful for all of us. Thank you.

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“Investing in Others”: Erica Lockheimer + Shalini Agarwal with LinkedIn (Video + Transcript)

Transcript of Elevate 2020 Session

Sukrutha Bhadouria: All right, so the next session, I’m super excited about. We have Erica and Shalini joining us. In terms of quick introductions, Erica is the Vice President of Engineering at LinkedIn, leading LinkedIn Learning, which is super cool. She will be in conversation with Shalini, who is the Director of Engineering at LinkedIn. What Shalini does is she builds the core experience of sales solutions enterprise product. So thank you so much, Erica and Shalini, for making time for this.

Erica Lockheimer: Thank you for having us.

Shalini Agarwal: Thank you so much. So I’m Shalini, and I’m going to be having a chat with Erica. Thank you so much for the introduction. So given the topic, investing in others, Erica, what do you think?

Erica Lockheimer: The way I look at investing in others is really a moment where you think about investing in others, that sometimes they don’t see it themselves. So I’ll give you a perfect example. About five years ago, I was leading a team, and as you’re leading a team, you need to reorganize the team at moments. And I remember whiteboarding my whole entire org. And when you think about leaders that need to go in those positions, you could look within the team or you can hire. And in that moment, I’m like, I don’t think I have someone that’s quite ready to fit that role. I have two options, like I mentioned, that I could take. And in that moment I looked around my team and I thought, you know, I have this woman on my team. The potential is amazing, execution, craftsmanship, so great. But she’s just not quite ready. What if I was to invest in her, give her that opportunity?

Erica Lockheimer: I thought about it. Wasn’t quite sure, but I wanted to take a bet. So I thought about it, and I decided to invite her into the meeting, gave her my whole whiteboard presentation on the org, and I said, “Guess what? I would love for you to do this.” And I thought she was going to be so excited. She looked at me, and she’s like, “I’m not quite sure I can do that.” And I was like, my stomach sank. And I was like, here I am betting on her, and she doesn’t see it herself. And so I said, “Look, I will help you. I will invest in you. I know you have it. I know you have the potential. I will be right at your side, and I will mentor you through it.”

Erica Lockheimer: And that is when she said, “Okay, let me think about it.” And I said, “Go home, think about it, and come back.” She came back the next day and she said, “You know what, I’m going to do it. I’m excited, but I’m scared.” And I was like, “Wow, fantastic.” So fast forward five years, I can tell you two success stories of her so far. She got promoted to Senior Manager and Director at LinkedIn. And then I moved over from leading the growth team at LinkedIn for seven and a half years, I’ve been at LinkedIn for a long time, almost 10 years. And I’m now VP of Engineering to the LinkedIn Learning team, and she raised her hand to wanting to join the team. And so now she’s on my team. It’s about–not even a month in, and she’s already crushing it.

Erica Lockheimer: And so I couldn’t imagine if I didn’t take that bet, that one moment that we probably both had doubts, right? But you take that moment. You invest in someone, and then the outcome can just be amazing. So I just would encourage people to sometimes think at the situation a little bit differently and make different decisions.

Shalini Agarwal: Totally. Thank you, Erica, for sharing the story. I just want to share with our audience here, it’s not just one person that Erica spends time with. I’m another example of the same investment and mentorship. There was an opportunity in front of me, where I was asked to lead a program, where I was just volunteering my time. And I had a lot of self doubt, like it was working with [inaudible] in addition to my day job. How will I do it? How will I figure out how to do it? And Erica was right there, helping me just piece it together and say, “You can do it. You have the potential,” and really helped me also with not just giving that courage, but also [inaudible] to say how you can create your team, your core team of people working with you, something that she does really well.

Shalini Agarwal: As we talk about Women in Tech at LinkedIn, like Erica said, she’s been here 10 years. And during that time, she has made a huge impact on the women at LinkedIn and beyond, as well. So Erica, could you please share some anecdotes?

Erica Lockheimer: Yes, I’d love to, but, Shalini, I think we all just need to understand it’s a two way thing, right? We have conversations on the way home, where it’s like you just need that 10 minute, that 15 minute conversation, be like, “Oh, this is how I’m feeling. Can you give me some advice?” And I will have moments where I’m in, I have self doubt all the time, and you’ll ask, “Can I have a phone call?” And I say yes. And then it’s like we both lift each other up at the end of that call. So it really is a two way street. And I think that allyship and partnership of a couple of people that you can lean into is really, really key.

Erica Lockheimer: And so you asked about the Women in Tech program at LinkedIn, we’ve been running it for about seven years, and organically, because I’ve been in the industry for 20 plus years, I just started helping people, because I realized the same struggles myself. But our company really got serious about it, and they said, hey, we’d love this to be a full fledged program. Would you lead it? And of course I got excited, because I felt like I was kind of doing some of the work anyways, but I also realized I want to treat this like any other project that we deliver from an engineering standpoint. We have structure, we have deliverables, OKRs, we have money, we have people. And so it’s 20% of my job. And it’s something that, when I first realized that we wanted to do this, I reached out to people like you, and male allies, female allies, and said, okay, can you be leaders, and let’s structure this.

Erica Lockheimer: And it really is about the funnel that we all talk about, that we invest in high school training programs. We invest in college students, we invest in the women at LinkedIn, and then we invest in the community, which is why we’re here today. And so I think it’s just so important to make that effort. And I know, Shalini, I think it would be great. This is about sharing with the community, community over competition. If you could share what we are doing on the Reach program, because I think that’s a really good example of how we invest in others, and I hope other people will try it out, as well.

Shalini Agarwal: Definitely. I mean, it’s the program that I mentioned earlier, that I’m leading now for the last three years. Thanks to Erica for all the help and support. But it’s very near and dear to me, as well. Because when I first came to this country, I could not work. And it was mainly because I didn’t checkbox everything that a recruiter was looking for, and Reach, as an apprenticeship program that we launched at LinkedIn, is really about giving that opportunity funnel, or opening that opportunity funnel, for anyone that has grit, has passion to become a software engineer, has shown the potential to learn, regardless of their background and their training.

Shalini Agarwal: So whether you took a break from your job and you’re returning to work, you’re a veteran, or just a career switcher, the program is open to everyone. And as part of the apprenticeship program, you get a manager who is invested in your growth and an engineering mentor that helps you learn your technical skills on the job. So you learn the skills and you also learn how to work in a team environment. So there’s an investment that is happening as part of the program.

Shalini Agarwal: And not only that, we have seen apprentices that now become software engineers that want to pay it forward for the new apprentices that are coming in. And it’s as small as just doing a lunch interview with them, and giving them hope and helping them feel that they can belong to this place, and they can do it, too.

Erica Lockheimer: Yeah. I love the Reach program. I have some of the apprentices in my team, and seeing them get promoted through the ranks, and like you said, it’s a multiplier, really, of how it has an impact across everyone in the organization, for us to think about talent in a very different way and how you invest in everyone. It’s not a simple check box.

Erica Lockheimer: But we talk about these programs. I mean, these could be heavy lifting. They can be quite big, but I also want to remind people, because there’s different people that are just starting out or in smaller companies, it doesn’t have to be these big programs. You can have small acts of investing in others in your everyday life. And so one of the quotes that one of my colleagues, Renee Reid, we talk about is “Empowered women empower women.” And I want to feel, you know, narrow in on the empowered, because I think sometimes when people think about empowered, they think, oh, it has to be someone in a high rank position. It does not. It can happen at an individual contributor level, entry level. Think about, you just started your career. Well, then help out your peer, or help out a high school student. We are all empowered in our current roles. So I think that’s a really important thing to remember, that we all can be change agents and really pay it forward.

Erica Lockheimer: And I was listening to one of the earlier speakers, and she gave a really great example of meetings. You think about a meeting that you’re in. We do this all the time. And I do a very big conscious effort of this, where I see everyone in the room, and obviously the person that speaks the loudest, they’re going to be heard, or the person that interrupts, but we want to be able to call people into the conversation. So I often know that that person that’s not basically speaking up, they know the material more than the people that are talking. So I will call on them. Like for instance, Shalini, I would love to hear more on, you know, [inaudible], and she will, obviously, I called on you. So now you’re going to have to speak. I put you in that spot. But those are the small acts of investments that I think we need to think about every single time in our daily lives. And they can be small. It doesn’t have to be big.

Shalini Agarwal: Totally agree, Erica. If I there’s one thing I need to tell my 12 year old self is, there is no time to start. You can start any time. If you’re in college, you have your first job. There’s so many people looking up to you every day. That 20 minute, 30 minute investment in just giving them coaching, what courses to choose, how to think about their first job. All of that information and guidance is helping that person make a huge difference in their life. And you don’t have to start when you’re a manager or a director or a VP to do that. And the fact that when people invest in you and you invest in others, it creates this flywheel of multiplication. It’s like people are helping people, and they’re not only helping and giving. They’re also receiving, as well.

Shalini Agarwal: Now when people come to me for asking anything, like help, advice, career advice, and I am obligated, not just because I want to, but because people like Erica invested in me, even though they are so busy schedule and all the time that they put with me to discuss and figure out what the next step in my career or life could be, I feel I have to do it just to pay it forward. So think about small changes and small impact.

Shalini Agarwal: So there’s one thing that I want all of you guys listening here to take away as action item, is find that one person, or more, that you can help with not a lot of time, but small baby steps, things that you can do in meetings, things that you can do for people looking up to you, find those opportunities. Raise your hand to help others and invest in them.

Shalini Agarwal: At this point, if there are questions, we are open to take more questions. I know we talked a little bit of stories here, but I’m sure there are things that are top of your mind that you would like to ask.

Erica Lockheimer: Yeah, we’re always big on dialogue.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: So I see some questions. So I have a question, as a mentor, what is the most that you think you get out of it, because we talk about mentees getting out of the mentor, mentee relationship, but as a mentor, what is it that you get out of it?

Erica Lockheimer: I think … Shalini, I’ll go first. And then if you want to answer, as well. I mentor quite a few people. I also wouldn’t call it formal mentorships. It’s more of like these 15 minute things. I have a board of people that I work with, and sometimes people need something all the time, and sometimes, not always, but what I personally get out of it, it helps me be a better leader. I’m having these mentor moments, and they’re facing a challenge, and then I have to kind of reflect back and say, hmm, am I handling those types of people in my team with the right compassion, the right empathy, the right opportunity? It really makes me reflect on how I could be a better leader to other individuals. So that’s what I get out of it.

Erica Lockheimer: And I always feel really great that someone trusts me, that they can be vulnerable with me and tell me exactly how they’re feeling, because I get so much out of that. And then at the end, I get to help them. And also, helping people also feels great. And then I always put a task on them. If I give them any advice, I go, “Now I helped you, and we spent time with each other. There’s accountability here. You have to give me an update. Within the next week, I want to hear how things went.” So that’s a big thing that I’m also a big fan of.

Shalini Agarwal: Yeah, I can vouch for the accountability. I will just add one more thing. It also gives you courage. When somebody is coming to you and being vulnerable, asking those questions, and you feel totally fine helping them. It’s not a moment of shame. It’s a moment of courage, and gives you the courage to go and talk to your mentors or people that you look up to, have that same conversation for yourself. So it actually uplifts you to do the same, too.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: What I find, actually, when I am mentoring people, is that I’m giving all this advice that actually I need. So what is that one thing that you wish your mentees would do, or any advice? Because I find when people approach me to be their mentors, they sometimes don’t know how to go about it, and they sometimes don’t know how to make the most out of that relationship. So what are some tips you might have for people to either make sure they get the best out of the mentorship, mentor, mentee relationship, or at least go about establishing that relationship the right way?

Shalini Agarwal: So I can maybe start, and Erica, please add more to it. One thing I always ask people when they’re seeking for a mentorship relationship is what are their goals? And the goals doesn’t have to be five-year goals. It could be six month goals, could be year long goals, but what is it that you’re seeking? Just having that dialogue in your first meeting about what are the goals and what are the kinds of things that you’re looking to improve or work on? Several times, what I’ve found is once you have that explicitly written out or discussed as a person, you can actually have a better frame of mind to help this person. A few times, what I’ve also found is I can actually redirect that person to a better person or another person that could help this person, because the goals are so crisp.

Shalini Agarwal: If somebody is a first time manager, I’m happy to help, but I started my management career a decade ago or more. So some of those challenges that they’re facing are not something that are fresh in my memory, but if I can find somebody else that I mentored a few years ago, who is actually in a better mindset and is closer to those issues, might be a better mentor for them.

Erica Lockheimer: I think that’s great advice. Two things that I would add is, I usually have two different people that come to me. One is like, they have an exact problem that they want to solve, and that’s really, really helpful. And so we’ll just go through that exact problem and I’ll give advice. Then there’s the other camp, like you said, that they don’t really know, that you can just tell they’re kind of lost. And so I actually got a really good framework from Pat Wadors. She used to be our HR VP. Because I was going through that personally. And she gave me a really good framework, and I shared it with, I think, many people at LinkedIn. It’s been helpful, is, you know, you think about literally writing it down, to Shalini’s point. It’s literally four columns. Like values, what are your values? Your values kind of don’t change. They’re very solid. For instance, my value is work life balance. I have two kids. I’m not going to commute to work. There’s some values that like, that is where I’m going to be.

Erica Lockheimer: And so make sure that you’re super clear on your values. I think your motivators are very important. That’s the next column. So think about what motivates you. Sometimes you’re in a different space. Sometimes it’s money. You need money. That’s your motivation. My point of life right now, I am very motivated to, as cheesy as it sounds, to make a dent in this world. And so impact is important to me, and that’s the biggest thing, the biggest bit.

Erica Lockheimer: The third column I would say is skills that you’re good at, skills that people tell you you’re good at, not the skills that you think you’re good at, but skills that you’re great at. And then the fourth column would be, the last one is skills you want to obtain. So though you could be in a different spot of your career. So for me, I remember when I made my transition over to LinkedIn Learning, I really wanted to learn how to run a business. I was able to articulate my motivations, my values, my skills, and what skills I was looking for to the executive leadership to basically say, “Hey, this is where I’m at.” And they were able to give me an opportunity and invest in me. It’s either the company invests in you, or you go somewhere else. That’s really what it comes down to. But I think most of the time it’s clearer that you can be about what you want.

Erica Lockheimer: And sometimes, trust me, I didn’t figure that out overnight. It took me several months to figure out what those things are. And a lot of mentor conversations, Shalini included. But it takes time. And so I think just having a framework is really, really helpful to gather those thoughts, and more than happy, I’m seeing some questions in chat, I can share the framework as well. Feel to ping me. It’s been helpful.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you so much, Shalini and Erica. This was just wonderful. We can see through the comments that it really resonated with everyone. Thank you.

Shalini Agarwal: Thank you so much for having us.

Erica Lockheimer: Thank you.

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“Every Job is a D&I Job. Every. Job.”: Aubrey Blanche with Culture Amp (Video + Transcript)

Transcript of Elevate 2020 Session

Gretchen DeKnikker: Okay, everyone. Welcome back. Our next session is with Aubrey Blanche. She is the Director and Global Head of Equitable Design and Impact at Culture Amp. We first discovered her at the Atlassian event. And if you need more stuff to watch later, please go back and watch her talk from Atlassian that’s on our YouTube channel. Which by the way, housekeeping notes, we are recording these. They will be on YouTube. You should subscribe now and then you will get them all.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Why I’m particularly excited about this session today is Aubrey did a post where she said a lot of people ask her, how do I get a D&I job? And she said, “My advice is don’t get a D&I job. Really, don’t get a D&I job. No, really, don’t.” You should read the post. It’s exactly what she says. And then… Aubrey, you’re muted. Yes. Okay. I just want to hear you laugh. It’s so good. Okay. And so her suggestion was that you could have more of an impact doing D&I within your own role than you can sometimes in an actual D&I position. And so we said, “Hey, could you come in and expand on that? Because that sounds amazing.” So without further ado, please welcome Aubrey.

Aubrey Blanche: Thank you so much. I love being here. I love Girl Geek so much, so I feel really lucky to get to join you all for the live stream today. And yes, my other talk was about why diversity is a problem. So clearly, I’m a little bit of an iconoclast, but I promise I’m also pretty reasonable.

Aubrey Blanche: So to give folks context, I’m currently the Director of Equitable Design and Impact at Culture Amp. And basically what that means is I help the business and Culture Amp’s customers think about the ways that they design fair and equitable experiences, which is what actually creates diversity, both internally and then for their global customer base. Before that… Oh, hold on. I got to figure out how to do this. There we go. I was the Global Head of Diversity and Belonging at Atlassian for about five years. And all the time, I am the math path. So if you know anything about my work, I am trained as a social scientist, and I take a really rigorous analytical data and science based approach to creating organizational change and fair workplaces where people who have been unjustly denied their rightful opportunities can actually thrive.

Aubrey Blanche: What I found is I get probably more than a dozen reach outs every week of people asking to pick my brain on how to get a career in D&I. And the fact is, one, brain picking is really violent. Don’t do that. But also, it turns out that I’m both not the right person to reach out to about that for a couple of reasons. The first is super practical, which is that when I got into this field, it was really different. And so I’m not confident that my advice is going to be as relevant as someone who’s getting into the field now. And it also turns out there’s a lot more folks in D&I than just folks with the title head of. So I encourage folks to diversify who they ask. We are busy, but we like to help.

Aubrey Blanche: But secondly, because most of the time I really, really believe that you should not get a D&I job. Now, that’s probably pretty surprising for me to say. You’re probably wondering, Aubrey, do you hate your job? And the answer is no, I adore my job. I feel incredibly lucky to be able to do the work I do every day. But I want to be honest with you about what that job entails, because often what people think it is has nothing to do with what the job actually is, and they’re going into it for the wrong reasons.

Aubrey Blanche: So one of the things people who come to me often say is, “Well, I’m just so passionate about this. I want to help people.” What is also usually true is those folks are underrepresented themselves, and they’re burning out in their roles because they’re feeling crushed under the weight of sexism or racism or ableism or other isms, or a bunch of them combined. And what I’m going to tell you, which I wish I didn’t have to, is honestly, it is more emotionally draining to be in a D&I job. Because those moments… A reflection for me was, after the Pulse nightclub shooting. I’m a queer Latina, and for me, I didn’t get to go to work and work on a marketing campaign or go focus on software. I had to go think about the Pulse nightclub shooting at work and find other space for me. So I would say that if you’re just frustrated with the kyriarchy, understand that getting a D&I job is likely to make your burnout worse.

Aubrey Blanche: So we talk about this concept of compassion fatigue. And it’s something, that, if you’re not careful in a D&I career, you will get. So compassion fatigue. What is it? The technical definition is that it’s an indifference to charitable appeals on behalf of those who are suffering, experienced as a result of the frequency or number of such requests. There isn’t actually good data on how many D&I professionals suffer from compassion fatigue. But I can tell you that I’ve never talked to one of my peers who hasn’t at some point in their career suffered from this. So we know that 40% of nurses suffer from this. And given that D&I is also a caring profession in a lot of ways, because we’re not only asked to be organizational strategists, we’re asked to design HR and people programs, we’re asked to write policies, advise on sensitive legal and ethical issues. But we’re asked to be therapists and counselors, not just for underrepresented folks who are needing support, but also for majority group, often leaders, who are going on their own journey to understand what they’ve done to re-entrench the systems that keep people out.

Aubrey Blanche: It’s heavy work. And I will be honest that I, and almost every effective practitioner that I know, has completely rearchitected my life to be able to sustain this kind of work. So it’s a thing you can do, but I hope that folks know the totality of the work and what it is. So now that I’ve been a little doom and gloom, I do want to tell you about why I think you don’t need a D&I job. Why, if you’re passionate and you care about making the world better, you don’t need the job title in order to actually create change.

Aubrey Blanche: Oh, one quick thing. I want to talk to you a little bit about my self care routine to make it a little more real. So I do meditation yoga, I take physical supplements, daily affirmations, and I mostly have gotten sober. I also have a huge community. So I have my girlfriends, a bunch of them, on WhatsApp. I have a personal integrity coach, a coach that helps me deal with my family system and ancestral trauma. I do somatic bodywork to remove the secondary traumatic stress that this work requires. And I also have a therapist to deal both with a lot of my childhood trauma and the stuff that I deal with every day. I recognize not everyone has access to all of these resources for economic reasons. But thinking about leaning on your friends or journaling or the amount of time it takes to offload the emotional work that you’re doing in this field is super important.

Aubrey Blanche: So now I want to talk about what the job actually entails, because it’s probably not what you think, even though I think it’s really fun. So first, you are educating, always. You know that feeling where you say, people of color shouldn’t have to educate you? The fact is when you’re in D&I, you do have to educate them. You have to do it patiently. And if you want to be effective, you have to do it compassionately. And you have to be comfortable answering the same, very, very basic questions a lot. The fact is that creating change, while we can do it on a systemic level, often requires those one on one conversations to really take people from good people to active allies, or people who aren’t blocking the types of change that you’re wanting to make. So if you like repeating yourself and if you love teaching, it’s a great thing. I love it. But again, check your own patience and your appetite for that work.

Aubrey Blanche: The second is a lot of this is HR strategy. So I’ve seen a lot of people who wanted to go into D&I who have expertise in things like engineering. And while they’re incredible advocates who have amazing ideas for this, often they’re not actually interested in the day to day work of the job. So crafting HR strategies, designing programs and communication, measurement strategies to make sure that the programs you designed actually worked the way you wanted them to. And I say this, not as a deterrent, but so that folks who get into it know what you’re doing.

Aubrey Blanche: And a part of this job that no one wants to talk about, but we really should, is that you spend a lot of time convincing leadership to do the right thing, in most organizations. And I mean that both on an ethical sense. And also, most of the time, leadership will fund branding projects and unconscious bias training, the first of which definitely doesn’t solve structural racism, and the second of which, if not done really carefully, actually makes your organization more racist. So I think what we see is often that even the most exceptional leaders have smaller impact than they want because the amount of their time they have to spend convincing folks to do something and then justifying their budgets is a lot more than folks in similar roles in an organization that aren’t coded as diversity and inclusion roles.

Aubrey Blanche: The last thing is you have to like designing processes. So I think the previous wave of D&I looked at ERGs and building community and running splashy brand campaigns and trying to get your company on the best companies for diversity list. But the fact is that that work, while some of it can be crucial to creating safe spaces for underrepresented people, the things that matter the most in an organization are the structural aspects. So evaluative processes. So if you’re not jazzed about designing a performance review process and then measuring to see whether it was actually fair, there might be a different job for you than diversity and inclusion where you can have even greater impact on these things that you’re passionate about.

Aubrey Blanche: So like I said, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to convince you not to go into the career that I’m in. But the reason is really because I believe that each and every one of you have something incredible to offer this mission, but you’re often thinking about it differently. And what I mean by that is you can do a D&I job. You can do diversity and inclusion, equity and justice work in any job that you have in an organization. One of the reasons I’m really passionate about this topic is because of this idea. I’m sure folks have heard of the Uncle Ben principle: with great power comes great responsibility.

Aubrey Blanche: I will be really honest with you that when you take a diversity and inclusion job, in most organizations, you give up all of your power but still have all of the responsibility. So often, diversity and inclusion teams are under resourced in terms of headcount. Often at multi thousand person companies, there’s only one person doing this work. And the budgets that they are allocated are so small, to be spread across so many groups, that they’re set up to fail. And so what I’m suggesting is that you go into a place in an organization where you have great power and then take great responsibility.

Aubrey Blanche: So the fact is, every job in an organization is a diversity and inclusion job. Let me talk about what that looks like. So let’s say you’re a director of marketing. The fact is, you’re responsible for hiring and promotions, compensation of your people, the culture in your organization, you probably have control of a budget, and you have influence over how others in the organization act and think about these issues. You can simply demand that the hiring processes in your organization are fair and that they’re audited. You can insist on pay equity audits to make sure that people are compensated commensurate with their value. For the culture, you can enforce standards of behavior and respect for other people. Budget, you can pay people to do diversity and inclusion work. You can decide that the employees in your organization that lead ERGs, that lead work that creates equity and belonging, deserve spot bonuses, deserve special leadership opportunities for the initiative and the impact that they’re bringing to the organization. And you can influence, just by your behavior, the way that other leaders in your organization can show up as allies.

Aubrey Blanche: So when I say don’t get a diversity and inclusion job, I’m not telling you to give up on creating systemic change. What I’m recommending is that you go from influencing people to bring equity and justice in the world to actually bringing equity and justice into the world yourself. As someone who deeply loves my career and does this all day and feels very grateful, I always know that the leaders who step up and don’t need my help are the ones whose organizations thrive. The ones where underrepresented people grow and get the opportunities that they deserve, and so do majority group folks. And so I would encourage you not to think about your job title, but about what you’re doing every day to make the world just a little bit more fair and balanced than it was before.

Aubrey Blanche: That’s what I have for you all, but I’m excited to take Q&A.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Thank you. That was just exactly what we asked for. So perfect. We have quite few questions. We’ll try to get through a couple.

Aubrey Blanche: Awesome. I’ll try to be snappy. And oh wait, if folks, for some reason I can’t answer your question, you can tweet at me later. Oh, my Twitter’s on there. Great. You can find me on my digital soapbox.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Yeah. Also, you should just follow her, because once I discovered her at Atlassian, I’ve been following her ever since. And so now I’m a superfan and it’s a little awkward sometimes.

Aubrey Blanche: No, it’s great. It’s fun. We have fun online.

Gretchen DeKnikker: First question. All right. So I’ve been fired and/or retaliated against for organizing against sexism, unfair pay, racism, and other D&I work as an IC in engineering and product. How do I gain the social capital to point out the uncomfortable truth about organizational failings without the shield of the job title?

Aubrey Blanche: Totally. So I would say that the job title doesn’t actually shield you that much, so I want to just give you that honesty. I think one of the things is I would say going in, be really honest with leadership about that’s the type of leader that you are. Because what I’ve found is that, and obviously this is speaking from a place if you feel that you have choice in your career path. But I think there’s that… is be really honest about the types of things in your values. Know that, especially if you’re an engineer, this is a very, very competitive talent market. Also, cultureamp.com/careers, call me. I’m Aubrey at Culture Amp. I can pass your resume on if you’re not interested in us. But I think that’s, it is go in and make it really, really clear who you are and what you want to advocate for so employers who aren’t going to support you can select out.

Aubrey Blanche: The second thing is, quite frankly, crush your day job. People try to act like advocating for this work is somehow opposed to being really excellent as a contributor. And I hate that I’m saying that, but it’s very practical advice, which is being excellent is a good way to veer from that. And I think second, especially when you don’t feel like you have organizational power, try not to do things alone. So something that people forget is that collective action is still possible. One, if you can get out of your forced arbitration agreement when you come in, please do that. But number two, something that I think people often forget is the power of banding together.

Aubrey Blanche: So I’ve seen at a large enterprise software organization, women were concerned about promotional equity. And one of them, I happened to know her through my network, and she was talking to me and she said, “We’re all really upset and we’ve all talked to our managers and nothing’s really happening.” And I said, “Well, have you all gone to the director together?” And she said no. And I said, “Well, why not? Why can’t you?” And about 15 of them got together and went to the director and they did an audit, and they actually ended up changing the procedures. So that’s the other thing I would say, is slowly start to build a community of people who do support you and are willing to do that. And maybe start with that step before you start a lot of really active advocacy so that you’ve built that safety net, and people who will speak up, whether those folks are also from your community or acting as allies or accomplices.

Aubrey Blanche: But my last piece of advice is, if you can, and I recognize this a somewhat privileged piece of advice, so couch it with that. Work somewhere where they’re happy to have that voice. They exist.

Gretchen DeKnikker: We need a secret list of them, though. They’re hard to find and very difficult to vet. Or some of them make it very obvious, but you know. Okay, one more question. So she wanted to thank you for your honesty, which I do too. But this is a thing that I really, really appreciate about the way that you do the work, not just the work that you do, but the way that you do it. So her question was, what can we do as an individual contributor to make sure our company is moving in the right direction with regards to D&I if we don’t have a D&I person?

Aubrey Blanche: Yeah. So I would say ask simple questions. And this is the most boring thing, but I swear it’s the key to good D&I, is really enforce structured process. So this goes to a question I saw around recruiters. So ask questions about what processes are being followed. If you’re an IC, ask your manager for the next role. What structured process are we using to make sure we minimize bias? What sourcing strategies are we using to make sure that we connect with underrepresented communities? Because often what I’ve found is that folks don’t do that unless they’re asked, but many of the changes that you can do to make a hiring process more inclusive, those are not that complicated. Not that they’re easy, but they’re not that complicated. And when it comes to team dynamics, I think you can make small suggestions that shift the needle.

Aubrey Blanche: So I’ll give you a couple things. One of the best tactics, so a fact, is that women are interrupted three times more often while speaking, by people of all genders. So this is a thing that happens to women, and especially women of color and often Asian women, in particular. But be really careful about interrupting the interrupter. So this is one of my favorite tactics, really simple, also. Let’s say Sarah has just had a really great point and Naveed has just interrupted her. Say, “Naveed, so, sorry. I just wanted to hear the rest of Sarah’s thought.” Suddenly, Sarah has the floor in a way that she didn’t before. And the fact is Naveed probably did not mean to be rude, but we have these socialized patterns of behavior. Or make sure that you claim credit for underrepresented peoples. Help them claim credit for their contributions.

Aubrey Blanche: So women in the Obama White House had this tactic called amplification, where what they noticed is that men were basically stealing their ideas. Not necessarily intentionally, but it was still happening. And so it can be as easy as saying something like, “Oh, Angie, that was an awesome idea. And…” Because it’s now claimed that idea for Angie. And what it does is it actually changes the balance of who’s contributing to the room. And there’s an extra bonus if you identify as female when you do this, or are on the femme side, I would say, is that women are expected to socially support other people. And so when you do that, you’ve not only claimed the idea for your maybe female or femme colleague, but you also now get social brownie points, if there is some kind of thing. So I think watching for those collaborative behaviors is something huge that you can do. It feels small, but you know what it’s also just going to do? It’s going to make your team work more effectively together. So this is good management training.

Aubrey Blanche: But I think often, we think of D&I as super social justicey, which it is, but the way that it shows up can actually be very simple. Hey, let’s pass around the note-taking responsibilities. No, I don’t think that Cheryl needs to plan the offsite this time. Maybe Derek should do it. That type of stuff is interrupting the outcome of inequity that ends up hurting people’s careers. But it doesn’t always have to be couched in the same type of language that we would talk in justice oriented circles, because sometimes people don’t get it when we don’t use language that they’re familiar with. So I would say just do that stuff. It’s basic. And also, it’s really, really hard for your manager to get mad at you for things like, hey, I don’t think we should interrupt each other. And let me know how you go. If you come up with any other great tips, please let me know. I love to share them and I love to get better too.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Well, thank you. We are at time, but this was amazing. Thank you so much, Aubrey.

Aubrey Blanche: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. Have a wonderful Friday. I’m excited for the rest of the live stream.

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“What’s Holding You Back Might Be You: Imposter Syndrome”: Sara Varni with Twilio (Video + Transcript)

Transcript of Elevate 2020 Session

Rachel Jones: So next up is Sara, we’re so excited to have her. She is the chief marketing officer at Twilio, so she joined Twilio two years ago from Salesforce and today she’ll be sharing her thoughts on imposter syndrome at various stages of her career, from climbing the ladder at Salesforce to her current role as CMO of Twilio, and the tips and tricks that she’s learned along the way. All right, Sara.

Sara Varni: Great, can you hear me okay?

Rachel Jones: We can, yeah.

Sara Varni: Fantastic. So, hi everyone. Good morning, good afternoon. My name is Sara Varni and I’m the CMO here at Twilio and thank you so much for letting me share this session with you. I’m here to talk about imposter syndrome and this is a real condition that I have experienced at all different phases in my career and I say whether I was 22 or now 42, this is a condition where I’ve heard that voice in my head that says, “You’re just not ready for this role, or this is too big of a leap for you.” And today I want to share with you some of my techniques that I’ve used to push through that internal dialogue in my head and to take my career to new heights. But I thought I’d share and start with a personal story. Back in my time at Salesforce, I was tapped to run marketing for one of the biggest products at the company and I was by no means a shoe-in for the role.

Sara Varni: I had worked on a much smaller product line before that, I was just not very well known at the company, and even the team that I was going to be taking over had no idea that I was in the running for this position. And so, when the announcement was made, when I got the role, I did what any manager would do and I reached out to the team, I said, “Hey, I’m so excited to take on this role and to drive some great projects and efforts with this team,” and I expected a warm welcome back and what happened was crickets, basically. And I kept checking my email feverishly, trying to get some sort of inkling of encouragement and over the course of the next 24 hours, only one poor soul responded to me and they didn’t even respond to the group, they just responded to me directly.

Sara Varni: So you can imagine how I was feeling, here I’ve been given this role of a lifetime, this opportunity that I always thought I wanted, and in that moment I felt so insecure and so questioning of if I was deserving of the role. And there was two things I could do with that feedback in that moment, I could say, “All right, I’m going to go curl up in a ball and just be paralyzed by the feedback,” or I could take it and use it as fuel to show why I was supposed to be in that role, why was in the right place at the right time, and to just start on that journey of building trust with that team. And so, I mustered up the courage, I wrote the team back and I said, “Thanks for the warm welcome. I can’t wait to get started with you guys,” and that was the start of that journey. And three years later, we had built an amazing team, we had built an amazing culture and we put some huge wins on the board.

Sara Varni: But if I had just taken that feedback and that experience and let those inner voices take over, we never would’ve gotten to that place and I would have been stinted in terms of where I was going with my career. But just to tell you a little bit about me and my whole journey and this will give you a little bit of color as to how I’ve faced imposter syndrome along the way. I always joke that if there was an award in your high school yearbook that was the least likely to be a tech CMO, you might’ve seen my picture there. I grew up 40 minutes outside of San Francisco in the boondocks, pretty close to the windmills, if you’re a San Francisco local, and I came from a family that was mainly focused in real estate and farming. And so, I flew the coop. I decided I wanted to move away from that and move to the East coast and I became an equities trader, so going from the farm to the trading floor was definitely a culture shock for me, but I loved the energy of being a trader.

Sara Varni: You got there and it was just like you were on the floor of a casino every day, but long term, I was still wanting to scratch a creative itch. I always loved, and seemed to gravitate towards, work that drives me creatively. And so, I went back to business school and ultimately landed a role at Salesforce, which at the time was not a very well known company, but obviously it was a great platform for me to learn and grow. I spent 10 years there, essentially working up from the mailroom of the marketing department to ultimately running marketing for the biggest product line, and that set me up for my role today to be the CMO of Twilio. And one thing that as I reflect back on that journey, I see that there are certain things I gravitate towards. I love being in a high growth environment. That’s exactly what I saw on the trading floor, and I love gravitating towards things that are creative.

Sara Varni: And I think as you’re listening to this presentation, I encourage you to think about what are those things, what are those three to five characteristics that gets you up in the morning, that get you excited about your work because in these times when you have self doubt and these times when you’re wondering if you’re the right person for the role, you need to call back on that and remember these are the things that you’re great at, and it’s most likely the things that got you to where you are today and are highlighted to people that they think these are the reasons that this person should be in that role. So that all sounds easy, it was a breeze, I just went from job to job and ended up in this amazing place but that’s not the truth.

Sara Varni: Obviously there are many bumps along the road, and I had an amazing support system, I’ve had some incredible managers and leaders that have absolutely helped me get to where I am today and have encouraged me at every step of the way. But for all of those people that were encouraging me, those are not always the people that you listen to. And often what creeps into your head is the negative feedback and the naysayers and the haters, I’ll use the term haters a lot in this session. And at every step of the way I heard things like, “You know what? She’s not technical enough. She’s too nice. She’s too positive. She’s too negative.” You often get conflicting feedback. She’s a dark horse for the role. My favorite, when I started at Twilio, there was actually a post online that said I was a low-end Barney. I’m like, at least you could spell my name right. And so, again, I had two choices of what I could do with this feedback, just like the situation that I started out with when I was taking over that team.

Sara Varni: I could let this eat me up, I could let this just completely paralyze me and stop me from moving forward, or I could use it as fuel and turn it into energy for me to go out and prove them wrong and to just start putting wins on the board, given the traits and energy around the things that I like to do, like I said, working in a high growth environment and really being creative. So now I’m going to walk through some of the techniques that I’ve consistently used over the course of my career and I want to put air quotes around the word “techniques”, these are not heavily researched activities, this is not something you’re necessarily going to read about in Harvard Business Review, but they are things that have helped me. So first, I want to say that you have to just say no to haters. And I think it’s really important when you’re entering a new role or taking on new responsibility that you need to be in confidence building mode.

Sara Varni: And there are going to be those people that are always going to have something critical to say. And I think one thing I’ve learned over the course of making these transitions a few times is that often the real feedback that you’re getting from that person often has more to do with them and where they are mentally and what’s going on in their career than it does what’s going on with you in the crux of their feedback. And I recently watched Miss Americana, Taylor Swift’s documentary on Netflix, which I highly recommend, I think it’s incredible. And they highlighted her session at the VMAs where Kanye West jumped on stage, she had won best new artist or best song for the year, I don’t remember the exact award and Kanye jumped on stage and basically grabbed the award out of her hand and said, “Hey, I love you, Taylor, but this was supposed to go to Beyonce.”

Sara Varni: And in that moment, the whole crowd was booing. And Taylor, just in the emotion of everything happening so quickly, thought that the audience was actually booing her, but what they were booing was Kanye, obviously. And I think in these moments, when you’re unsure of your new role, if you’re unsure if you’re up to snuff to do this job, you’re often likely to believe the haters. And I think you have to remember, there are a lot more people in your corner rooting for you then you think. My second piece of advice is to establish a solid network around you that you can call, that you can reach out to, that you can connect with at any point. And this helps you to defer some of the questions that you might be afraid to ask in the early days of taking on a new responsibility and just give you the confidence to push forward to the next part of this role. You might be lucky, you might have this one person that can answer all different types of questions under the sun.

Sara Varni: For me, I have a network of people that I ask different topics for different things. I might have someone that I call for very tactical, practical information on demand gen or how to think about a website. I have people that I call for general strategy and leadership questions. I have people that I call for recruiting and hiring, and I think it’s really important to build a network across all of the different parts of your job that you might encounter. And a big part of this is there’s got to be a give get. If you’re going to reach out to someone and ask for their advice, you also have to offer back like, hey, if you need this, if you need help with X, Y, and Z, please call me anytime, that will build your strongest network. My next piece of advice is that at some point you’ve got to get over the initial fear and doubt of the role and just put your head down and get some wins on the board.

Sara Varni: Who you’re seeing on the screen is Julia Mancuso, she’s one of my favorite athletes. And I posted on my Twitter handle yesterday an article that was written in and around 2014, it’s the article I read almost once a year. And Julia, I think, is super interesting because she came to be famous and came on the world stage at a time when Lindsey Vaughn was super popular, but Lindsey had had a number of injuries and Julia was the lead person for the Sochi games. And so, when reporters would talk to Julia, Julia was an amazing skier herself, but the questions were always about Lindsey and the competition between Lindsey, and Julia was just positioned as being in Lindsey’s shadow. But Julia didn’t let that get to her. She focused on why she loves skiing so much, just like I am trying to focus on the parts of my career and the elements of my roles that I love the most to keep me going and keep me energized.

Sara Varni: And she said, “I just love skiing. I’m going to focus on racing the best race possible and even though I don’t have the appearance or the same style as Lindsey Vaughn, you’re going to see me on that podium.” And they did. Ultimately, no one really realizes this, but Julia Mancuso is the most decorated Olympic female skier in American history. And I think there’s something to be said for that to just put your head down, remember why you have this role and focus on those strengths, start putting some wins on the board. The next piece is once you feel like you’re in a groove in a role, I think you can always be looking for ways to improve. I think the best leaders are constantly thinking about what they could be doing differently, where they have blind spots and really matching programs and training to help sharpen that.

Sara Varni: And this is a place where you do want to get some of those people that aren’t the people that are telling you you’re great all the time, you do want to surround yourself with people that can give you that constructive feedback. I know personally this year, I employed a leadership coach and that has been life changing for me. Through the process I’ve gotten 360 feedback, I’ve worked on roleplay exercises in certain situations where I know I have blind spots and it’s really helped me. Another area that I recommend for all types of leaders is working on your executive presence and especially working with a speech coach. I think that there are so many forums where to move up to the next level you need to present in a clear and concise way and I absolutely think that this is a trait that you can learn. I remember early in my career I just felt like this is something that you’re either born with or you’re not and over the course of the years and over working with a number of different people on my teams, that is absolutely not the case.

Sara Varni: In a lot of situations, your company will sponsor these efforts, so absolutely ask your manager, ask your leadership team what access you can get to these training programs, because I think they can make a world of difference. And my last piece of advice is do what works for you. I think in the course of trying to overcome imposter syndrome, you want to make sure that you don’t become an imposter yourself. You’re going to get all types of feedback, some of it you’ll agree with wholeheartedly, some of it you’ll think is completely not you, and I think you have to take the spirit of the feedback and apply it in a way that still is authentic to how you operate and what your core values are. So these are my five core pieces of advice, my techniques to overcome imposter syndrome. I truly believe that the best leaders are authentic leaders and I encourage everyone listening here, lean into new opportunities and find your confidence, remember to remind yourself that you’re here for a reason and just be your badass self. And so, with that, I would like to open it up to Q and A.

Rachel Jones: Great, thank you so much, Sarah. So now we’re going to start the Q and A. Our first question, how do you keep haters at bay when the hate is coming from your own family?

Sara Varni: Yeah. I mean, I’m one of five, I don’t know if I mentioned that and just speaking from my own personal experience, I think my advice doesn’t change whether it’s a family member or a colleague. And often when I get feedback from my siblings that I think is overly harsh or negative, I take the spirit of the feedback, if there are things that I need to work on I absolutely think about that and try to apply it, but if it seems overly harsh and out of line, it’s often something that’s going on in their own life or something that they’ve encountered in their own journey and I try to diffuse that and try to help them. I try to get to the root of where that’s coming from and figure out if there’s a way that I can help them, as a sibling, to overcome whatever confidence issue they have.

Rachel Jones: Great. For our next question, do you have any recommendations or resources for a career coach or a leadership coach?

Sara Varni: I know here at Twilio, we use a program called Year Up and I know that there are a number of different organizations that provide this for companies. I’ve unfortunately only gone through the companies I’ve been working at, so I don’t have one that I’ve worked directly with outside of a company myself.

Rachel Jones: Sometimes we can be our own biggest haters. So how do you recommend overcoming our own negative self talk?

Sara Varni: I’m sure that you have a network of people that you’ve grown up with, that you’ve relied on through the course of your career and I think it’s a matter of connecting with those people. And I want to be careful, you don’t want to surround yourself with people that are always just going to tell you how great you are because that’s not the right setup either. But I do think it’s important to have a mix of people who can give you constructive feedback and also your cheerleaders. I have people from all different phases of my life. I have a great friend from high school, she’ll say that she’s my fan club president. And if I have a big presentation where I’m nervous to go on stage or I’m just not feeling right about it, I’ll call her as part of my phone a friend network, she’s the first person I call and she’s the person who’ll say, “Hey, you’ve got this, you’ve done this a million times, think of how many times we’ve had this conversation,” and it just helps me get over the hump.

Rachel Jones: How do you stay confident in a junior entry level position without coming across as arrogant?

Sara Varni: Yeah, that’s a great question. And I think always being eager to learn and being willing to be vulnerable and saying, “Hey, look, I don’t know everything yet,” but I think it’s the way that you phrase your responses and how you approach certain conversations. I think that you have to come at it from a, look, I might not have all the answers here, but I do have a fresh approach to this and this is how I think we should go about achieving it. I think always presenting some level of humility while also being convicted in your belief, I think it’s just an approach that people will be willing to work with and help you along the way. And I think being open to feedback.

Sara Varni: Honestly, the people that I’ve managed over the course of the years, there’s the difference between people who have been able to excel and grow has largely been based on their ability to take feedback and work with it. I think people who can’t take feedback or can not digest it well, you create a feedback loop where your manager might be afraid to give you more feedback. And so, I think to the extent you can be open to it, you will have a better partnership with your manager and they will be more willing to help you grow and continue to take on new skills.

Rachel Jones: All right. That’s what we’re going to wrap up this session. Thanks again, Sara.

Sara Varni: Thank you so much. Have a great rest of your session.

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“How to Quickly Ramp Up on Open Source”: Marianna Tessel + Rocio Montes with Intuit (Video + Transcript)

Transcript of Elevate 2020 Session

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Hi everyone, I am back. I’m Sukrutha and we’re next going to be joined by Marianna Tessel, the Chief Technology Officer at Intuit. She’ll be joined in conversation with Rocio Montes, who is a Staff Software Engineer. Together they both at–Intuit Girl Geeks will share how Intuit is tapping into its engineering community to advance the company’s mission to power more than 50 million consumers, self employed, and small businesses around the world. So go ahead and get started. I can’t wait to hear.

Marianna Tessel: Hi, everybody.

Rocio Montes: Hi, everybody.

Marianna Tessel: First of all, I think Rocio and I will introduce ourselves a little bit more. Maybe I’ll start, Rocio. What do you think?

Rocio Montes: Yeah, go ahead.

Marianna Tessel: So I’m actually a software engineer in my background. I started my career in Israel, in the Israeli military. So ask me later on about how it was like being a captain in the army there. It was a lot of fun. After my military service, I actually came to the US to the Silicon Valley because that’s where all the cool kids that were working on engineering were.

Marianna Tessel: And I worked here in a variety of companies, starting from General Magic. There’s a documentary about the company. It was a really interesting company. Arieba, VMware and Docker. I joined Intuit about two and a half years ago, and about a little over a year ago, I became the CTO of Intuit. I’m having a lot of fun of this role, and this is how I met Rocio. So, Rocio.

Rocio Montes: Hi everyone. My name is Rocio Montes and I am a staff software engineer. I started my career at Intuit working on TurboTax, specifically on the electronic filing engine. Then I moved on to Turbo where I did some front end and mobile development, and now in my current role, I lead open source and InnerSource efforts at Intuit.

Rocio Montes: So I create tooling processes and automation to make these two initiatives successful at Intuit, and to enable our engineers to participate in the open source community. Which brings us here.

Rocio Montes: Marianna, I know that you’re very passionate about open source. How did you get introduced to open source?

Marianna Tessel: You know, Rocio, I always liked this idea of open source. This idea of, like, software, developed in the open, shared, free. And what I noticed over the years is while open source was this fringe movement early on where I remember we were talking about, “Don’t use the open source code because it’s not really quality or it’s just kind of this movement that is out there.” What happened over the years, it became really, really robust code and a real option for me as an engineer, and later on as a leader, to use. So I got fascinated by it, but then I also joined Docker, which was one of the, and still is, one of the biggest open source projects out there. And I have to say during this time, I completely fell in love with this idea of open source and what the impact and the opportunity of it could be. So that’s kind of a little bit of how I got into this and now I’m a complete fan.

Rocio Montes: That’s great. You definitely like it a lot, but can you tell us why is it important?

Marianna Tessel: I think open source is super important for many, many reasons. And it’s important to understand that it’s important to both companies, as well as developers themselves. You as individuals, it’s important for you as well. For employees, you can contribute to open source. You can learn a lot of new software this way, and it’s actually a great way to work in something you’re passionate about and boost your resume. I’ve seen a lot of developers starting their careers in open source and getting their ground in open source. Then later on, they actually can show, even though they might not even have work experience, they can show a lot of resume experience with their open source contributions, and they can become known and really be part of the community.

Marianna Tessel: There is also this, I think as engineers, you always want to have this impact. And one of the nice things about open source its very lasting impact on software. It’s always there, it’s open and it’s not bound within one company. So it’s super great way for you to learn, to expand your experience and also to get known sometimes.

Rocio Montes: Absolutely. So you’ve mentioned why is it important for individuals, but why do you think it’s important for companies to focus on open source?

Marianna Tessel: Rocio, that’s an excellent question because a lot of companies don’t understand that. They don’t understand the importance of open source for them, but I think it is super, super critical. First of all, one thing to understand, remember when I said that open source used to be this kind of more on the fringe and things that were like out there? Today, open source is actually where a lot of the innovation is happening, and a lot of new things start from open source. So you can get some of the most robust and the most advanced code from open source.

Marianna Tessel: And it used to be that the code in open source wasn’t necessarily super high quality because there wasn’t a company behind it, but today that is actually not true. This is one of the most high quality code because a lot of companies contribute to it and they actually harden the code. So you can find very innovative and very high quality code.

Marianna Tessel: And then, obviously, as a company when you consume open source, you’re not really attached to a vendor and you can take and evolve the code that you use in the way you want, and be kind of more in control of what you use and control of your destiny. So it is actually really, really good this way, but then there’s other benefits.

Marianna Tessel: From a talent point of view, you boost your image as a company when you’re involved in open source and you boost your reputation. Then, when you hire people, if you use open source components, you immediately get people that are qualified to work at your own code base, because they might know already GraphQL, Kubernetes, or whatever the challenges are out there. You don’t need to train them because they already know. And like I said, you can hire people this way and you boost your reputation.

Marianna Tessel: The last thing that is kind of really, really cool is that companies should consider open source things themselves. And what it does, it actually gives your software longevity as well. It means that it’s out there in the communities and others are going to help evolve the code. So that’s super other a great attribute of having an open source software. You know, Rocio, some companies actually make a business out of open source. And like I said, I have some background in a company like that, but that’s a whole different business though. I’m not going to talk about that.

Rocio Montes: Okay. But let’s go one level down to actually talk about what does it really mean to participate in open source?

Marianna Tessel: Yeah. Participating in open source is… Let’s break it down because we said, there’s individuals and there’s also companies. So let’s start from individuals. For individuals, you can participate in multiple ways. First of all, you can just get familiar with open source. You can browse and see what’s out there. You can start using it. You can start playing with it because open source is highly available and free. There’s almost no barrier to get going. You don’t need to get a license, you can really easily start using it. So, also, I highly recommend to people to get comfortable contributing to open source and say, “Oh, I have something here I can start working on.” You can start from something super small and increase your contribution, but it opens up a whole world for you as you do that. So, and you can start proving yourself in the community.

Marianna Tessel: And, last, one day you may become a maintainer, which means a really high contributor, and one of the people that actually decide what goes in the open source. You might become a maintainer as part of your community and maybe one day you will write an open source software and you put it out there and it will always have your name on it.

Rocio Montes: Yeah, absolutely. And I know that for some of our engineers it has actually created a way to participate in conferences, and give talks, and be part of the engineering community in a better way.

Marianna Tessel: Rocio, this is such a good point because I saw engineers that actually worked in open source and before they know it, a lot of people use it and they become community stars, giving talks to people asking them “How you do that?” And it’s so hard to do it if you were just working on a code in your company.

Marianna Tessel: You know, Rocio, before you move off this question, I also say for companies, there’s a lot of ways that companies can participate in open source. There’s probably three main ways that I can think about. First of all, as a company, I encourage companies to use open source software when it’s viable, when it fits your needs, and then have your teams also contribute to the open source software that you use. Having maintainers in open source is always so great because that actually means that you can influence the direction of the software that you use. So whatever software that your company uses a lot, consider having contributors there that are actually becoming maintainers.

Marianna Tessel: And last, as you know, Rocio, I’m really encouraging people in the company to open source software themselves and make more and more components available out there. Like I said, it’s good for the engineer that worked on it, but actually it’s super great to have your code out there evolving, and continues to have this longevity of life, and you get people that are trained on your code because it’s out there.

Marianna Tessel: Rocio, actually, can I ask you a question?

Rocio Montes: Of course.

Marianna Tessel: You talked about how important for people to contribute to open source and you actually one of these people that started contributing to open source yourself. So how did you go about it, and what project did you start with, and what was that experience?

Rocio Montes: Yeah, absolutely. I actually started contributing to open source during a college hackathon that I attended, and it was actually a great experience. We appeared to be blocked because we have found these bag on this library for Farsi and JSON files at the time. I really don’t remember the name of the project, but it appeared to us that we were completely blocked. And then one of the more senior engineers told us, “Well, this is an open source project. You can just forward the code and fix it.” And it was kind of like a “wow” moment for us, really, that realization that the open source community was there for us.

Rocio Montes: And for the hackathon, we actually used our fourth project because we had a time limit, but after that, we actually contributed back our fix to the project, and it was really nice to see that the maintainer of the project was actually really nice, even though I had forgotten to add the steps to replicate it. He took the time to ask me about it and just in general, nice about it. And then the fix was merged in and it just felt really gratifying. I think pushing your code to someone else’s project and having that collaboration experience. It’s something that to me is very gratifying.

Marianna Tessel: You know, Rocio, it’s funny. It sounded like it started from a need, but you got hooked and part of you getting hooked to this, he also leading here, inside Intuit, a movement to elevate our level of contribution to open source and awareness. How do you do that?

Rocio Montes: Yeah, absolutely. So two years ago, we started really working closely with Intuit technology evangelist, Aliza Carpio, to bring focus to open source in our engineering community. So we focus mainly on two things: Awareness and culture. So for that, we first launched our open source site. Everyone in the industry actually had a site, so we thought we need to have one too. It’s called opensource.intuit.com. I actually suggest everyone to go and check it out. And there we highlight our most popular open source projects.

Rocio Montes: We then established a community of global open source leaders. And this means that we actually have engineers at each one of our sites that share the passion for open source with all of the community. These engineers are actually a physical presence at each one of our sites, and they help us deliver global workshops for open source, where we are actually training our engineers to do that first step. Right? To get started with open source, because for some of us open source is still some sort of scary world and they just don’t know how to come in, but having someone physical and having that presence there actually helps. They are also responsible for guiding members through the open source process of their projects, and to actively look for potential projects to open source.

Rocio Montes: We also started participating in community events like Hacktoberfest. It’s something that Intuit hadn’t done yet. So we jumped into our first Hacktoberfest and we had really amazing results. We also looked into enabling our engineers to easily open source their own projects. And the process for open-sourcing a project was a little lengthy and confusing. So we pretty much set some automation in certain areas of the process to allow engineers to quickly and easily share the work that they have been doing internally with the open source community.

Marianna Tessel: Wow.

Rocio Montes: Yeah, it’s been really gratifying.

Marianna Tessel: Rocio, you mentioned lots of efforts. Are they paying off? Is it working?

Rocio Montes: Oh, absolutely. So we have reviews a process for open sourcing a project from six months, down to three, to two weeks. And we have actually, as a direct result of that, we quadruple the amount of open source projects. We now have 112 open source projects at our public organization on Github. And something really amazing for us is that we didn’t have any women-led open source projects, and we now have three of them and that’s an amazing win for us.

Marianna Tessel: Woo!

Rocio Montes: Yeah. And then Intuit started getting recognized for speaking engagements. We are now going to be participating at Grace Hopper as open source day co-chairs and open source track leaders. We also talked at ComicCon, we talked about open source at Developer Week. So it had really opened up the opportunities for Intuit.

Rocio Montes: During Hacktoberfest, we had over 170 PRs from our engineers, and really my goal at that time was, “Well, maybe we get 50 PRs, we’re going to be successful,” but the response was overwhelming. And it was really nice also to see that 23% of those contributions were from women, and that is actually really outstanding because the participation of women in the industry for open source is 6%. So to have those results are very, very, very nice.

Marianna Tessel: Totally agree.

Rocio Montes: Yeah. So Intuit is definitely focusing on open source and we’re very glad to be making those efforts. And many companies actually talk about also InnerSource, Marianna. What does that exactly mean?

Marianna Tessel: That’s a super great question. There’s InnerSource, and sometimes we call it internally open contribution, but the idea is that you open source your software inside the company. This means that you move away from the traditional model that there is just that one team that is responsible for the software, and you’re allowing everybody to contribute. I love this idea. First of all, people don’t have to be blocked if they need something from another team. They can go into code and they can help change it. So you can see the benefit of that.

Marianna Tessel: But also to get your code ready to be InnerSource, that requires a certain level of hygiene and that really pays off because as anybody who actually manage a successful open source project will tell you, you need to have a high degree of understanding, first of all, readable code, great automation, understanding what are the areas where you need contribution, a very strong CICB pipelines, and all of that to really make sure that other people can come in and contribute.

Marianna Tessel: So you might not get exactly the same level of rigor that you will get of managing an external community, but it does require you to elevate your code hygiene quite a bit. And like I said, it has the benefit of people coming in and helping you on something you need. You can put the issues out there and let other people in the company join, or when they need something from you, they can just join the party versus put it on some requirement list and make it through rounds and rounds of internal back and forth until it makes itself in.

Rocio Montes: Yeah, and extra meetings and just conversations that are not needed. We should definitely communicate through code.

Marianna Tessel: Totally.

Rocio Montes: So that’s great. It’s great to hear. So now going back to open source, what are your favorite open source projects these days?

Marianna Tessel: You know, there’s so many, but let me mention a few that are a little bit more in the infrastructure realm. I’m, as you know, I came from infrastructure, spent time at VMware and Docker so I tend to really know what’s going on in that space and gravitate to it. I still love Docker and this whole notion of containers, if you haven’t started using it in your company, please do. And Kubernetes is clearly the way to became the way to orchestrate containers, so that’s, again, a wonderful tool.

Marianna Tessel: And since I mentioned this through tools, I will remiss not to mention Argo, which is an Intuit tool that we open source. It’s actually a set of Kubernetes native tools and it helps you run and manage your jobs and applications. It is used by over a hundred companies, including companies such as Google, Tesla, et cetera. It’s really became an amazing, totally, very proud of it. We have other open source projects as well.

Marianna Tessel: I also like what’s going on with observability these days and you look at the project such Open Telemetry. We are very curious about them. And AI is another space that as it’s evolving, it’s good to see that there’s a lot of evolution of it that is actually open sourced. A good famous example is, of course, Tensorflow, but also Apache Spark has some very interesting ways that it brings help for AI jobs. So I recommend people take a look at them. And again, there’s a lot of good lists out there of open source projects, but go browse, go to Github, go to other places, and get yourself familiar with open source.

Rocio Montes: Awesome. That’s great advice. And also opensource.inuit.com, as well, for projects that you can collaborate.

Marianna Tessel: Totally.

Rocio Montes: Great. I think we’re ready now for Q and A.

Marianna Tessel: Yes, we are.

Rocio Montes: Let me go turn on the lights it shut off. Okay.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Yeah, we’ve got some great questions. First thing is more of an observation, I think, than a question, but people have called out as a female CTO, as a female leader in open source on, in this talk, you must work in a female-friendly engineering culture. Do you want to speak to that?

Marianna Tessel: You know, I would like to… First of all, I think, obviously, our culture is very friendly, and in general at the company, which makes it super easy and welcoming to be a female CTO. I don’t have to justify it, or talk about it, or apologize it, and I actually don’t even think about it. So that’s super great. My role in that, as well, is to make sure that our culture in the company, and particularly in engineering, is super welcoming to women and be a true champion for women. But I think it’s a very, very friendly culture and one that really is helping women. Rocio, what do you think?

Rocio Montes: I agree. I agree that the culture is very supportive. As a female engineer, I do feel that I can go after any of the goals that I set out to work on, and we always get that support.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: That’s great. As you all know, there’s a lower percentage of women typically in contributing to open source. What do you think might be the reason behind it? Do you feel like there’s just a lack of accessibility or this lack of awareness? Where do you think, in your own experience, the variety of reasons that may or may not have contributed to this lack of diversity in open source?

Marianna Tessel: I think that open source could be a little bit–as Rocio described her own experience–It could be a little bit intimidating. It does feel like you walk in a community of strangers and you’re starting to contribute your code and you don’t necessarily know the people. First, I totally agree we need to increase the awareness of open source and that’s important, but also let’s not be afraid of contributing and let’s have women actually take over open source. I think works. Women are really natural community builders, so we actually going to see increase level of collaboration in the community.

Marianna Tessel: And just like any other community, there’s also not everything is great in open source and the way the community sometimes behaves, but you can always flag that and it gets addressed. But it’s super welcoming environment and don’t be afraid of it. Tiptoe in, go in, and you can really, really start flourishing in it as something. So I really encourage people to get more awareness and then actually not to be afraid to start. And then it will become a lot less foreign once you do.

Rocio Montes: Yeah, and to add to that, there are, I think that when we started seeing the projects coming on from female engineers to open source their projects, I think that created a chain effect. Seeing one woman do it, and then the other ones actually follow because they see that representation in that community. So I think that looking into open source projects that are from women, maybe, or just going to a meetup where people are focusing on open source will get you that security and that community feeling that will encourage you to keep going and participating in open source.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: That’s great advice. If there’s anything you wanted to take away from this talk, be fearless, go ahead and contribute. It’s actually not that scary of an environment, it sounds like. So go ahead and get out there in the open source world.

Rocio Montes: Yeah.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: The next question we have is about how if you want to contribute, but the company might have policies against it. There seems to be a lot of draconian contracts when you’re an employee, right? So what advice do you have there?

Marianna Tessel: Every company has their own policies for open source contribution and when you are in a company it’s important for you to understand the specific policies… Sorry, my earphone is falling. It is important to understand the particular policies of your company and stay within that. Obviously you can also contribute to completely unrelated open source projects normally on your own. Again, ask for a company’s advice, but I recommend you get familiarize yourself with the policies and stay within.

Marianna Tessel: My word of advice here is for companies is to get really open to the idea of having more and more people in your organization contributing to the open source. Encourage it and open source software yourself. Recently there was an article that went around at Inuit where somebody said that open source software by companies is really the future of software. Especially when companies open source software, not for the purpose of monetizing it or making profit out of it. So I would recommend the companies get on this bandwagon, go open source a software. It’s really good for you. It’s good for your employees. It’s good for the world of software. And for employees, if you’re not sure, ask your company, ask your legal department, HR departments, your managers for a guidance of what to do. That’s always the best thing.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you. I think people really, really are looking for mentors generally. Especially as a woman in tech you want advice, you want to bounce ideas off of someone. So do you think that it’s helped you or it will help people to have mentors in open source, and how do you go about finding one? Besides attending a Girl Geek dinner, of course.

Marianna Tessel: Mentors always help, and for me, what works is not necessarily have… And again every person is different, so I don’t want to say that the only way, but for me what worked is not necessarily have one or two mentors, but I have a variety of mentors that I go to for different questions. And maybe some people I go to because they have just unbelievable advice about people and they always know what to do when I get a tough situation in that area. Others might help me when I get a really hard technology question and I might go to them with technology questions.

Marianna Tessel: So different mentors for different areas are great. I think in open source community, what you’re likely to find is mentors that can help you understand how to become a maintainer, how to become more of part of the community, and there’s ways to get close to the communities. Many of the open source community actually hosts the in person events and more. There’s conference that are in that space. So you can actually find mentors there. I think they’re more appropriate mentors that will help you to understand how to be active in the community and how to flourish there.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you. This has been an amazing session. I know I’ve learned a lot and I’ve seen from the comments and the questions that everybody’s really, really appreciated it, especially some call outs about how the talk was structured as an open dialogue. So thank you so much, Marianna, and thank you, Rocio, for making time for all of us today.

Marianna Tessel: Thank you for having us.

Rocio Montes: Thank you very much.

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“Girl Geeks Gone Gov”: Martha Wilkes + Lisa Koenigsberg with United State Digital Service (Video + Transcript)

Transcript of Elevate 2020 Session

Gretchen DeKnikker: This session, yes, we are recording them. They will be on YouTube later. Subscribe now, and all of your dreams will come true. If you’re hosting a watch party or you want to tweet or have questions, throw them in the chat, send them out on Twitter. Definitely have the pictures. We saw the ones earlier of the watch party with the dog, and that was amazing. That just gave the whole team life because we’re all a little tired after this week.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Submit and upvote your questions during this session, down here using this Q&A button and be sure to check out the job opportunities from our sponsors at girlgeek.io/opportunities. That does include jobs where you could work with these amazing ladies that I’m about to introduce to you at U.S. Digital Service.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Martha Wilkes and Lisa Koenigsberg are both working at U.S. Digital Service, and they’re out here to tell you a little bit about mid-career malaise, a very important thing, knowing that everyone in this audience is more senior than our average audience, and the fact that we work in this ridiculously ageist industry that never gives enough attention to these things, and that all of us are going to face it. You guys are going to come, you’re going to give us life today, so I’m going to stop talking and let you take it away.

Martha Wilkes: Thank you, Gretchen. I’m Martha Wilkes, and I work at U.S. Digital Service. I’m one of the two Girl Geeks Gone Gov. They asked us to come up with a cute title, so that was our alliteration to the next level. We both found ourselves in the government with no intention. Lisa, what is US Digital Service anyway? What are we doing here?

Lisa Koenigsberg: Yes, yes. U.S. Digital Service. It’s comprised of about 170 technology geeks, and I use technology in air quotes, across different expertise, products, engineering, procurement, developers, designers, really smart bureaucracy hackers, which we’ll come back to again. We work with various government agencies to mostly give them permission to try something new, keeping in mind that the mission to do that is to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people in the greatest need.

Lisa Koenigsberg: We’re hiring, by the way, usds.gov/apply. Check us out. We’re going to tell you more about it as we go. I’ll tell you a little bit about how I got here. It was 12 years in a nonprofit, 12 years of coming in one day and finding out thank you very much, but no thank you. Here I am, a mid-career, middle-aged woman who has to go out and fend for herself.

Lisa Koenigsberg: It was hard. I had heard about USDS from a conference, actually a diversity and inclusion conference, that I had gone to several years before. I pocketed a card and made some LinkedIn connections and put that in the back pocket, doing what you typically do is, “I’ll never go and do that. There’s no way I’d work for the government. I’ve heard horror stories about how hard it is to get into the government and who wants to go from private sector to public sector?”

Lisa Koenigsberg: I’m here to tell you that I have done it and it ain’t so bad. I don’t know, Martha, if you want to say a little bit about your journey?

Martha Wilkes: Yes. Mine was a little more fraught. I didn’t ever have USDS in mind and if I did, I don’t think it ever sinked in. I technically live in North Carolina. We’re here in Washington, DC right now.

Martha Wilkes: I, too, got laid off and here’s lesson number one to the people. When you get the mandatory HR meeting with no agenda and you have to attend on the day, there’s your sign. We scrambled, and this goes to my other lesson for you. Keep your portfolio and resume updated all the time. I heard this all my career. Did I do it? No, because on that day, I was scrambling like everybody else was. We knew what was happening.

Martha Wilkes: You have to be ready to go. I was at a company for 16 years, thinking I’d stay at that company 16 years, and guess what? That’s not what happened. I would say that was my first lesson, to be ready to go.

Martha Wilkes: I really also was not finding a lot of jobs locally, and it took me a while to find work, even any jobs, really. I was actually finding that the ones I was getting were the ones that were where the interview process was sight unseen because I have a lot of gray hair, people. That’s what I have, and I’m a middle-aged woman in the tech world. It turns out ageism is real and both of us have experienced it. I think you also liked the fact that the USDS interview process was on the phone.

Lisa Koenigsberg: Yeah. Let me tell you a little bit about that process. I’m going to lead in with an example that tells you what United States Digital Service is. We refer to it as USDS.

Martha Wilkes: Sorry, United States Digital Service.

Lisa Koenigsberg: Inside baseball here, so I apologize, an acronym heavy world.

Martha Wilkes: It’s the government; there are acronyms.

Lisa Koenigsberg: Typical government placement takes a long time. The USDS process took two clicks. You don’t need a government resume. You can use your regular resume. You go online, you pick a few checkboxes and upload your resume and you’re done.

Lisa Koenigsberg: What our counterparts that predated us did, one of the things that we did was hack the US Government hiring process to make it so that we have a much more human-centered approach to hiring. We’ve been talking a lot throughout today about bias. The entire interview process consisted of three pretty detailed interviews. All of it took place on the phone. I did not physically see a human being until I accepted an offer.

Lisa Koenigsberg: Then I said, “Well, wait a second. I would like to see who I’m going to work with and maybe where I’d be working and see a human being,” just because I didn’t trust that it was real. It doesn’t remove all of the bias because there’s still voice and tone and language that comes from different parts of the country and the world, but it definitely removed some of the ageism bias because they couldn’t see what I looked like or what I wore or any of those things.

Lisa Koenigsberg: That gives you an example of what USDS is. USDS is still working with the office of personnel management to make the hiring process more user friendly, meaning that you don’t have to write a 25-page computer readable resume that does keyword matching, and then maybe if you did everything right, you get to talk to a human. We start with human and go from there, so there’s ongoing work happening, but USDS started that with their own process. Did I say that we’re hiring?

Martha Wilkes: Yes, usds.gov/apply. we won’t be offended if you go to our website in the middle of our talk. That would be awesome. We’re always hiring people.

Martha Wilkes: Speaking of other people who work here, the imposter syndrome here at U.S. Digital Service is turned up to 11, because there’s incredible people here. I have to say, in my career I’ve worked with what I thought were awesomely smart people. Everybody here is smart and also nice because that’s one of the things that we’re looking for at U.S. Digital Services, not only people who can do the work technically, and we all have to be able to do that, but there’s an extra special secret sauce to USDS, U.S. Digital Service members that we don’t always own the thing.

Martha Wilkes: Mostly what we’re doing, because of our reputation, is that we don’t have all the answers. Our agency partners and the folks that work in the agencies are awesome people. They just are stuck in the bureaucracy and the red tape maybe of their agency. We mostly partner with them and elevate them and make sure their excellent ideas come to fruition. We can, because of where we are, locate a breakthrough a little bit. Do you feel like that imposter syndrome, Lisa?

Lisa Koenigsberg: Oh gosh. In any given day, I’m sitting in a room full of a combination of agency staff, let’s say at Office of Personnel Management. I’m sitting in a room with USDS staff that could go anywhere from former CTO of companies, to the people who started–the famous five or seven of Google, and the chairman of the Office of Personnel Management. Then there’s me.

Lisa Koenigsberg: I’m with my sweatshirt and my tennis shoes on thinking, why am I here? What could I possibly contribute? Then they ask me a question and it’s amazing, the support that you get in the feedback. They’re just looking for help. They’re looking for people from the outside to help them realize how to deal with the American public and create user-centered services and product ties and use modern technologies.

Lisa Koenigsberg: It’s hard, but it’s super fulfilling. I have given the example of if you want to do something in a place that has the big impact, forget Google and Amazon. Those numbers are minuscule. There are millions and millions of people in the United States and the people that we work with every day, those are their customers, not the couple of million that belong to Google or Amazon. It’s huge. If you’re looking for something that has purpose and meaning, there’s nothing bigger than you can do than work for a government agency.

Martha Wilkes: The other good thing about working for the government, which again, neither of us ever thought we’d be in, the benefits are really good. I think this is our advice and our lesson to especially middle aged women and also planting seeds in younger women who maybe one day, so may be thinking about this, because we are looking mostly for people who can walk in and handle themselves and have had maybe some life experience.

Martha Wilkes: I think both of us has had some life experience. Not only have we had life experience, but to sound like a Hallmark card or an Oprah episode, the hard things in life, the disappointments we had by being laid off in mid career, I almost can’t believe it’s coming out of my mouth, as cheesy as it sounds, but it literally has brought me to this experience, opened my mind to, “Okay, I have to broaden my horizons because I’m a middle-aged woman in tech and I need to find something, the next thing.”

Martha Wilkes: Also, that–having gone through that now has given me something, so when something hard comes along, maybe I can keep it in perspective a little bit, or maybe be like, “I’ve been here before and it’s been a hard thing, but I’ve come out the other side.” I think that’s the lesson, to be open to the adventures in your career. I never really thought I would. I never envisioned myself here. What do you think?

Lisa Koenigsberg: Yeah, when I dropped my resume in, I thought, “Nah, that’ll never happen. I’m just going to do it for the experience and have another interview through my belt.” I do want to, again, echo some of that, don’t be afraid to stretch yourself. Don’t be afraid to try something different.

Lisa Koenigsberg: I know the average government employee works in a place for 20 years plus. We have terms. We’re limited to two two-year terms, so a total max of four years because that is the industry standard, right? That’s how long people stay at a job. That’s how long you don’t become succumbed to the inside baseball. There’s a purpose for that, and it’s hard.

Lisa Koenigsberg: I also come from a woman perspective and I have found that, because I’m with the United States Digital Service, that has given me some carte blanche to walk into a room and be heard. As a woman in technology, I offer give every opportunity that you have to be heard. Don’t be afraid to have your voice. Don’t be afraid to say what you think. It won’t always go well, but don’t shy back because you’re sitting in a room full of men. Your voice matters. Find a place where you can be heard.

Lisa Koenigsberg: I will also just give a few examples of what USDS does, talking a little bit from our own experience. Do you want to throw in a few things that you’ve done?

Martha Wilkes: I’m a designer. My first project, when I joined U.S. Digital Service was to actually dig on a hiring pilot. We have a pilot and we’re trying to improve the government hiring because we have had stories and evidence of people with upwards of 60-page resumes. That’s what it takes to even get through the hiring process, which is crazy, especially when you’re trying to hire awesome tech people who might be coming from the private sector who have a two-page resume, like we all do.

Martha Wilkes: That was my first project. Now I’m at the Department of Veterans Affairs, working on tools for healthcare for our awesome veterans. They’re such fantastic people, who have paid the price up ahead, assuming that they did the right thing up ahead for their country, and now we owe them all the stuff that they sacrificed for.

Martha Wilkes: They’re wonderful, wonderful users. I listened to some user testing last week, usability testing last week. I told everyone I’m biased because I fell in love with everybody. They’re awesome, awesome people, our veterans.

Lisa Koenigsberg: Yep. My original few months, maybe six months, was at the Veterans Affairs Administration and I focused on the authenticated experience. Once you’ve logged into the VA.gov website, what do you see? What is your dashboard? What is your profile? What services do you have rights to and how do you find out about others? Super exciting.

Lisa Koenigsberg: We did a three month in-depth research and discovery phase that directed probably a two-year roadmap that’s now being executed against. I got to come in and just make that happen. I’ve now handed that off to another really smart group of people, and I’ve been working at Social Security Administration to help them better transactions, like getting a replacement Social Security card or getting proof of benefit from them or finding out your claim status. We’re helping them bring the consumer to the forefront and get the- I guess our time is up.

Martha Wilkes: USDS.gov. That’s our final thing. USDS.gov/apply. Sorry about that. We made it.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Wonderful. Okay.

Martha Wilkes: We’re happy to take questions, you guys.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Yes, and I love that U.S. Digital Service, they sponsor–they join us as a government participant every year. Every year, the speakers are just phenomenal. You think at the beginning, there’s no way I would ever work for the government. Then you meet these women and you’re like, “You know…?”

Gretchen DeKnikker: Then you guys talking–not you guys, y’all talking about impact…

Lisa Koenigsberg: Oh.

Martha Wilkes: We’re Girls Geek Gone Gov.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Just the impact, you touch everyone, everyone in the entire United States. That is scale and that’s amazing. I think a lot of people, for the first time are looking at it, going, “Oh, wow. This sounds really cool, and I could work with you two.” Okay–

Martha Wilkes: It’s daunting. It’s a little scary, truly, when you walk in and you realize that when you’ve been operating at a different level, maybe, especially for me in the private sector, but it is thrilling and also you’re not by yourself. There’s an awesome team of people. Again, mostly the agency folks are the ones who really have that expertise and you partner with, I would say. Do you agree?

Lisa Koenigsberg: Yep.

Martha Wilkes: Cool.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Our most popular question is, well, it’s switching as they do. One is around the technology stack that’s used. I know you all work in different departments. Is that even something you can share? Is it a secret?

Martha Wilkes: Does COBOL strike anybody’s fancy because we’re huge in COBOL at Medicare/ Medicaid, and guess what? We actually can’t change that out. That runs the–

Gretchen DeKnikker: Well, the scale of that, yeah…

Martha Wilkes: That runs, what is it, 84% of the economy, so that COBOL code, thank God, is still up and running and safe.

Lisa Koenigsberg: I feel like a lot of what we do when we go in is there are a lot of mainframes sitting in use, okay? I’m not going to lie, but a lot of what we do is try to figure out how to build API services or microservices on top of that, so that we’re not hitting the mainframe for every request that we have, as a starting point of trying to then understand the business roles that drive that, so that we can then replace it some day.

Lisa Koenigsberg: It is not the forever solution, but unfortunately moving from static servers to AWS doesn’t work very easy here. A lot of what we do is try to incrementally get them to do that API transition, so they can uncover business logic and then have it written down when they’re ready to replace it.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Right. You’re the [crosstalk 00:18:22] inside the government.

Martha Wilkes: At the VA, The Veterans Administration, the project that we’re working on, React, microservices, like modern stuff…

Lisa Koenigsberg: There’s React, there’s Ruby. We do have modern services, but they’re often layered on top of very legacy systems.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Okay. There’s two questions. I want to try to get them both in, but we’re like close on time. One is do you need to have a technology or engineering background to apply to U.S. DS Digital Service?

Lisa Koenigsberg: I would say most of our folks do. Most of the on the ground work at the agencies is technology based, so we’re typically looking at people from the technology industry and design and engineering and product. We do have some front office and some talent parts that don’t require that, but knowledge of how to find that is also necessary. I would say most of it does come from a technology background.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Okay, and then the other one, I know it can be confusing… If you guys can get the owl to go back to have you centered, too. Focus just…

Martha Wilkes: Well, the owl has a mind of its own. When I start talking, it literally just…

Gretchen DeKnikker: The other one is how the terms work. You come. It’s a year or two years or four years. Then do you stay, do you go to another department? How does that work?

Lisa Koenigsberg: Neither of us have had to deal with that. I’ll give you the 30,000 foot view of what I’ve heard. Everything goes smoothly. Your two years hits and you can easily just roll over into your next two year term, or you can choose that this is enough, or you can choose that I’m all in on government and try to get yourself placed in a permanent government position.

Martha Wilkes: That’s what I want to do.

Lisa Koenigsberg: Right,

Martha Wilkes: Right now.

Lisa Koenigsberg: You could do your two years and then opt into your next two years. Usually, around year three, you’re starting to look at, and even the leadership at United States Digital Service is starting to talk to you about what is it that you want to do and help you get whatever direction you’re going to go.

Lisa Koenigsberg: We know that right now, there’s a 30/30 split last year of people who went back to the private sector or stayed in some kind of civic tech. Most of the people who stayed in civic tech went to other companies that were doing civic tech work, not necessarily with the government, but a lot of people are staying in the civic tech space because it’s super compelling.

Martha Wilkes: It’s so addicting, having worked at a private sector company, to come and work someplace that really has a mission of serving American people and people who are applying to be Americans citizens. To go back to just selling stuff for a company or just making stuff… It’s a little bit addicting I have to say, and I can’t imagine going back. I don’t want to go back.

Lisa Koenigsberg: I’ll also offer that a lot of the big companies, Microsoft, Google, offer sabbaticals to go do things for three to six months. We’ve had a lot of people come in, thinking I’m going to do my three or six months and have either done that or have stayed and said, “This is amazing. We want to stay.”

Martha Wilkes: There’s no experience like it in the private sector.

Lisa Koenigsberg: Our current administrator, Matt Cutts, came with a six months’ sabbatical from Google and stayed.

Gretchen DeKnikker: I don’t think you guys mentioned: Are you hiring?

Lisa Koenigsberg: Always.

Martha Wilkes: We are hiring. We’re always hiring because people are always coming and going. A lot of people don’t even stay for their full two-year term. People, for various reasons in their careers, are always coming and going, so we’re always hiring.

Lisa Koenigsberg: usds.gov/apply.

Gretchen DeKnikker: There we go. All right. That’s what I wanted to get in one more of. All right. This has been a pleasure, a true pleasure. Thank you so much.

Martha Wilkes: Thank you.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Thanks, everybody.

Lisa Koenigsberg: Happy National Women’s Day.

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“Lift As You Climb: Morning Keynote”: Carin Taylor with Workday (Video + Transcript)

Transcript of Elevate 2020 Session

Gretchen DeKnikker: We are ready to kick off the morning. Carin Taylor, our keynote speaker, is the Chief Diversity Officer of Workday, where she has global responsibility for the development and execution of Workday’s inclusion and diversity strategy. Prior to joining Workday, she was the head of diversity, inclusion and innovation at Genentech, where she was responsible for strategic initiatives, including executive coaching, building, and leading highly effective teams and increasing play engagement. She is here to kick us off with our theme today, Lift as You Climb.

Gretchen DeKnikker: We are so, so, so excited to have you, Carin.

Carin Taylor: Good morning. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you so much, Girl Geek X for actually having me. It’s my pleasure to be here, obviously being your keynote speaker, but also just really as a sponsor as well. I’m going to go ahead and share my screen. What I’m going to talk about today is I’m actually going to talk about building a culture that vibes for all. You’ll find out what that means in a few minutes, but I’d like to start off with just a couple of things. First of all, thank you again for having me. Happy International Women’s Day or weekend.

Carin Taylor: Most of us, or a lot of us, are starting to celebrate today, but a lot of folks will be celebrating on Monday and next week as well. But thank you all for actually being here. I’m going to talk about something that is important to me as I think about this work around belonging and diversity, and how it actually impacts us, not–as women, but also our entire work environment in the world that we’re in. So I’m going to talk a little bit about that. And I’m going to start talking about the fact that a culture that vibes is a culture that thrives.

Carin Taylor: But I also want to acknowledge that it starts with you. It starts with me. It starts with us understanding what is our journey and who are we in the context of this conversation. For me, I was born and raised in California. Obviously, grew up as an African-American girl. I was in a family with three other brothers, so I grew up in a really competitive environment, have lived in Silicon Valley my entire life. I’ve worked for some pretty big Silicon Valley companies, as you heard from Gretchen. Doing that and being a lesbian, an African American, a mother of two beautiful biracial kids, that has shaped how I actually see the world and how I think about this work.

Carin Taylor: It wasn’t until I started doing work on myself and understanding my points of view around this that I really began to be able to have a perspective that actually was able to help other people. I’ll share a quick story with you. These experiences have shaped my life. One of the things I had an opportunity to do is live and travel all around the world. And so, being acknowledged as someone who was very different while I would be traveling in different countries was something that really stuck with me. But one of the real pertinent and impactful situations that I was involved in was actually an experience with bias.

Carin Taylor: Ad so, I’ll paint the picture for you. I was at a sales conference, there were about 200 or so people there. I was one of about 10 women. I was one of two African Americans, and I was the only African-American woman in the room that day. The topic of conversation that day just happened to be diversity and this was long before I started doing diversity work. But as I sat in the front row listening to the speaker, a typical-looking executive, white male, I had a really adverse reaction to looking at him talk to me, African American, traveled the world, etc., etc., talking to me about diversity.

Carin Taylor: It was really bothering me. It was like kind of hitting me in the gut. So I walked up to him during a break, and his name was Mike, and I said, “Mike, look, I’m really sorry, but I can’t receive your message.” And he said, “Why not?” I said, “Because of what you look like. I just couldn’t get past that.” I had cut off everything. I couldn’t even hear what he was saying anymore. And he said, “Why not?” I said, “Because of what you look like.” He said, “I’m gay.” It was the first time that unconscious bias really, really hit me upside the head.

Carin Taylor: But it wasn’t until later that evening that I really understood the impact of that story and that interaction that had happened. What happened was I was sitting at home and all of a sudden I burst into tears. Because what I realized is that what I had done to Mike, people had been doing to me my entire life. They had been judging me simply by what I look like and I in turn had started to do it to other people. I share that because that experience really kind of kickstarted my personal journey around understanding who I was as a person,. understand how I viewed the world.

Carin Taylor: But it wasn’t until I had very similar experiences in addition to that one, that really led me to believe that there was something about how I saw people and how I saw the world that I needed to work on and that again shapes why I feel so passionately about this topic. So let me go ahead and get started. So, VIBE. VIBE, if you VIBE, you can thrive. Vibe for us at Workday stands for value, inclusion, belonging, and equity for all. It’s really important that we put that for all on top of this conversation, because, as we’re doing this work and you talk about inclusion, and you talk about belonging, it has to be in the context of every single person that you interact with.

Carin Taylor: It can’t just be for women. It can’t just be for black women. It can’t just be for certain categories of people. You have to think about how you are inclusive of every single person within your workforce, and that’s what VIBE means to us. If we break it down in the areas that we focus on, it’s these areas that you’re seeing on the screen right here. So the inclusion, belonging, and equity, I’ll kind of go a little bit deeper into, but I want to kind of just lay this out for you. VIBE means that we value diverse representation.

Carin Taylor: It means that we look across our organization and want to make sure that there is a healthy balance of the workers that are actually in our workplace. Uniqueness is about how, how does my individual uniquely–uniqueness play a part in the environment and helping our company thrive. Inclusion is about the environment and the conditions that are being created for you to have a culture and a place of belonging for everyone. And so it’s interesting because inclusion, that environment, can be really healthy and you think you’re doing all the right things, but not everyone may necessarily feel like they belong in that culture.

Carin Taylor: So it’s important that you provide different ways of building inclusion so that everyone has an opportunity to feel as if they belong. Belonging is a bit different. Belonging is personal. Belonging is about how am I, or how are you personally feeling in that environment of inclusion that’s been created for you. And I’ll talk about that a little bit more. And then there’s equity. The way that we look at equity is really from a standpoint of does everyone have an opportunity to succeed in our company, and I’ll talk about equity a little bit more as well.

Carin Taylor: So here’s why belonging matters and at the end of the day, it really kind of gets to the bottom point there. And that is when you feel like you belong, you perform at your best, you are your best person. So think about situations where you feel like you have not belonged and think about the emotional capital that you demonstrate in terms of whether or not you’re showing up with imposter syndrome, whether or not you’re giving your full self, whether or not you’re being as creative as you can possibly be. If you don’t feel like you truly belong in an environment, you’re really not giving your best.

Carin Taylor: And so, as we think about this transition that we’ve seen within the diversity space, where back in the ’60s, it was about affirmative action and equal opportunity to today how we’re talking about inclusion and belonging, this thread of how we want to make sure that everyone feels as if they’re included is really a critical part to the work that we’re doing. Obviously not just myself, but all the belonging and diversity HR practitioners out there that are really striving to make strides in this particular area that we’re working in.

Carin Taylor: So let’s talk a little bit about equality versus equity. So you can see from this pictorial, the equality, it really gets to sameness. It kind of assumes that everyone is starting from the same level of platform. The reality is we would love to think that that were true across the board, but the realities are, is that we’re not all starting from the same place. And so when we think about the difference between equality and sameness and making sure that everyone is treated exactly the same, that doesn’t necessarily lead to equity. And so, as you see, what’s depicted on the right hand side, equity really is about fairness.

Carin Taylor: It’s about giving everyone that opportunity to succeed. And sometimes as you can see here, it means adjusting the way that you do things or how you provide opportunities for people in the workplace. And so we think about those things. We want to strive to make sure that there is equity in the workplace, but in reality, until there is equity, there really can’t be equality. So why does this matter to us? Why should this matter and why does this matter to us really as a culture and as a society? Well, it’s because of this $16 billion a year stress that it’s causing corporations. And this $16 billion, this is from a study that was done by the Kapor Center.

Carin Taylor: And what they found out is that when people feel like they don’t belong, they feel like they can’t thrive within a particular culture, there’s a ton of turnover, which means that it’s impacting retention. And the interesting thing is it’s not just impacting underrepresented groups of people. It is really impacting everyone. It doesn’t matter if you’re male, female, white, black, gay, straight, in tech or not. This is a $16 billion a year issue in Silicon Valley. So think about that around the world. Think about the complexity of what this really means when we have cultures that do not strive to do something like value, inclusion, belonging, and equity for everyone.

Carin Taylor: So I wanted to leave you with some tips to, as you’re thinking about how do you build a culture that really vibes, and I want to share some things and really think about this from some learnings that I’ve actually found. So the first one is really around leadership buy-in and accountability. And what that means is you have to have your leaders not just buy into what you’re doing from a diversity standpoint, but they’ve got to participate as well. They’ve got to be executive sponsors, they’ve got to be parts of councils. They’ve got to be talking about diversity and inclusion, both internally and externally, as you think about the impact of this on your business.

Carin Taylor: They have to do things like model behaviors so that those behaviors are demonstrated in the workplace and other people can actually see that they’re modeling those behaviors and benefit. One thing that’s super important though, it’s not just the verbal buy-in that’s super important. One of the also critical things is how do you get your leaders to document and really ultimately document to your CEO that they are committed to this work and making sure that the workplace for all, and particularly for women, is really a place that thrives.

Carin Taylor: The next thing is approaching this through a learning lens. And so I have found that one of the real important things is how you view this work. And the more that you accept that we all come from different backgrounds, perspectives, experiences, and you leverage those things as a way to do better for your business, you’re looking through a learning lens. And so you’re doing things like starting from a place of curiosity and empathy and forgiveness. We’re currently in a state where we’re fearful of saying the wrong thing or doing the wrong thing and therefore, in some cases we don’t do anything.

Carin Taylor: And so approach it really from a learning lens and allow for stumbles, allow for stumbles and resets. Don’t take this as if you do it wrong the first time, you’re going to continue to do it wrong, or don’t not move forward with asking questions because you may not know how to ask the questions, but really look at it through a learning lens. The next one is around sharing data. So as you all know, one of the things that really resonates with people is sharing data. So whether or not you’re looking at that data from a gender or race, a generation, a location perspective, a leadership perspective, it doesn’t matter, sharing data so people can actually see what’s happening, see what the trends are is super important.

Carin Taylor: But what’s equally important are the stories, the personal stories that come along with that data. It’s really important to attach personal stories, people, to the data that’s actually happening because data for most of us is just data and there’s no personalization to it. But when you attach it to a story, something that’s real life happening for people, then it tends to resonate a lot, a lot more. It’s really important that you have to look beyond just the numbers. So the next thing is ensure everyone is aligned. And what this is about is this is, what’s your one strategy that you may have?

Carin Taylor: So for us, it’s VIBE. Regardless of where you are at in the company, VIBE is really what we strive for and everyone at our company understands that. But I also have to make sure that there is some flexibility based on the region, the organization that you may be in, because there could be differences. And I’ll give you a quick example. If you’re working in a typical engineering environment, we all know that engineering is more dominated by men than it is by women. And so when you’re having those conversations, everyone’s trying to VIBE to make sure that this is an inclusive culture for everyone.

Carin Taylor: But in engineering, you may need to put more of a focus on how you’re inclusive of women. If I flip that story, and I think about an organization like human resources, they almost have the opposite problem. They have the issue of they are more dominated by women. And so their organization may think, may need to think about how did they create more of a balance when it comes to gender diversity, but on the male side. So you have to allow for that flexibility as well. The one other thing that I’ll talk about here is making sure that you’re able to differentiate the difference between your personal values and your company values.

Carin Taylor: And I share this because one of the things is sometimes those things can conflict. Sometimes when my personal values come in conflict with my company’s values, I need to know which one is on top, which one takes precedence. And if you’re working in a corporation, it should be your company’s values. And so, even though I like to share that, if I decide on Monday mornings I want to be a really nasty person and every Monday I come in and I’m a real B. Well, that doesn’t necessarily align with my company’s values around integrity and valuing people.

Carin Taylor: And so I have to leave that part of me outside. I can’t bring that side of me in. And if we talk about this in real terms, we’re talking about the things that really damage our relationships in our culture, such as people being homophobic, people being sexist, people being racist. Those types of things that crumble your culture are things that you want to make sure don’t impact your company culture, even if that conflicts with a person’s personal values. The next thing that I’ll talk about here is provide clarity because words matter.

Carin Taylor: So people need to know if you’re in a corporation like we are of 10, 12,000 people, we have to be aligned on what matters and how we’re talking about things. And so if everyone has a very different definition of what diversity and representation are, or inclusion and belonging, and they don’t understand the difference, or equity and equality, or visible and invisible differences, you have to often define what those things mean in your culture so that everyone has more of a common understanding and lens in which they’re looking through those things.

Carin Taylor: And so know that words really matter. The next thing that I’ll talk about is, you have to talk about the hard stuff. This is a one that makes us feel most uncomfortable, but it’s also the one that’s probably one of the most important. So whether or not you’re talking about Black Lives Matter, or the Me Too Movement, or immigration or race or politics, or lack of diversity in leadership within your company, these are the hard topics that we need to overcome that we need to talk about. And I say, don’t ignore them because these are the things that our employees are thinking about.

Carin Taylor: These are the things that they’re talking about at the water cooler, in the bathroom, when they’re going for walks on breaks. Our employees are talking about this, which means that we need to have much more of a lens of how do we appreciate the fact that we have all these social issues going on and they are impacting the productivity and mind share of our employees. And so we really have to make sure that we’re not throwing the hard stuff under the rug, but that we’re really taking the opportunity to talk about them. The next thing that I’ll share around building a culture that vibes is around getting everyone involved.

Carin Taylor: How do you find ways to make sure that all of your employees can participate, regardless of the level in which they are at? So whether or not it’s getting involved in employee resource groups or councils or functional diversity councils, or how do you get your remote employees involved, how do you think about what this means from a global perspective, find ways to get people involved. And I’ll talk about that around a couple of things that Workday has done to really make an improvement in that area. You’ve got to measure progress.

Carin Taylor: So I talked about sharing data and stories before, but you have to measure how you were actually doing and measurements go up and down. And I’ll talk about this in a couple bullets, but this is a journey. This is not a destination. There are going to be stumbles. There are going to be resets, but as long as you’re measuring progress and then putting things in place to continue to build upon that, then you’re actually headed in the right direction. The next thing is to celebrate the big and the small. Remember that we’ve been doing this work for a really long time and creating a culture that vibes for all people requires not just that every one of us participate, but it also means that there are great things, big things, big wins that you’re going to have and then there are also small things that are going to happen as well.

Carin Taylor: But at the end of the day, the thing to remember is that this is a journey. It’s going to take you a long time to get there. No matter where you’re starting is–wherever you start is where you start. But the fact that you continue to make progress and look at it as a journey is really important. So that’s what you can do in reference to a culture of vibing. Let me switch a little bit to what you can do as a person before I wrap up and open this up to some questions. So one of the things is, understand your story. So I shared part of my story in the beginning.

Carin Taylor: In order for you to expect that other people are going to share their story and lean into the difficulties of this conversation sometime, you have to understand your story first. So that’s the one thing. Welcome difference. Make sure that you’re looking for different perspectives and experiences and ways that people think as a way to do better in the work that you’re doing. Lead from a place of curiosity, empathy, and forgiveness. I talked about this a little bit earlier, but we can’t have an environment where people are afraid to speak or afraid to ask questions and think that we’re going to make progress if we shut people down.

Carin Taylor: I’ll share a quick story. I was in a meeting one day and an employee says to me, Carin, I don’t believe in diversity and I don’t believe in equal pay for women. And so as a head of diversity and as a woman, you can only imagine how that kind of took me back a little bit. But the beauty in the conversation was two things. One is we had a culture where an employee could share what they were truly feeling about this work, even to someone like myself. The other piece of that is I didn’t jump on this person and shut them down and go, oh my God, why, why am I having this conversation?

Carin Taylor: I listened. I asked questions. I led from a place of empathy and understanding so that I could better understand what the perspective was from this person. And at the end of the conversation, we got to a really happy place, so that’s great. Demonstrate inclusive behaviors, demonstrate them for all, speak up, speak up for people who don’t have a voice, whose voices are not heard. When you’re sitting in a meeting and you’re listening to someone steal someone’s idea or repeat something that someone else just said. This happens a lot to us as women.

Carin Taylor: Make sure that you are being brave and stepping up for that person. Engage in a difficult conversation, share your experiences, actively participate in making your culture better. Whether or not you’re calling it VIBE, whether or not you’re calling it DEI, whether or not you’re calling it diversity and inclusion, it doesn’t matter. But in order for us to make significant progress in this space, everyone’s got to participate. Again, provide that space and airtime for others. And if you are in a position, mentor others, sponsor others.

Carin Taylor: Help give each other that leg up so that we can all survive in the workplace. This really is just a quick little picture of how Workday vibes. And this is what we call, this is a day that we had last June called VIBE Week. But you can just see how multiple people around the world are getting involved in the activities to help us build a culture of inclusion. And then lastly, what I’ll do is just share this quick little video and then I’ll wrap it up.

Speaker: Our love gets better every day.

Speaker: Our friendship has no religion.

Speaker: Love is about who you are and not what you are.

Speaker: I don’t see a wheelchair. I see the love of my life.

Speaker: Our love is greater than anyone’s hate.

Carin Taylor: And so with that, I leave you with this question of what can you do to make sure that you’re building a culture around you that values inclusion, belonging, and equity, and what steps can you personally take to make sure that you’re creating an environment where everyone around you can thrive as well? So with that, I’ll go ahead and open it up to some Q&A. Gretchen.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Thank you so much, Carin. That was amazing. We have tons of questions. We just have a few minutes, but we’re going to get through as many as we can. So first, this is the one I really want to hear your answer to. Where do you find your inner strength to standing up to bias?

Carin Taylor: To standing up to what?

Gretchen DeKnikker: Bias.

Carin Taylor: Yeah. That’s a …

Gretchen DeKnikker: It’s a good one, right?

Carin Taylor: That’s a fantastic question. So I think a lot of it has to do with almost that story that I talked about with Mike in the beginning and having been someone who demonstrated bias and actually seeing it on both sides. And for me, what I thought was I felt the pain and the hurt and the damage that it meant to me and then I felt the hurt and the pain and the damage as I witnessed myself doing it to someone else. And having both of those perspectives and being able to then say, oh my God, how do I compartmentalize this and how do I never make another person feel undervalued for who they were was something that was just so prevalent in my life in terms of how I personally can translate when I see bias happening, how I kind of like try to just kind of shut it down.

Carin Taylor: And so for me, I think that’s where that inner strength comes from is really thinking about it and feeling it from both different sides.

Gretchen DeKnikker: All right. Okay. So our next question, thank you for the brilliant insights. How do you measure belonging at Workday and what aspirational goals have you set?

Carin Taylor: Yeah, that’s a fantastic question.

Gretchen DeKnikker: And this one comes from Dublin, also. Okay.

Carin Taylor: Fantastic.

Gretchen DeKnikker: That could be like Dublin, not Dublin, but okay.

Carin Taylor: Ireland, Dublin, California.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Yeah. I could have like got really dumb excited for a second.

Carin Taylor: So we measure belonging at Workday through something that we call a belonging index. And the belonging index is a subset of really kind of 34 questions that are a part of what we call our Best Workday Survey. And so we survey our employees every Friday. As a matter of fact, I took my survey this morning, but we survey our employees every Friday with only two questions from this set of 34 questions. But part of that, what we’ve pulled out are six questions that go directly to belonging. And that’s how we measure belonging in the workplace.

Carin Taylor: We measure it by gender, generation, race, location, and level that you are within the company. So individual contributor, manager, executive, etc. But that’s how we measure it. And it’s a part of that entire Best Workday Survey that we leveraged.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Okay. This is a good one too. Is leadership buy-in and ultimate accountability dependent on the organization style, like flat, hierarchical?

Carin Taylor: No, not necessary. Not necessarily. So if you think about leadership and who actually sits in leadership today, it can be hierarchical. But even if it’s not, making sure that the key point there was about making sure that people, that your leaders are talking about it and that they are participating in it. They can’t just go out and say, oh yes, I believe in diversity and not do anything about it and not do anything to support it and not build it into their organizational structure. It’s got to be a piece of what they do.

Carin Taylor: And part of it is hierarchical because if you have it coming from your very top leaders, and they’re saying that this is important, it certainly is going to spill down to the rest of the organization. But if you think about almost everyone being a leader within your company, also everyone having an opportunity to lead in some way, whether or not it’s on a project, it’s on a team, everyone can really play that leadership role. Everyone can take accountability and certainly everyone can participate.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for joining us this morning. This has been amazing. Again, everyone we have recorded this, so if you missed any part of it, it will be available later. And, Carin, thank you for your support, both personally, and from Workday.

Carin Taylor: This has been my pleasure. Have a fantastic day.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Thank you.

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“Jumpstarting Your ML Journey in Cyber Security”: Melisa Napoles with Splunk (Video + Transcript)

Transcript of Elevate 2020 Session

Sukrutha Bhadouria: All right. Up next, Melisa Napoles, we’re so excited to have, will be our next speaker. She’s a solutions engineer at Splunk, where she helps customers solve interesting data problems in security operations, as well as in business intelligence. Melisa will now be sharing with us her favorite lessons learned from organizations that jumpstart their machine learning journeys in cyber security. Welcome, Melisa, and thank you so much for making time for us.

Melisa Napoles: Excellent. All right, I’m going to go ahead and share my screen. All right. Can you confirm you guys see my screen all right?

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Yes, we can see your screen.

Melisa Napoles: Excellent. Well, hi everyone. Thank you for those of you who are still on with us, and hello to those of you who are just now tuning in. For the next 15 minutes or so, we’re going to hopefully get you all out of here having jump-started or substantiating your knowledge around doing machine learning and cyber security.

Melisa Napoles: All right. Here’s what I have for our agenda the next 15 minutes. When I think about jump-starting this journey and I think about all the clients I’ve worked with, it feels natural to me to segment the conversation in these four areas. Before jumping right into it, though, I’m going to take just a moment to tell you a little bit about me so you can put some history with the face on the other side of the screen here with you.

Melisa Napoles: I moved around a lot growing up, and this slide just talks about what makes me me. As my company likes to call it, these are my million data points. My family immigrated to the United States from Cuba, so I am first generation born American. After graduating from school and having various internships and consulting experience, technical specialist experience, sales engineering experience, I landed myself at a big data company called Splunk. I currently live out of Chicago, Illinois, supporting some of our larger Splunk customers, but my heart is somewhere between Miami, Florida and Seattle Washington, where I have my family. They say that your home is where the heart is, right? That’s a bit about my situation.

Melisa Napoles: And what being a solutions engineer really means is that I’m sort of like a consultant with Splunk solutions and everything Splunk touches, which is a lot of things. Splunk got its initial start in IT and security, but it’s since translated into a platform that serves almost every business unit in an organization. And the reason that’s cool is it’s allowed me to be exposed to how businesses run their practices, in particular, their cyber security practices. And so from this work over the last five years now, there are certainly patterns that have emerged to show what really good looks like in a cyber security practice, embarking on machine learning and what not so good looks like and some of the things that cause organizations to stalemate and not be able to move forward. In this particular visual, something that I’m particularly proud of in working here at Splunk is we just have absolutely stellar, quality female engineers, and I’m thankful to have that support system around me.

Melisa Napoles: All right, so let’s jump right into it. When I first started working in this space, it took me a good long while to really get the gist of AI and ML, and I went to school for physics and I took a lot of math classes. I was pretty much forced to figure it out because of the clients I was working with and the questions they were asking me that ultimately I was also asking. And what I learned is that for starters, ML, or machine learning, is a subset of AI or artificial intelligence, to put it simply. AI is the broader concept of machines being able to carry out tasks in a way that we would consider smart, and ML is an application of AI based around giving machines access to data to make some decisions on their own. It’s really not as scary as people make it seem. And when we’re talking about cyber security in particular, I’m finding that many organizations are really still in the realm of the machine learning area, at least today.

Melisa Napoles: When I embarked on this journey a few years ago, I also ran into asking, “Well, is machine learning statistics or is it not?” And even to this day, I get organizations asking me this, trying to understand this on their own, too. And what I’ve learned is that machine learning is very much based off statistics. And the main difference between them is their purpose. All ML certainly uses statistics, but not all statistics can necessarily be classified as machine learning. Statistic models are designed to make inferences about the relationships between data variables themselves and the machine learning models are designed to make the most accurate prediction off those inferences. It seems like everyone has an opinion about this these days, but this is the best conclusion I’ve come to, at least to date. We’ll see how long it lasts for, but this seems to be working in separating my logic in this space.

Melisa Napoles: And of course, like all good things, there are also lots of opinions on this sort of thing that you see quoted here as well. There’s comedy as a part of this quote, but I do find this to be true. At a very practical level, what ML typically represents when an organization is first starting out is in fact basic statistics. And right, this is just the thing that we all learn about in the mandatory high school or college stats class that we were forced to take.

Melisa Napoles: And so with all the buzz around machine learning and AI in the industry, you’d think everyone is doing it. Right? But what’s surprising is that organizations are not. And for those who are doing it, they’re running into major issues that effectively put a brick wall in front of them. And it’s really hard to get over. Oftentimes, I work on projects where a good number of organizations do, in fact, feel like this is all hype because they don’t know where to start or they got started too quickly and didn’t understand some of the foundational pieces to having longevity in this space, but it’s definitely not all hype.

Melisa Napoles: And so the way that I think about working with any data is like this. Everything we ever do with data for the most part can route back to a question we are trying to answer, a question that is formulated by our brains that we are trying to answer. And oftentimes those questions, if not all the time, can be categorized as your known knowns, the questions you know you need to be asking and in which you have confidence in how to find the answers, your known unknowns, the questions, again, you know you need to be asking, but you really are not very confident how to go about finding those answers and your unknown unknowns, the questions you don’t even know to be asking and you definitely don’t know the answers. Most organizations implementing machine learning and cyber security live in the first two spaces here, your known knowns and your known unknowns. Only the ones with extremely good resourcing can also say they’re incorporating the unknown unknowns, and we’ll talk about why that is.

Melisa Napoles: All right, so I’m going to give you just a moment here to see if you can count the number of bears on this visual. If any of you have played Where’s Waldo before, this as much the same. ML can help you reduce noise and look for the things you care about, the known unknowns, “I know I need to be asking about this, but I’m not really sure what the answer is or how to come about it.” Because we’re short on time, I’m going to jump to the next screen, and there they are. There are four bears, but that was a lot of noise to sort through, right?

Melisa Napoles: And keep in mind that I told you, you were looking for bears. What if you didn’t know to look for bears? What if you didn’t know they were representative of something you cared about? Because you knew to look for the bears, this was a known known. You knew the bears were what you cared about, so now where are they? Let me count them. Had you not known you were looking for bears, this would have been a known unknown, “I don’t know what’s anomalous here, but I know something likely is. Let me look for similarities and dissimilarities to find it.” You may ask why we used bears here and not just a Where’s Waldo visual. Fancy Bear is a Russian cyber espionage group. They target government, military, and security organizations, so think NATO and the like, and they try to steal secrets, hence finding your Fancy Bears.



Melisa Napoles: And it’s easy to get overwhelmed with where to start with ML and cyber security or really ML in any practice, and you don’t have to be doing the most advanced things with ML to be getting incredible value. Go after, and what I often advise organizations, and the most successful ones, what I see them doing is going after what the industry likes to call low-hanging fruit. Go after the low complexity, high benefit use cases. What’s in the upper right hand quadrant here is representative of where I see organizations first implementing machine learning and where they’re very successful. When you see things like malware detection or intrusion detection, think about asking questions like, “Do I have employees visiting weird websites that have long complex URLs that are sort of unrecognizable and are not indicative of something normal? And if they are, how often do they do it? Are they doing it more than they normally do? And how do I even define what normal is? Is it no times and they’ve been there the first time? Is it more than five times?” Understanding what that normal is, is where machine learning is incorporating.

Melisa Napoles: When you see things like … We’ve got here, a variety of things, but even think about asking, “Do I have employees failing to log into their corporate-issued laptop more times than they normally do in a given period?” I’ll take myself in particular. I mean, I fail authentication on my laptop at least five times every single day for a solid week every time Splunk forces me to change my password. It’s just a habit. And with Splunk incorporating machine learning into cyber security practice, they should be able to ask, “Well, when is Melisa failing to authenticate on her laptop way more than she normally does?” So these are some things to think about.

Melisa Napoles: What’s working for organizations and where are they in their AI and ML journey besides what we’ve just talked about in that upper right hand quadrant? Most organizations get started on machine learning or anomaly detection in cyber security with static thresholds. Imagine for a moment that you’re part of a security organization and all that really means is your job is to protect the company from the bad guys and gals doing any variety of things. And you’re tasked with being able to answer, “When do I have employees failing to authenticate more times than they normally do, failing to log in more times than they normally do?” And the first way that organizations tend to answer this question is by saying, “Okay, well, let’s just set some static threshold in place.” In this case, in the visual I’ve got, it’s 100, so any data point where the failed logins are more than 100, I’m going to be notified. But how do I even know if 100 is the right number and if it’s the right number for every individual in my organization?

Melisa Napoles: Oftentimes, while that is an awesome way to start doing machine learning and cyber security in that particular one example, organizations will then often upgrade to incorporating statistics with standard deviation, so then being able to ask, “All right, well, instead of tell me when I’ve got employees failing to authenticate more than 100 times, tell me when I have employees failing to log in more than they normally would.” And so that’s what you see here.

Melisa Napoles: And so organizations will get here. They’ll live here for a while, but as they start to incorporate a larger volume of data, a larger variety of data, as they try to model this at the speed at which their data moves so that their models are not stale, they realize the three Vs, and the three Vs being volume, variety, and velocity, volume being more data means more history means more time to get to look back in those models, which is important for accounting for fluctuations in seasonality. What about your employee like me who fails to authenticate every six months when password refresh has happened? More variety of data, the more accurate your insights. And again, if your machine learning can move at the speed at which your data moves, you won’t have stale models, and that means you’ll be making more accurate decisions based on your insights.

Melisa Napoles: What happens typically next when organizations realize the three Vs is they then begin to incorporate fit and apply concepts or train and test concepts, essentially breaking up a single workflow with statistics into two workflows for scale so that we can account for the three Vs. Imagine for a moment that you have a data set that represents a fruit basket. You’ve got records for oranges and bananas and apples and grapefruits and you’ve trained that data set to recognize that when there’s a banana, the banana’s yellow and it’s curved so that when new data gets corroborated against that training data set and it sees a data point that is yellow and curved, it can say, “Oh, I know what that is. That’s a banana.” So that’s what incorporating train and testing concepts means. It’s really, in large, part starting to do what we call supervised machine learning.

Melisa Napoles: And sometimes at this point, organizations they’ll start to dabble in creating supervised machine learning models, but it gets to a point where you’ve got such a large volume and variety of data moving so quickly that it’s hard to know all the models you should be using to fit your data … because you don’t want to fit your data to a model, you want to fit the models to your data … that they bring in supervised and unsupervised solutions to help in the world of machine learning.

Melisa Napoles: And so the fit and apply concepts, I would say, fit more in the world of the supervised machine learning, but then you have those unsupervised machine learning models. And if you think about us talking about your unknown unknowns, that third aspect of your known knowns, your known unknowns, and then your unknown unknowns, the questions that you don’t even know to be asking, that typically falls under what unsupervised machine learning helps you solve.

Melisa Napoles: Here’s an example, just one example, one view, one solution of what unsupervised machine learning in the world of cyber security can look like. Forget all the antics of what’s on the visual here. What you’ll notice is if you follow my storyline, you’ve got seven distinct anomalies using machine learning, telling you a larger story of an employee’s account being hijacked and used to steal data. You see anomalies of a ridiculous amount of data being taken from the computer of the employee. You see the employee’s login being logged in from Chicago, from China, from Russia, right? That defies the laws of physics. It’s impossible. You see all these weird things happening in conjunction together that strung together by a bit of supervised machine learning and a whole lot of unsupervised machine learning over a two month period tell you a larger story of what’s happening, things that you wouldn’t have even known to ask about because you didn’t even know what the patterns were to be looking for.

Melisa Napoles: What’s holding organizations back from doing more, from getting to this point of doing unsupervised machine learning and any variety of other things in the world of AI? I firmly believe in all the clients I’ve worked with, small and large, across different industries in cyber security and even in other spaces, but especially in cyber security, it’s the fact that there’s not an onus on being a citizen data scientist, whether it’s leadership not promoting that or individuals not having that fostered within them. And being a citizen data scientist is not being a data scientist, but as the person who works with your data, who creates the data, who is most knowledgeable of your data, there’s nobody better than those people to understand the business impact of that data. And so that’s what it means to be a citizen data scientist, understanding some of the fundamentals so that you can take that data, work with your data science counterparts and really propel the business forward in doing machine learning, doing AI so that you can ultimately impact an organization’s bottom line, whether that’s efficiency or revenue or what have you.

Melisa Napoles: The most prevalent are what you see on the screen here, so don’t be intimidated by AI and ML. It’s very powerful, but it’s nothing that can’t be wrangled. Embrace that idea of being a citizen data scientist. You do not have to be doing the most advanced things with ML to be getting incredible value and have impact. And remember those three Vs, volume, velocity, and variety as you embark on really testing and playing with ML type things.

Melisa Napoles: Remember these concepts of training and testing in the world of supervised and unsupervised machine learning, and then lastly, we didn’t have enough time for it, but remember that you should never be forcing your data to fit algorithms. Rather, you should be able to pick algorithms that fit the flow of your data so that you have accurate insights and you can make really quite powerful data-driven business decisions.

Melisa Napoles: I am going to play a very quick video here, which I find to be very inspiring and works its way into the world of figuring out ways to use machine learning to advance really the business and the world.

Speaker: One inventor is Benjamin Franklin.

Speaker: Leonardo da Vinci.

Speaker: Thomas.

Speaker: Edison.

Speaker: Alexander Bell Graham.

Speaker: No.

Speaker: That’s kind of a tough one.

Speaker: Um.

Speaker: In school, it was always a male inventor, I just realized.

Speaker: To know that there were women before me…

Speaker: It gives me motivation that I can invent something, make maybe a change in the world, and that would be really cool.

Melisa Napoles: All right, so that was a campaign that Microsoft put out for International Women’s Day in 2016. I fell in love with it when I first saw it and I still watch it every now and again just to remind me of a few things.

Melisa Napoles: Lastly here, I do just … Let me see. There we go. What I have to remind myself of, and what I hope that I leave all of you with, is in the world of figuring out how to work with machine learning and not be intimidated by it, but find productive uses for it, don’t be afraid to go out there and really respectfully challenge the status quo.

Melisa Napoles: All right. That’s all from my part. Thank you so much to the Girl Geek organization for letting me speak with you all here today and also letting me learn from the rest of the speakers. It’s been a great event so far.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Hi. Thanks so much, Melisa. This was great. I want to make sure to thank you for making time for this on a busy weekday. We have some questions that we will take offline, so they’ll be answered offline. Thank you so much, Melisa.

Melisa Napoles: No problem. Take care.

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“Leveling Up: Becoming a Manager of Managers” — Girl Geek X Elevate (Video + Transcript)

Transcript of Elevate 2020 Session

Gretchen DeKnikker: The inspiration for this panel was, you think it’s really, really hard becoming a manager until you become a manager of managers, and you don’t realize it’s just like another rung on the ladder. It’s like a whole different skill set and you’re lost, and it’s super hard, and so because we have such an amazing senior audience tuned in today, I thought this would be a perfect topic. And then, thanks to these wonderful ladies, we were able to put together the perfect panel, also.

Gretchen DeKnikker: So we have Ines Thornburg, who’s the Area Vice President of Splunk, works in their customer success arm. Arquay Harris is the Senior Director of Engineering at Slack. She actually got her intro at Slack through a Girl Geek dinner, so you should be coming to those dinners, because if you want to be Arquay, and don’t we all, you should do that. And then Bora Chung, who’s the Senior Vice President of Product Management at Bill.com. So, they’ve all worked at different sized companies. They’re at different sized companies now, so they have all of this amazing perspective. Bora’s going to come from product and Arquay’s going to come from engineering and Ines is going to come from customer success, and it’s going to be amazing, and all I have to do is basically sit back and let these women talk.

Gretchen DeKnikker: So, if we want to do a quick kind of round of intros, and why don’t you start, Arquay? And let us know kind of how many people that you’re managing now and a little bit about how you got where you are.

Arquay Harris: Sure. Hi, I’m Arquay, a senior director of engineering of essentially the growth team here at Slack. My org is about 70 or so people. I manage two teams. One is called customer acquisition and one is called expansion, and essentially they make up the product purchase funnel. How I got to Slack, as mentioned, I went to a Girl Geek dinner. I highly recommend that you go. It’s very rewarding. I’ve been here for about four years. I’ve watched the company grow from a company that was about 500, where engineering was roughly 100 or so, to now engineering is well over 700 and at our largest we were 2,500 people.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Bora?

Bora Chung: Hi everyone, I’m Bora Chung. I am SVP of Bill.com and I lead an organization of about 40 product managers and product designers. Just to give you context of the size of the company, we are about 13 year old company that do workflow automation for SMBs and our revenue’s about, I think last fiscal year was about 110 million. The entire company size is about 550, so product managers and product designers account for about 40 of them. We just went public December of last year so we’re going through a transition of being a private company to public company.

Bora Chung: How I got here, even though I manage both designers and product managers, my own professional heritage is more on the product management side, so I spent nine years out of business school at PayPal, four years at Apple, and then four years at eBay.

Gretchen DeKnikker: The quick unmute is not working. Ines, can you go?

Ines Thornburg: Absolutely. Thank you, Gretchen. So, Ines Thornburg. I am responsible for the Americas portfolio and customers for customer success at Splunk. My team is about 100 people, comprising of customer success managers as well as the renewal function and the renewal team that supports Americas customers. Been here about two years now and my career spans back to a series of different software companies where I started off as a consultant doing implementations, moved into presales, joined Oracle through the acquisition of Hyperion, so I went from a small growing company to a midsize company to a mega company. Was there for a while, learned a lot and then decided to try a venture startup.

Ines Thornburg: So, why I’m at Splunk, the technology’s very relevant in today’s data explosion as well as where we are in our journey in terms of maturity. And so Splunk is going through a pretty massive business transformation, shifting to a SaaS and subscription model, so that’s what really excited me. We’re still what I would consider a medium size company and really on a trajectory of growth, and that’s what I feel like I can make an impact on for our customers.

Gretchen DeKnikker: All right. So, you guys can see … Y’all, I’m trying not to say “you guys”. Y’all can see why I’m so excited about this panel. They have just an amazing set of backgrounds. It’s a completely different skillset, right? Ines, what do you feel like you kind of had to relearn in that very first time that you went from being a manager to managing managers?

Ines Thornburg: Gretchen, for me it was all about how I spent my time, really. And so going from being, as I mentioned, starting off as an individual contributor, doing the work myself, then being able to manage people doing work, then to manage multiple workstreams and priorities and making sure that those managers responsible for different workstreams not only were competent and experts in their field, but then, me balancing my time across the different responsibilities in a way that, frankly, I wasn’t getting too involved, I learned to trust the expertise on my team and learn what was good enough. And frankly, perfection is not always the end goal. We have to continue to progress multiple workstreams at one time in initiatives, and really making sure that no one gets left behind.

Ines Thornburg: And so, me figuring out that right balance between rolling up my sleeves and doing versus allowing people to do and coaching along the way was really that arc that we continue to perfect over time.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Bora, you were within the first 100 employees at PayPal, right?

Bora Chung: That’s right. When I first started, I started out as an MBA summer intern and the company was about 100 people.

Gretchen DeKnikker: What was that journey, along the same vein that I’m assuming it sort of started there where you were drinking from the fire hose?

Bora Chung: Sure, sure. I think the soft skill that I learned during that period was just mental agility. So, there were a lot of ambiguous situations when you’re a fast paced startup with just very few resources. You don’t really have a very well defined job description, so there were lots of ambiguous situations that hit you every day but just figuring out how to be a go-getter and get out of that ambiguity using mental agility was a skillset that I picked up in the early days of my career, and then if I could just connect that with the manager’s manager tradition, when I get to manager and then a manager’s manager, what I had to unlearn a little bit was when do I helicopter out versus when do I helicopter in. There’s absolutely no management course or management book written about how to do it, when to feel it out.

Bora Chung: So I think that’s a basic soft skill that you have to pick up very quickly and I struggled through that a little bit. I’m still learning it, but to me, the biggest difference between a junior employee in a very small startup versus a manager’s manager is learning how to do helicoptering in and helicoptering out at the right moments.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Right. Yeah, I like that analogy. Arquay, what’s a skill that served you really well as a manager and then you kind of had to unlearn?

Arquay Harris: Oh, that I had to unlearn? As an engineer, I got into engineering leadership in the way that most engineering managers get into engineering management which is you’re the most technically proficient person on the team and so your manager says to you, “Have you ever thought about management?” And you’re like, “No, but I’ll try it,” right? And so it’s a really hard transition because … It’s really hard because you know that you’re technically most proficient and so you just want to jump in there and do PR reviews and all of the stuff, and so you have to really make this transition from being able to be the person who was the peer on the team to the person who is the leader on the team.

Arquay Harris: And then when you make the transition from managing individual contributors for people playing bingo to manager, what happens there is you go from this very directive sort of supporting, coaching state of mind to managing to outcomes. So, when you have a person who is also responsible for managing other people on the team, you don’t want a person who is managing or doing things in the way that you would do them. Right? You want them to manage in the way that they do them and the way that feels comfortable for them.

Arquay Harris: And so I would never say to my manager, “Hey, I want you to do this and this is step one, two, three.” It’s like, “This is the outcome. How can I support you to get there?” You have to really trust them to be able to do it. And so the unlearning comes from this thing of wanting to be the person who is the hero, jumps in, saves the day, maybe writes the code, to really growing and empowering that next generation or that next level of leadership.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Yeah, absolutely. Maybe let’s go to Bora. What skills have you gained along the way that you feel like, “If I’d just learned that earlier, it would have been so much less painful?”

Bora Chung: Right, right. I think it’s doing skip level one-on-ones and getting the right communication done in those sessions. So, one mistake I made when I become a manager’s manager was I was just having one-on-ones with my immediate direct reports, but then they also have a set of teams and maybe not as frequent, but making sure that I check in with the team members and the delightful moments are when I hear some of the key themes and strategies being played back, I think that’s when things are going well. When you completely hear game of telephone being played and have a disconnected kind of direction and alignment, that’s when you know that things are not going well, so I think one thing that I recommend, and is a pretty tactical thing that you could easily do is maybe a little bit less frequent but do a skill level one-on-one check in and I think that I didn’t realize early enough but I picked it up and that has been serving me greatly.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Yeah, I’m taking that one back with me for sure. How about you, Ines?

Ines Thornburg: I think the one thing as you grow in your career and you become more visible, have more responsibilities, the one thing that I’ve learned is that when you speak or when you say something, the impact of what you’re saying really is that much stronger, that much more gospel, so to speak, and when you’re facilitating a meeting or when you’re communicating, you have to realize that, again, as your responsibility grows, is that people really listen. So you have to be careful, so if you’re trying to facilitate a brainstorming, for example, what I’ve learned is, facilitate the dialogue, get the conversation going, but I reserve what my opinion is until the end, because I don’t want everybody to just think that my opinion is the right one, because it’s certainly not. That’s why I bring together, and when I’m doing hiring, I always try to look for complementary skills.

Ines Thornburg: So I’ve learned to really be cautious about what I say and when I say it and to whom I say it, because I realize that, frankly, what I’m saying does affect and impact a lot of the folks on the team.

Gretchen DeKnikker: How about you, Arquay?

Arquay Harris: Things I wish I could have learned earlier?

Gretchen DeKnikker: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Arquay Harris: This is a thing that I say all the time, which is … I say, “Be friendly, not friends.” If my team’s watching, they’re probably laughing about this because I say this a lot and it’s basically very early on in my career when I made that transition to manager, these people are your best friends. You hang out with them every night and when you are friends with the people who report to you, you cannot be impartial, right? You can’t say to your best friend, “You really screwed up on that thing. I need you to work harder in this area.” It can be really awkward.

Arquay Harris: And so what I really learned later in my career was how to set boundaries, because I do you a disservice if I’m not able to give you that really constructive and helpful feedback and help you grow. And that doesn’t mean that you have to be this monster who’s just a robot, but boundaries are really, really important and I just wish I’d learned that earlier.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Yeah, definitely. Definitely. You’d kind of talked a little bit before about another skill, about learning to delegate, and you had this example of quadrants.

Arquay Harris: Yeah. I kind of dug into that a little bit earlier. I wish I could claim credit but it’s essentially situational leadership. You can google it. There’s lots of videos on YouTube about it, but it’s basically about how when you are leading a large organization, or any organization, what a lot of managers will do is they will try to bend the team to the way that they lead. “I’m really introverted” or, “I’m super extroverted” or whatever it is, like the people need to fit into what I expect of them, but really, what a really good leader should do is you should make your management style situational to the person and to the stage that they are in their career.

Arquay Harris: And so it really just goes into this first quadrant, which is directive, which you might do to a more junior person. You might say, “Bora, I need you to log into this machine, do this work,” and then you move up into coaching, which is you have a little bit more skill and it’s like, “All right, you kind of know what you’re doing. How can I coach you through it?” Onto supporting, which is, “You know what you’re doing. How can I support you? How can I help you get to that next level?” And then the final magic kind of golden quadrant is delegation, and that’s just, “I don’t even really need to tell you what to do. You probably are bringing me the problem, telling me what it is that needs to be solved.”

Arquay Harris: And I think the thing that’s really interesting is it’s not really a straight line. You might kind of hover, depending upon your skillset, maybe in communication you’re in full on delegation mode but at technical proficiency maybe you need a little bit more support, and so I think that when I’m managing managers, I really try to think about it in that way, about what are the strengths and how do I help really, really uplift a person’s strengths and how do I help them really either correct for or counterbalance any weaknesses that they may have?

Gretchen DeKnikker: That is a good segue. Hiring is so different. All the skills that you learn to vet people when you’re a manager, and you’re just vetting them for do they have the skillset to do this role and do I think they’ll be the right fit with this team? But when you start hiring managers, what’s your suggestion there? Where do we start, Ines?

Ines Thornburg: One of the best practices that we have, and we really are very firm about it at Splunk, is at any role at this point, we have a panel. We have a select group of people that bring different questions to the table to assess skill. So, for example, we may have someone assessing the technical skill, we may have someone assessing behavioral type skills, situational skills, collaboration skills, et cetera. I always like to make sure I speak to the finalists.

Ines Thornburg: I like to know every single person on my team, a little bit about them, and really I have two primary questions that I’ve always asked as a leader doing hiring through every company I’ve been at, which are, number one, why am I talking to you today about this role, whatever the role is? Because what I’m looking for in that question is really what is their career journey? Why does this particular role fit into their long term career journey? I’m not looking for someone that’s just applying for a job because they may have seen something. I want somebody who’s put thought into how this role is going to help them along their long term career journey.

Ines Thornburg: Second, why Splunk or why whatever company? And to me, that shows me they’ve done their homework, they have a passion about what the company is we’re trying to achieve and we can have a dialogue. And from there, those two questions really help me take it on to the next level conversation, which is something that, frankly, how I always start those … And I’m not looking for skill, I’m not looking for technical proficiency. I’m looking for the long term drivers that really want that person to be on my team.

Gretchen DeKnikker: So, Bora, you’re at a company that’s one sixth the size of Splunk, so you might not quite have all the bells and whistles that Ines has at her disposal, so what is your process and how is it different?

Bora Chung: We start with the fact that interview is definitely a two-way street. We want to make sure that we evaluate the candidates, but candidate’s evaluating us, so we try to actually put an interview panel together that represents cross functional relationships, because teamwork, team play is an important element of culture at Bill.com, so we make sure that the candidate experiences the characters and the types of people that he or she will be working with. So, I think that’s one.

Bora Chung: The other piece is I think we have different seniority levels represented in the interview panel as well, so that I think some of the maybe early career folks could really test out the technical chops. You know, is this person a great designer? Is this person a great engineer? And then maybe someone like me could maybe test a little bit more about their soft skills, right? Can you actually influence the cross functional teams? Are you going to think more for the company versus your own output versus your own team’s output?

Bora Chung: So, I think we have a good balance of technical assessments and culture fit and teamwork elements going on. So I think we could definitely do more in terms of strengthening the recruiting process, but we’ve been hiring a lot of good talents through this.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Arquay, you’re kind of at the midsize between the two, but also, what did you have to change about how you interviewed? What skills did you need? What muscle did you need to build to be able to vet people to be managers as well as you did for ICs?

Arquay Harris: Having worked at very, very large companies where you have an interview process that is pretty set in stone and pretty precise, the cool thing about working at a hyper growth company like Slack is that I had the opportunity to really be involved in crafting that interview process and seeing it evolve over time, and we, right now, have a pretty defined rubric where we have pretty set slots where you’re judging people on things like teamwork and collaboration, ability to execute, strategy, and then we try to make it so that we have really diverse panels that are representative of gender and race and tenure and that type of thing.

Arquay Harris: But I think that the difference between evaluating an IC versus a manager is that to a certain extent when you’re judging an IC, there is the work product. That can be a really good weeding out factor, because if you do a coding exercise or you do … even when you come in and you’re doing white boarding exercises, not necessarily algorithms but something that shows technical proficiency, it’s a little bit easier to see whether or not a person can thrive or not thrive. It’s not perfect, but you have more signal, right?

Arquay Harris: When you’re evaluating a manager, it is, as I was mentioning, a lot more about the soft skills, and so you’re really trying to see if given certain scenarios, how they can fit and I think that it really does depend on your particular company and size and what you’re looking for, and so, for example, in those early days of Slack, one of the things that was really important was hiring managers who had experience or aptitude for scaling teams.

Arquay Harris: Because recruiting, if your engineering org is like 50 people or 100 people and we’re trying to grow to 7, 800 within a couple years, recruiting is going to be a very big part of it and do you understand to build strong relationships with recruiting? Do you understand how to really evaluate your pipeline? Fill gaps on your team? And so it’s these types of questions that we’re really looking for.

Arquay Harris: In terms of making it so that it’s a really fair and consistent process, we really make sure that we try to have our interviewers stick to the rubric, look to the way that people are answering the questions and that it’s not just subjective, like, “Oh, they’d be cool to hang out with,” kind of thing. We like to make it so that there’s some fairness and consistency built into the process.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Yeah, absolutely. You got me thinking, also, I think some folks really hesitate to hire that person with way more experience, right? Especially if you’re at the hyper growth company, because if you’re in a senior role at the hyper growth company, you’re gaining the skills at a rate that does not keep up. You might have perfected your job yesterday and you might be finally good at it, but the next day, it’s a different job and you’re not good anymore, and you’re constantly going. So how do you sort of fight that … I think some people get really nervous about, “I need to hire someone who knows what it looks like when we get there,” but that’s also a person that may know a lot more than you do, and I think people hesitate with that. How do you advise people to work with that?

Arquay Harris: Yeah, when I started at the company, my team was two people. Literally two people. And that was fine. I was like, “All right, let’s roll up the sleeves, let’s get it done,” but I was really excited about working for this particular company at that time and I think … You can suss a little bit of that out in the interview. If you’re interviewing someone and they haven’t done that exact thing and they can really describe to your their approach or their philosophy, what I really look for is, is this person a structured thinker? Do they have best practices or some kind of toolkit or some sort of methodology in the way that they approach leadership?

Arquay Harris: Because part of it is what you just said. It’s all intangible. The ambiguity is so high at a company like this, that I think understanding what type of leader you are and what you can contribute, that’s way more important than a very specific checklist of skills, because like you said, tomorrow it’s going to be different anyway.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Bora, you were nodding your head on that.

Bora Chung: Yeah, I was thinking about the early part of my career when you asked that question. I think when I was more junior in the early part of my career, I was thinking that I should be the smartest person if I’m the manager, and I was somewhat reluctant and afraid of hiring people smarter than you … smarter than myself, rather, but what I am realizing is that it’s absolutely cool to hire people smarter than me. It actually elevates the team. It improves the quality of the thinking and ultimately what we deliver to our customers is going to be much stronger. So I think I had to shed that a little bit of early stage career insecurity to really put together a strong team, so I think that was one.

Bora Chung: And then I think it goes back to one of the comments that Ines made earlier. I don’t have to be the perfectionist that knows all the answers. Sometimes a great value as a manager or manager’s manager comes from asking the right question, maybe asking the powerful question that nobody else is asking, because they are afraid or there’s a big elephant in the room. So I think a lot of wisdom I gained over the years is that it’s awesome to have team members that are smarter than you. They elevate you and your team and then, two, is you don’t have to have all the answers. Sometimes asking the powerful question could really be helpful as a manager or manager’s manager.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Absolutely. So, Ines, you have this huge organization. What do you have to add in? You have 400 people, right? Or something. It’s a crazy number.

Ines Thornburg: At Splunk, my team’s about 100 but in other jobs and other companies, it’s certainly been a lot larger, and that’s the thing. As our responsibility grows, you’ll have lots of different experts on your team in different disciplines, different business units, what have you, and it’s impossible just to chime in with Bora and Arquay. You can’t be the expert. It’s just physically impossible as your organization grows, and so what you do need to do is to be really, really comfortable working with these teams of experts in helping them accomplish their mission. And so, as a leader, really, my value to my team is making sure that we’re working towards the same goals and cascading those company goals down. Everybody understands those goals, that we’re progressing on those goals and frankly that we’re communicating our progress effectively in working together.

Ines Thornburg: Splunk’s a very technical company, like all these others, and am I technical? No, but I have a business degree and frankly we’re running a business at Splunk, and so my goal is to make sure that from a customer perspective, that those customers are getting value out of our technology so that they renew and we grow as an organization. And so, my value to my team is different than the value of them to our company and that’s what we have to make sure that we’re always balanced on so that together the team is stronger. So, that’s the way I think about it.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Okay. Time is going way too fast. We’re going to do one more question and then I see that we have some amazing, amazing questions in the Q and A also. So, your most cringe-worthy and your most exciting moments when you first made this transition, so that everyone can sort of go along with you. I can go first. My most cringe-worthy was like what Bora said. I thought I needed to know everything and I was so embarrassed when I didn’t know what was going on, and it took me a while to realize I’m just air traffic controller and actually the less information I have on a tactical level, the less opportunity I have to screw things up and I should just let the expert be the expert.

Gretchen DeKnikker: And then my most amazing one was when I walked in, I was planning this 10,000 person conference and there were hundreds of people setting up all of these little tiny details that we’d spent a year making and I knew the names of like six people that I could see at any given moment and I was like, “Okay, this is working. They have this. They’ve got it. I don’t even need to know what’s going on right now. This is amazing.” So, why don’t you kick us off, Arquay?

Arquay Harris: Cringe-worthy is definitely bad hires. Unlike hiring a bad IC hire, the blast radius is just so large when you have a bad management hire and it could affect the careers for quarters and quarters of the people in the team. Most amazing moment is really fulfilling and rewarding to see people grow, to see them go from kind of more junior manager to senior manager to director, to see them be able to come into their own as a manager, develop their own styles, and yeah, that’s probably the best thing.

Gretchen DeKnikker: How about you, Ines?

Ines Thornburg: Most cringe-worthy is when I feel like I’ve not done enough preparations and prepared my team, and so specifically, again, we’re all in some sort of technical discipline. Learning the technical skills, I think, is one aspect of the job, but let’s not forget about the soft skills. And so Arquay mentioned soft skills and looking at those in hiring, but also continuing to help the teams augment them. So that means communication skills, that means collaboration, meeting facilitation. It means executive presence, making sure that when you’re representing your company or your team, that you do it in such a way that you’re proud of that. So, when I know I haven’t prepared my team and I see a train wreck about to happen, that’s when I’m like … That’s the cringe-worthy.

Ines Thornburg: The most proud, frankly, Splunk just had our sales kickoff and we’ve been working really hard as a customer success organization over the past couple years to get to a point where we’re really ready to support almost 20,000 customers globally and the team recognition and what I saw … what my executives and the company recognized on the customer success team was just extremely rewarding to see the people on my team winning awards, being part of large contributions to customers, and frankly it just made me really warm and proud inside.

Gretchen DeKnikker: That’s awesome. All right, Bora.

Bora Chung: So, cringing moments. When you become a manager’s manager, naturally a lot more escalations hit your desk and escalations could stem from conflicts between people or conflicts between departments or sometimes goals are not aligned. Just having to resolve conflicts on behalf of the team, sometimes you’re successful, sometimes you are not so successful and disappoint the teams. So I think the escalation handling and conflict resolution, I think I had some rough spots at the beginning of my career, so I think that’s the cringe moments. The most proud moments, there are times that when you go on an extended vacation or extended business trip, you come back and your boss is basically telling you that, “Oh my God, Bora, your team was perfect. I didn’t even know that you were out of the office.” And at the beginning, again, you’re like, “Does that mean that I’m not adding any value? Did you not know that I was out of office?”

Bora Chung: Sometimes I would wish that some crisis would happen just so that they know that I was absent, but I think the real truth is that that means that you have a fantastic bench and you have a great top talent manager. So, my most proud moment is when I’m absent on a sabbatical or vacation and then the team doesn’t even notice that. I think that’s the ultimate success of coaching and grooming the right team.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Absolutely, yeah. Okay, so we have a ton of questions. The first one, and we’re going in order of their voting, as women of color, have you experienced any difficulty or veiled biases while managing male coworkers? What did you do to handle that situation? So, Arquay, Bora?

Arquay Harris: Sure, I’ll just jump in. I think one of the hardest things about being a woman, especially a woman of color, is just the big issue of low expectation. What happens to me a lot in particular is people think that I’m not technical. I’ve had interns be like, “Do you code?” Which is a ridiculous question that you probably never ask a male who’s a director of engineering. And so I think, yeah, you face that a lot and it’s really unfortunate. On the bright side, I think things are changing, particularly as we get more and more women in leadership positions, I think just having different voices in the room is really contributing to the conversation.

Bora Chung: For me, the usual stereotype where sometimes the hardship is, especially as an Asian woman, getting stereotyped into a bucket of, “Oh, you must be quiet, you must be an introvert,” so I think this is why I spent extra energy on developing what we usually call the executive presence and executive gravitas, because especially when you become a manager of manager, it’s not just your personal brand and personal reputation. It’s your team’s effectiveness that you have to be responsible for. So, I think those have been some tough spots, but I think I try to overcome it by being more vocal and representing the team more actively.

Ines Thornburg: Gretchen, I think you’re muted.

Gretchen DeKnikker: I need to unmute. Okay. Bora, this one’s for you. What are the things that you discuss during your skip level one-on-one? I’m thinking of setting up a skip level one-on-one with my skip level manager but I don’t know what we should discuss during those meetings.

Bora Chung: Right, right. So, I think it starts with just a very broad question of how are things going? And the other kind of check in is that, is there a certain expectation? So I try to also let the manager in the middle know that we are having the skip level. So I think the worst outcome is that if the manager in the middle gets alienated in this conversation, so I don’t really have an agenda. I think just like our services are getting more and more personalized, I think the skip level one-on-ones need to get personalized. So with some folks, I talk about just their career aspirations. With some folks, since I’m one level away, they could maybe ask more questions about the big picture strategy and whatnot, so it’s a little bit different, but the two things that I just always do is I let the team member drive the agenda. I just start by just checking in on overall things and I make sure that the manager in the middle is aware of the fact that we are having this conversation, and we’re not breaching confidentiality.

Bora Chung: There are some key things that I think the manager in the middle should know. I also make it pretty obvious and public as well.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Ines, do you do skip level?

Ines Thornburg: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I even do double skips. Like I said, I want to be the finalist on all interviews because I really take pride in knowing people. One of the things, as a leader of a large organization, that I like to understand is, is career aspirations, as Bora mentioned, because honestly this is where we have a much larger purview of opportunity as a leader, and frankly if I have a conversation with someone and I understand really they want to be in another part of the organization at some point in the future, if I see that connection and see that match, I would love to make that match and keep that talent within my company rather than seeing people leave and take all that wonderful knowledge that we have, and great talent, to another company, frankly.

Ines Thornburg: So, I do that a lot and, frankly, when I’m looking … I don’t want people leaving my organization necessarily but at the same time, if we can promote from within and give people more opportunity within our organization, it just makes … frankly, people appreciate that and I love a team that culturally has a strong morale and knows that we’ve got each other’s backs.

Gretchen DeKnikker: I think this one’s for everyone, so we’ll have Arquay kick us off. What are the top traits and qualities you recommend focusing on for someone looking to get into a management role?

Arquay Harris: Adaptability for sure, because the thing about being an IC is that it’s a pretty defined trajectory to go from associate to engineer to senior to staff to senior staff, right? You might not know exactly what it is but there are some … some part of it’s mapped out. It’s a little bit more opaque when you’re talking about leadership because in any given moment you could have to deal with people’s emotions and you have to coach and you have to support and you have to discipline and you have to … It’s just all of these things that you have to do, and so you have to take, like we say, growth mindset. You have to be willing to iterate and change. So if you have these kind of qualities …

Arquay Harris: If you’re a person who’s really rigid and like things just so, you maybe want to not consider … Consider something else.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Or find people that are just like you.

Arquay Harris: Or that.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Yeah. How about you, Bora?

Bora Chung: I would say maybe two shifts and mixes, right? One is if ICs generally think about execution for the most part, I would say you have to start to blend in execution as well as strategic thinking, right? So I think that’s maybe the first shift. The second one is just how you think about time horizons, so let me maybe take product development as an example. Maybe when you’re an IC, you’re thinking mostly about next release, the release after that, but when you eventually become a manager, you think about maybe an annual roadmap or like a three year vision. I think those are maybe the difference in time horizon of your thinking, and there’s not a right or wrong. I think there need to be different parts of thinkers. Some people need to execute, some people need to think strategy, some people need to think next release, some people need to think about the three year vision, but I think those are some of the shifts that you start to … you need to have to transition into a managerial role.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Ines?

Ines Thornburg: Yeah, in addition … I mean, the adaptability is huge, and Bora’s comments, I think, were spot on. I will add onto those, communication, and, frankly, as you think about just rallying a team from what they’re doing at a macro level down to the micro, everyone needs to have a proper communication cadence and understand where we’re all marching toward. So, I think a lot about communication and different ways that we communicate, whether it’s quarterly all-hands calls, weekly cadence calls, the one-on-ones, the skip levels, Slack, we have Slack channels, we have email … I mean, we communicate in lots of different ways.

Ines Thornburg: We actually have spent the starting part of our year thinking about all the different communication … You know, the different communication means and important forums that we need to do to make sure, frankly, everyone is marching in line. At these high growth companies, things are moving so fast and, frankly, as a leader, we have to make sure that everyone is working towards the same goal. So, tops down, bottoms up, communication to me is super, super important and sometimes we just don’t think about it enough. So that’s one that I’ll add on.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Yeah, or the mindset that meetings are a waste of time. Meetings are your lifeblood when you get to a certain level. If you spent your whole day in meetings, unless they were just … you’re not careful with your time, if you spent your whole day in meetings, you were doing your job all day, and I think that’s a mindset thing that a lot of people really struggle with changing.

Ines Thornburg: Yep, agreed.

Gretchen DeKnikker: So, next question, I think this would be for Arquay. In engineering, what can we do as an organization to encourage more women in manager of managers positions? Was there anything specific that helped you get to where you are in your career and that is Katie coming from the Scotland, UK today so [crosstalk]

Arquay Harris: Thanks for joining. Part of it is basically making sure that there’s some sort of support system at your company and paying it forward and being that person who can encourage. So, for example, one of the things that I do at my company is every week I have office hours and I post it, and the women’s ERG … bingo … So I’ll post it in certain channels and get people to sign up and try to be mentor and support system when I can.

Arquay Harris: And then the other thing is, I think, really just having … When I was coming up, there weren’t a lot of people who look like me who did the job that I do, and so it just wasn’t a thing that I could even see myself doing. The idea of a CTO was Andy Grove, right? With the khaki shirt … I mean, a blue shirt and khaki pants, and so that’s part of it too. Just making yourself aware and available and aware to other people within engineering and letting people know that, hey, you are a source of information.

Arquay Harris: And then sponsorship is a big thing that people are doing lately. If there’s someone that you see who you think has potential, maybe encourage them, and if I had people on my team who show interest in management, maybe try giving them some tasks. Like, “Hey, maybe try managing this intern for a summer and seeing how it goes, or maybe you might want to run the sprint meeting.” That kind of thing. Really just give them these little nuggets to see if they have the aptitude and really kind of understand what management is.

Gretchen DeKnikker: I can’t believe we’re already at time, but I just want to thank you on behalf of everyone who’s tuned in right now because you guys just gave them most amazing session. So thank you again to Arquay, Ines, and Bora, and we will be back in just a moment.

Ines Thornburg: Thank you all.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Bye.

Posted on

“The Next Million” — Girl Geek X Elevate (Video + Transcript)

Transcript of Elevate 2020 Session

Rachel Jones: All right. So we’re going to move on to our next panel, but first some housekeeping. So, we are recording all of these sessions. They’ll be available on YouTube in just a couple weeks. If you’re hosting a watch party, we want to see. So please share, tag us on Instagram, use the hashtag Girl Geek X, and remember to submit your questions in the Q&A box and upvote your favorites. Right. So a background check typically excludes people, but at Checkr, a high level goal of theirs is actually to get one million more people into the workforce. So this group of Checkr girl geeks will share how working at a mission driven company is core to engineering, product, and design. So I’m going to hand it over to the moderator of our panel, Krista. So Krista is an engineering manager at Checkr. So, Krista, take it away.

Krista Moroder: Thank you. Hi everyone. So as you mentioned, one of our goals is to bring people back into the workforce. So a quick background on Checkr, we are an API first background-check company that was started about six years ago, went through Y Combinator back in 2014, and since then I have taken on the background check industry and worked with a lot of on-demand startups as well as enterprise companies. And so I joined about nine months ago, and one of the things I was most impressed with when I joined was the big focus on mission at the company.

Krista Moroder: And so the goal is not just to help people be more efficient in hiring, but also to make sure people aren’t losing opportunities because of how the background-check industry has historically worked. And so in this talk, we’re going to talk to a few people on our team, in product and engineering and design, about what they do every day and how that’s impacting our mission. So I’ll start before handing it over. As mentioned, I’m an engineering manager and before that I’ve had a few careers, software engineer. I started a company at one point and I also spent a decade in education, including as a high school English teacher. So I’ll hand it off over to Melanie.

Melanie Cernak: Hi. I’m Melanie. I’m a product designer here at Checkr and I care a lot about social impact in criminal justice reform. I believe that everyone has the right to work and create a viable living and that there’s truly a right position for everyone. Prior to Checkr, I was at a different background check company where I realized how antiquated the industry is and how there’s these really deeply entrenched norms. And that’s I came excited about Checkr. I feel like it’s really shaking things up and a key progressive player in this space, working to expand employment opportunities for people with conviction histories.

Jess Zhang: Hi, I’m Jess. I’m an engineering manager in Checkr. I joined Checkr about four months ago. And what impresses me is Checkr is with our technology, we disrupted– The industry is so–20 years behind the modern era. And another thing impress me was the Checkr’s mission. For me, the first impression of background check is just to block people. To check your background, you have everything you said you have. I never thought of the other side as we want to actually get more people into the workforce and how if we do things too strictly, we’re actually not doing anybody a favor. And I’m very glad to join the risk team. And now that my team and I have a chance to detecting fraud and help to make the workplace a fairer place for everyone.

Michelle He: Hi. My name is Michelle. I’m an engineer on the motor vehicle report team at Checkr. I actually have a background in structural engineering and architecture. I transitioned into tech about four years ago and now I’m with Checkr for about four months. Personally, I’m very interested in use of technology to improve efficiency, solve problems at scale. And as a society, we have seen a lot tremendous progress with what technology has brought today. And, personally, I’m very fascinated by the way we discovering new ways we can be more productive and increase efficiency and reduce human errors. So the reason why I joined Checkr is that the opportunity to help shape the future of an industry that is stuck in the very long distance past. And it hasn’t seen a lot of innovations recently, and Checkr is actually a company that has a very strong north-star mission to help people get work, to guide its own growth, and it has a strong culture of nurturing individual growth. And, lastly, the office is lovely and every day it provides healthy lunch and snacks. That’s the last reason I joined.

Vivian Chen: Hi. I’m also a software engineer on the motor vehicle report team. And I also really like improving efficiency through the use of technology. I think it’s extremely gratifying to build practical solutions to make people’s lives a little bit easier to solving real-world problems. There are two main reasons why I decided to join Checkr. First one was, it was important for me to find a mission-driven company when I was switching jobs. I saw an article about how Checkr was making the initiative to be more inclusive of people who are formerly incarcerated and I thought that was really cool. Second, Checkr provides a lot of opportunities to work on interesting engineering problems. Checkr’s a operations-heavy company by virtue of being in the background-check industry and the amount of business logic required for completing background checks requires a lot of creative engineering solutions.

Krista Moroder: Thank you. Yeah. So let’s get into it. The whole mission of Checkr is very big and it’s abstract, but the actual day-to-day nature is a little more difficult. There’s a lot of system complexity in trying to actually go through the workflow of a background check. And so I’m curious, and maybe we can start with Jess, what does that look like in your role every day? And I know that Vivian and Michelle and I, being on the same team, we joke all the time about how we feel like philosophers every day. So from your perspective, what does that look like in the fraud-detection world?

Michelle He: I think you were muted, Jess.

Jess Zhang: Sorry. Thank you, Krista. This is a great question. I start smiling because it’s exactly what my day looks like as well. So on the fraud team, basically our mission is to detecting fraudulent identities. People using people, selling, they sometimes they create account and then they sell this to, their illegitimate accounts, to people who wouldn’t have, or to people who have bad intentions. There are people who fake out all sorts of documents identities. So our job is to block those people, but with Checkr’s mission will encourage me and challenge me to think outside the box, think of how I can not… It’s easy just to block people out, but it’s harder to how to block only the people who’s truly a fraud out and to keep the people who maybe made a mistakes, maybe have typos and have a mistake in their identities, and in their IDs, in their documents, how to keep those people in.

Jess Zhang: So that challenges me every day to think creative solutions. And with this, I also believe that the solution we bring to the market will be completely different from the companies who don’t think about this a daily basis. In the long term, we have a lot of questions to answer. Who are we blocking? And really what is our cases of fraud? With that, right-and-wrong questions answered? Is our data biased? Is our judgment, decision-making biased? How do we know? We have so much data to collect and to analysis and to build a [inaudible]. So these are very exciting and big challenges ahead of us. And it makes me excited every day.

Krista Moroder: Thank you. Michelle, you are going on support next week for our team, so tell us a little bit about what that looks like.

Michelle He: Yeah. So our company is a API-first service. So on a yearly basis, we process millions of reports and through all this process, unfortunately, there are some stuck reports. So, once in a while, because of a system can take care of some [inaudible] edge cases, we end up with these reports [inaudible], and they will end up being a support ticket coming to engineering’s desk. So as engineers, we actually look into these reports and figure out the reason why they were stuck and we actually have the power to grant or delay someone’s permission to get a job. So I think that’s a very powerful thought and that makes our support tasks even more meaningful. And at a granular level, for long term planning, I think because Checkr has such a strong mission that actually guides our decision making on how to invest resources and prioritize in our roadmaps on a quarterly basis. So, for example, next quarter, it’s very easy for us to come to a conclusion that data accuracy is our first priority because of our mission.

Krista Moroder: Awesome. Yeah. And Vivian, do you want to talk a little bit more about that as well? I know that you’re dealing with a lot of the same support issues as Michelle, but also with data accuracy, I know you’ve been very involved with that this quarter, especially.

Vivian Chen: Yeah. There’s a lot of coordination involved between these various entities in the life cycle of a background-check report. And so we have to make sure that as we’re passing this along, that we are parsing the information correctly, displaying it correctly. And to be more concrete, some of these entities include the data furnisher, which is where we get the information about the candidate. This could be information such as education verification, employment verification, and motor vehicle records. The customer who is the company that is actually requesting the background check and the candidate experience team who interfaces with the candidate and helps resolve any issues that come up during the process. As engineers, we have be cognizant of how our decisions are impacting the background-check life cycle and ensure that whatever we’re building is in the best interest of the candidate. And we have to avoid any mistakes that would delay a candidate from starting their job, therefore negatively impacting their livelihood.

Krista Moroder: Yeah. Thank you for sharing all that. That’s really useful to think about all these different things. When I was first joining Checkr, I remember there was this aha moment where I realized that at a high level, we’re doing background checks, at the actual deep level, we’re trying to help clean up this awful data interoperability problem across every single court system in the U.S. Because every single state sends data differently, maps it differently, uses different codes. And so, as we think about this giant data problem, moving to all these different people we have to work with, Melanie, I am super curious what you have to say about how you think about all of these different personas, because as a designer, you are the person who often has to think about how the candidate is making their way through this entire life cycle. So love it if you could talk a little bit about that.

Melanie Cernak: Yeah, absolutely. So we just created candidate personas, and candidate, if you’re not familiar, is anyone who’s going through the background check process. So we created three personas. The first is someone who’s been incarcerated for a long period of time and is now reentering society and has done a lot of rehabilitation, really ambitious, made a bunch of positive improvements in their life, but is still facing a lot of bias in the hiring process. The second is someone who has misdemeanors and struggles to understand what’s going to show up on their background check report. And then the third is someone who has a clear record and is applying for jobs.

Melanie Cernak: And so we use these personas in our product development process to really humanize the experience, make sure we know who we’re building for. For example, and I’ll touch on this a little more in depth later, but we’re working on this feature called candidate stories that lets candidate share information directly with employers. And when I was designing this, I was really thinking about the persona of someone who was incarcerated and now reentering society, they’ve done so much positive change, and now we’re giving them the opportunity to actually share that with customers. And so hopefully customers will take in this information and instead of not giving someone a job, reconsider and give them employment.

Krista Moroder: Yeah. I’d love to follow up on some of that. And I’m also curious if you’ve worked directly with some of our fair-chance talent in thinking about some of these designs, because we make it a priority as a company to make sure we’re bringing in people to our organization that have been impacted negatively some way by the court system. So what are some of the favorite features you’ve designed and how have you collaborated with our team to build on these?

Melanie Cernak: Yeah, absolutely. So at Checkr, five percent of our workforce is fair-chance talent. So people who have conviction histories, which is amazing. And they’re so great to work with and especially on our mission-related features, I often have focus groups with them where I can run the current progress and get their feedback on it. We did that with the personas and then two other projects. So the first is around candidate stories, which I mentioned earlier. So this lets candidates share information, either general information about themselves, so they can share evidence of rehabilitation, certain certificates or volunteer work, or they can share context about a specific record and say like, “Hey, here’s what happened in this charge. Here’s why it happened. Here’s what I’ve been doing since. Here’s why it won’t happen again.” And the goal for this is really, again, just to give more information to customers. Have them have the opportunity to give a personal statement and really make it more human.

Melanie Cernak: The second project we’re doing is around expungements and this actually came out of a hackathon project that won first place. If you’re not familiar, an expungement is the process of sealing and removing a criminal charge from someone’s record. And this is especially relevant when you think about marijuana charges. So this showed up in one of the recent democratic debates, that a lot of States have legalized marijuana and people who have low level of marijuana possessions are eligible to get their records expunged. And in certain States is actually mandated that they’re expunged, but this can still take years to process. And in the meantime, people are being denied employment, housing, licensing. So we wanted to take a two-pronged approach to addressing this. The first is just around education of going through and finding who has a potentially expungeable record and educating both the customer and saying, “Hey, look, this record may qualify for expungement. We recommend that you don’t deny employment based on this charge.”

Melanie Cernak: And then the other is telling candidates like, “Hey, did you know that this charge you have on your background check could be expunged?” And then the second part of that, which is a really exciting part is we’re exploring building the nation’s fastest and most affordable expungement service. And this would be an end-to-end experience for candidates. So they’d be able to go in, Checkr would tell them, “Hey, you have a expungeable record.” They could fill out a questionnaire that determines if they’re actually eligible and then they can actually process and pay for their expungement. And then we would contact all the CRAs, it’d be taken care of and removed from their record. So we’re really excited about this. This has the potential to affect hundreds of thousands of people’s lives and really move in the direction of getting a million more people with conviction histories into the workforce.

Krista Moroder: That’s awesome. And I just learned about that second part after talking to you today, which I think is just evidence of how many different things are going on at Checkr. So I guess as a final question, what are some of the other ways that people here have gotten involved in the mission at Checkr? And Jess, you mentioned that you’re going to be doing a prison visit sometime soon.

Jess Zhang: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for mentioning that. I learned that in Checkr will provide entrepreneurship and employment training for people who are currently incarcerated and the day consists of a one-on-one coaching sessions, assisting them with job-related training, as well as the time for connections. So next month, my teammates and I will actually join a prison visit through our partner on Defy Ventures. So it’s part of this program. I’m very excited and my team and I are also participating in many of the volunteering opportunities in the Bay area. We decided to use our team building time slot in a quarter to do volunteering and to give back to society. So we feel like nothing is more fulfilling than working together and make a difference to our society and Checkr provide that opportunity for us.

Krista Moroder: Thank you. Michelle, do you want to jump in and share your upcoming work?

Michelle He: Yeah, actually I am going to be on the same prison visit with Jess. I’m very excited about going on the visit. But also I want to mention, again, that Checkr is actually walking the walk as well. We’re not just talking to talk. We’re also fair-chance employer. And I actually have personally the opportunity to meet some of the fair-chance talents at Checkr, hear their personal stories, and work with them. They’re wonderful people who were just in bad situations, oftentimes not by choice. They’re hardworking people who have overcome many barriers after they have left the system and that I can only myself imagine and they deserve equal opportunity just like any others. So I love the fact that I have firsthand experience working with people who have prior record and they definitely deserve more than what they currently are getting.

Krista Moroder: Thank you. And Melanie, you’re also involved with Bounce Back, right?

Melanie Cernak: Is that correct? Yeah. So Bounce Back is a committee within Checkr. That’s solely focused on the mission and I’m one of the leaders of the Bounce Back product sub-committee. So I really try to champion our mission product initiatives and make sure that our mission is reflected in our product experience. And in addition to that, I volunteer for a reentry simulation, which is really powerful. It’s kind of walking the mile, empathy-building exercise, where you go through what it’s like for someone who’s been incarcerated and is reentering society. And you see all the challenges and barriers that they face. We had a conference in the fall called Checkr Forward, and we held this reentry simulation with all our customers and they were very moved and really excited about fair-chance hiring and how they could get involved afterward.

Krista Moroder: Yeah, and that’s a great example. Someone just posted something in the Q and A about is their business impacted by customers who are very conservative in their views on background checks. And we can talk more to that later, but the reentry simulation, I think, was a perfect example of a lot of people responding afterwards that they didn’t realize how difficult it was for a lot of people and opened up a lot of customers’ eyes to exactly what that experience is like. Anyway, I want to make sure that we save time for questions. So I want to thank everyone for listening.

Krista Moroder: There’s a lot of different technology design challenges we’re working on, but one of my favorite things is always thinking back to the Bill Gates quote about how the first rule of any technology is that when you apply automation to something efficient, it makes it better. If you apply it to something inefficient, it makes it worse. And I always think back to that when we’re talking about background checks, because they have never, ever been clean or efficient or well-run. And so that’s why it’s so important that we’re constantly asking ourselves these bigger questions about what we’re actually trying to do and what our mission is. To make sure that we’re making things actually better and not worse. So, yeah, we’d love to take some questions with any of the few minutes remaining.

Rachel Jones: Great. So I know that you just touched on this question about customers who are very conservative in their views on background checks. So how do you manage that when you’re marketing yourself to potential customers?

Krista Moroder: Actually, let’s see here, who would like… Maybe we can take this from a design perspective? We don’t have anyone on marketing on board, but I know you think about it often from design.

Melanie Cernak: Yeah. So I know that our sales organization like varies the pitch based on what the customer is looking for. And if they’re a little bit more conservative and they’re not initially interested in fair chance, we pitch on kind of our other benefits first. And once we have them on board, it’s more of like, “Hey.” It’s a lot of education. So we have a fair-chance learning center course where it talks about the benefits of fair-chance hiring and how much it can expand your talent pool. And so really it’s getting people on board as customers and then helping educate why fair chance matters. And we do a lot of marketing and contents around that.

Rachel Jones: Great. Anyone else want to weigh in on that or just ways that you present yourselves to customers as a company?

Krista Moroder: Yeah, I guess I can join in on that. So a lot of the features that we have around things like fair chance are optional because there is no requirement for customers to actually use them. But, again, the marketing that we try to do is around why it’s important to think about these things. And I think as people use the product to maybe meet legal requirements, they start to see the benefits of opening up their candidate funnel, especially when a really good candidate applies and there might be something small on the record. That discussion they continuously have with their candidate, doesn’t have to be a one-off conversation. It can be a toggle setting or a shift in functionality that they can open up to many more people like that person who just might not have raised their hands and said, “Take a second look at me.”

Melanie Cernak: Yeah. And we also have certain product features that help promote fair-chance hiring. For example, we have a new product feature called Assess, which you can filter out certain records in advance. So like [inaudible]. Certain things that we shouldn’t be making negative hiring decisions based on. It’s improving operational efficiency just to not have to look at those charges and then helping promote fair-chance talent as a result.

Rachel Jones: Great. Our next question, what are some of the biggest challenges, designing products for customers who are more modern, like tech companies, versus more traditional, like educational or government institutions?

Krista Moroder: Melanie, do you want to take that one as well?

Melanie Cernak: Yeah. I think there’s definitely very different product needs for some of our more traditional staffing companies versus on-demand companies. We started with on-demand, which has traditionally been our bread and butter. And we’re now working on diversifying and understanding a lot more of the needs for these more traditional and conservative companies. I think, yeah, one design challenge is just to be mindful that we’re not building anything for any specific customer. If a customer is large and they’re more conservative, we try not to build just custom solutions for them. We try to find a good middle ground of something that addresses their needs, while still is progressive.

Krista Moroder: Yeah. And I can speak to that a little bit from the motor vehicle side with Michelle and Vivian. We’ve, since the beginning, have done a lot with companies that are doing ride sharing or part of the gig economy, but as we branch into more enterprise-specific customers, a lot of the work we’ve done over the last year has been to support commercial drivers and making sure that we’re meeting regulations that might be required to be a truck driver, for example. And so a lot of the product features have been to make sure that we’re handling all these more specific situations of the types of background checks that you might need for a job that’s not in an office, but might require special certifications and requirements.

Rachel Jones: Great. We have time for one last question. So are there any industries that fair-chance employees struggle getting into and do you offer any training or help getting training?

Melanie Cernak: Yeah, so we offer a lot of resources and are partnered with a lot of organizations that do training and help like interview skills for people who are reentering society, in general, like professional and skills trainings. And then I think we also give recommendations of places that are fair-chance friendly and try to guide people who write in through our Bounce Back website. We give like individual feedback of where might be good for them to look based on their report.

Krista Moroder: Yeah. And there’s a lot of information on that if you go to our website. I think it’s bounceback.checkr.com but there’s a lot of resources there for different customers or just anyone to learn more about ways to get back into the workforce and support people who are in that situation.

Rachel Jones: All right. Great. Thank you so much, ladies.

Melanie Cernak: Awesome. Thank you.

Michelle He: Thank you for having us.

Krista Moroder: Thank you for inviting us.

Vivian Chen: Thank you.