Sukrutha Bhadouria: We have our next speaker, Kellee. She’s the Director of Client Success at Affirm. Before Affirm, she spent seven years at LinkedIn leading sales and marketing. Kellee has had a range of financial leadership positions, including CFO for africa.com and Lead Financial Manager for a food sustainability startup. We always meet colleagues looking for their next opportunity internally or externally. So this talk is perfect for us. Welcome, Kellee.
Kellee Van Horne: Thank you so much. I’m so happy to be here with all these amazing women on International Women’s Day. I’m going to share my screen and you guys can let me know if you do not see it. Otherwise, I’ll get started. So this talk today is focused on one of my most passionate subjects: how do you accelerate your career? How do you really get work that matters to you and that you think makes an impact?
Kellee Van Horne: And so today, I’m going to talk through some of the things that I focus on when I’m managing my career and the things that I always tell other women when I’m giving them mentorship and advice. So I just got an introduction. I’ll do a quick one, again. Director of Client Success at Affirm. I’ve spent 18 years in sales, marketing, tech, and financial services. And in my free time, I’m the mom of three lovely, fun, and energetic children. And so you can usually find me building a fort on the weekend when I’m not working.
Kellee Van Horne: Like I said, I have a lot of career conversations. I love having career conversations with people, both because I know it’s so important to how you see yourself and also how you think about how you want to make your way in the world. And one of the things that always comes back when we start talking about career conversations are what are the right questions to ask when you’re considering a new opportunity? And for me, it really boils down to three main focus areas.
Kellee Van Horne: One, who? Two, why me? And three, what next? And so I’ll talk about why these things are important and why I ask these questions. But before I go into that, I wanted to spend a little bit of time on why even asking these questions in the first place is really important. We’re obviously seeing a lot of focus on equity and particularly gender equity in the workplace. And we’ve started to see some progress at the top.
Kellee Van Horne: If you look at the Women in the Workplace study by McKinsey, we’re seeing that SVPs have increased from 23% to 28% representation of women. And in the C-Suite, we’re seeing about 17%… Sorry, 21% up from 17% of women are in the C-Suite now but there’s really a broken ladder. And this primarily happens in your entry-level careers, right when you’re going from individual contributor to manager, where we’re seeing about 100 men promoted for every 85 women to an entry-level manager position.
Kellee Van Horne: And so what continues to happen is that these promotions continue to accelerate and you’ll end up with a distribution where your management organization will be 62% men and 38% women. And I am a person that loves justice and I love fairness. And that doesn’t sound just and that doesn’t sound fair when we have 50% of our U.S. population is women. And so how do we think about addressing this inequity in the work that we do?
Kellee Van Horne: The other thing I’ll mention is that COVID is really widening the gap that we’re seeing in terms of women’s representation in the workplace, particularly in leadership, where one in four women have expressed interest in either downshifting or exiting the workplace because of the additional responsibilities that’s placed on them for COVID either because of childcare or because of elder care.
Kellee Van Horne: And so it’s really, really critical for everyone in this room to think about as you’re thinking about your career, how can I create a support system around myself? How can I create a sustainable career working with people that really believe in me and who think my work matters so that it can help you to retain yourself essentially in the workplace? Because it’s not easy, right? There’s a lot of things that are stacked against you from a statistical perspective. And so what can you do personally to accelerate your own personal experience?
Kellee Van Horne: And so I always start with who? I’ll give you guys a quick story. So I was working at LinkedIn in the summer of 2015, and I got called into a conference room by my HRBP, which is never usually a great conversation. And the nuts and bolts of it was I was losing my team. My scope and responsibility was being significantly downsized. And I basically had the choice of taking this new role, or looking for another role internally, or taking a severance package. This was challenging because I had no boss for the past three months. I’d been reporting ostensibly to another leader. But that person really didn’t have any responsibility for me and didn’t really spend a lot of time coaching or understanding the work that I was doing. I was also about six months pregnant at the time with my first child. And so I was feeling particularly vulnerable in that moment, just knowing that I had to make a very quick decision around choosing a job that I didn’t want and wasn’t excited about.
Kellee Van Horne: Taking a severance package that would end right before I delivered my very first baby, or finding a new job in a couple of months and hoping that someone’s going to take a chance on me to hire me and then leave my head open, because they lose that head count when they hire me while I’m out on maternity leave for five or six months. It was a very hard time and probably one of the lowest points in my entire career if I’m being honest. But what I ended up doing was I hustled. I spent a lot of time understanding the job opportunities that were around me. And I ended up deciding to not go for the job that would be closest to the experience that I had last time. But I ended up trying to choose a role based on the person that I would be reporting to. So I found a role that was reporting to a woman that I’d known as a colleague at my time at LinkedIn, and was very well respected in the organization.
Kellee Van Horne: I respected her a lot and she also respected me, which was really, really critical and important because I knew I would be coming back to work in a role that I’d never been in before. I’d never taken care of a child before, I had no idea what that would throw at me. And I knew I needed to be in an environment where the people around me really cared about me and about my experience not just as an employee, but also as a human being. And so it ended up being one of the best career decisions that I’ve ever made in my entire life. I not only learned more than I’ve ever learned in any other career role from the leader that I decided to go work for, but I also came back to an environment where I felt trusted, where I felt respected and where I knew that people had my back when I made tough decisions or when I took risks. And so from then on, every single decision that I make around career has been first and foremost who will I be working for?
Kellee Van Horne: And even more importantly, who will that person be working for? Because I want to make sure that the organization that’s standing behind me is one that I believe in and that believes in me. And so what I really would suggest for everyone as you’re thinking about your next career opportunity or next move, ask yourself these two questions. First, is the person you’re going to be working for a rockstar? Are they well-respected in the organization? That means that they are in a position to accelerate their careers and when their careers accelerate, your career will also likely get some tailwinds and accelerate as well. Does the person think you’re a rockstar, right? You want someone that really trusts you. When things get hard, you want someone that’s going to pound on the table for you. And so evaluating people based on whether or not they’ll do that is one of the things that I always recommend.
Kellee Van Horne: Does the person have skills or expertise that you want to learn, right? It’s really important, particularly when you’re early in your career, to be in constant learning mode. And that’s what your manager is for, is to help you build skills. And then again, is the person the coach? Or are they really just an IC? I think one limitation of a lot of organizational structures is that a lot of people end up managing not because they want to be managers, but because they see that as the only way that they can accelerate their careers. And so you have to decide and understand who the person is that you’re going to be reporting to. Are they a coach? Or are they an IC+? It’s okay to work for an IC+ actually, if you’re late enough in your career and stable enough in your skillset that you don’t really need someone managing the day to day.
Kellee Van Horne: But I’d say if you’re early in your career, let’s say the first 10 years, I would really strongly encourage you to look for people that are really coaches, because that’s when you’re going to be developing those foundational skills that allow you to excel as you get later and later in your career. I’ll pause here to see if there are any questions. Ah, what is an IC? Excellent question. Individual contributor. So someone who works on their own behalf, doesn’t manage anyone versus a manager. Yeah. Great. So yes, TLDR work for people who are highly respected, work for people who respect and care about you. So the next question you’ll want to ask yourself is why me? And so this isn’t really a question of why would they ever choose me? It’s really what is going to allow me stepping into this role to immediately have early wins and successes that demonstrate my credibility and competence in this role?
Kellee Van Horne: You want to have a really strong answer for that, and so I’ll talk a little bit about my experience. When I was leaving LinkedIn, I decided to go to a company called Affirm that I mentioned earlier. And it’s completely different from the work that I was doing at LinkedIn. It’s a different industry, that’s focused on retail, financial technology, credit and lending, whereas I was in the marketing and employee advocacy space before I left LinkedIn. And so ostensibly, there’s not a lot that I can draw on to make sure that I’m successful in my first time and role at Affirm. But the great thing was I actually had quite a bit of foundational skills that I could draw on to make me successful when I got to Affirm. So one, I’m a customer facing professional, and that’s something that I can do in any environment. I know how to work with people. I know how to build relationships with external customers.
Kellee Van Horne: I also really know how to collaborate well, right? And so when I work in a complex business like the one that we have at Affirm, I can really lean on those skills and accelerate my ability to add impact because I’m able to work with almost anyone in any kind of team, and that’s a huge asset to me. And then also, I really like working in a startup environment where we’re building things from scratch and I don’t mind ambiguity. And so that’s an additional skillset that I brought to my role at Affirm that allowed me to add value really, really early on, even though I was still learning the business. And so as you think about and evaluate different career opportunities, don’t just think about what will be the biggest stretch for you, also think about what will give you the opportunity to have early wins and demonstrate your credibility and your competence so that people will continue to give you more and more stretches?
Kellee Van Horne: As you think about what skills and things that you want to really lean into for your new role, you should think about what are the most pressing problems that are facing your future manager or team, right? You want to solve the problems that matter the most for the business, not just the ones that you find most interesting. And then also, what are the skills or experience that you’re going to leverage into those problems? Where are the places where you can add unique value, really focus on that. And again, your goal is to crush your new role as quickly as possible. And so I see there are some questions, I’m going to try to see if I can get to them. There they are.
Kellee Van Horne: Q&A maybe. How do you find out if the person you want to work for is a rockstar? Excellent question, particularly if you’re coming from outside of the organization. So everyone, hopefully, when you’re going through an interview process will get to meet both the person that’s going to be managing you, but also the people that report into that person. You should ask the question, and not directly, are you a rockstar? But rather ask questions about the results that that person has delivered. Ask the person and ask their team. What are the things that this person is known for? What are the results that this person has driven in the organization? That will allow you to understand are there things that they’ve done that people would consider to be really great?
Kellee Van Horne: And the way that people talk about those results will give you an indication of is it an okay result? Or is it an amazing result? The other thing I’ll say around looking for a coach, particularly if you’re applying from outside of the organization, is you should absolutely ask people when you are interviewing with them what is their leadership style? What is their coaching style? How do they invest in their team? Some people will have really robust answers and that will give you an indication of how much time they spend thinking about and making an effort towards that.
Kellee Van Horne: And then similarly, you want to ask the team that, right? When you meet other people that would be your colleague when you’re interviewing, ask them, what is it like to work for, blah, blah, blah? What are some ways that you guys are working together to build your skills or to build your career? It’s a very fair question. And if anything, it shows that you’re being really thoughtful about your career path. So I would definitely encourage everyone to start asking those questions if you’re not already. There are some Q&As that I’m not sure how to get to. So maybe someone will add them to the chat if you can see them, and I’ll keep going and I’ll make sure we answer them before we get done. So what next? This is really a conversation around where you think the next role is going to take you in terms of the next five years, 10 years, so on and so forth.
Kellee Van Horne: And the reason that you want to ask yourself this when you’re evaluating career opportunity is because you want to start thinking about can I set myself up for that next thing through the role that I’m taking? Part of that, right, again is building the requisite skills for that next job. And so focusing your early wins on building in skills that will allow you to take on more more quickly. But also, it’s about painting a picture for the people around you, around what you want to do with your career so that they can help you. One of the biggest things that we all need is more help from other people, and I am definitely guilty of it and I know so many people that are guilty of it as well is asking for help, asking people to give you advice, asking people to give you opportunities. And so the more you can talk about what you need and what you want next, the better it is.
Kellee Van Horne: And just keep in mind that most corporations, most companies, will plan in advance at least six months and some up to, let’s say, three years or five years out, right? And so think about the long-term timeline as opposed to what do you want to do next month or next week. Give your manager, give the organization some time to find something that’s really transformational for you and that’ll allow you to leverage into the opportunity when it’s there as opposed to just trying to force yourself into something right away, because it feels urgent. The more time you have to find the right thing, the better. And the more time your manager has to find right thing, the better.
Kellee Van Horne: And so the what next questions that you want to ask yourself, what skills do I really want to master? What experiences do I want to have? What types of things do I enjoy doing most in my career? And what impact do I envision making during my career? And those are the types of conversations you want to be having with the people around you as you talk about how you want your career to evolve in an organization.
Kellee Van Horne: And so I’ll give an example. When I was at LinkedIn, before I left, I was talking to my current manager about the fact that I really wanted to continue to hone my sales skillset. I was on the customer side and working with current customers, but I wanted to do a better job of building relationships that were net new and really have the opportunity to focus on that. And so I said that to her and I spent probably about six months crushing it in my current role, and also just socializing this idea that that’s something that I wanted to grow into as I continued to do my work at LinkedIn. And so lo and behold, after about six months, they said, “Actually, we are going to start off a sales specialist role supporting another organization, and we think you would do a great job as being the very first person to take it.”
Kellee Van Horne: They would never have thought of me if I hadn’t raised my hand early on and said, “This is something that I want to grow towards. Not that I need to do it today, but that it’s something that is on my mind as I round out my skills as a professional,” right? And so I definitely, as a manager now, really appreciate when people can flag things to me early and let me know so that I can keep things in mind as we continue to evolve as an organization. And so the goal is to communicate really specific and personalized ideas around how you want your career to grow. I’m going to go back to the chat really quickly. How do you balance the possibility that the organization will change and people will move around? Absolutely. That always happens. And you should always expect that the organization will definitely change and that people will move around.
Kellee Van Horne: And so what I always say these days is if there’s a reorg and you don’t like things, just wait another six to 12 months, there will be another reorg. If you were working for someone that you really like and respect, sometimes there’s the opportunity to follow that person, right? If you think that that’s required. Or what you also can do is try to consider is the new person that you’re going to be working for, could they also be an advocate and a mentor for you, right? So then you have now two people in the organization that really respect and care for you just as you respect them. And so it’s really about partnering with the person that’s managing you to try to see if you can establish that kind of trust or relationship where you’re allowed to take risks and be creative. And in return, you get support and the ability to take on more.
Kellee Van Horne: And so if it doesn’t work out, that’s fine. There’s literally millions of jobs in the world. So don’t feel like you have to nail it every single time. But as you’re thinking about the next thing after that reorg happens, just keep in mind for who’s going to be the next person that I want to work for. I’ll go really quickly to the rest of the skills that I would recommend focusing on and then would love to go to questions again. So we talked about making it specific and personalized. One thing that I’ll definitely say since I’ve been managing for quite a few years now is that almost everyone that I’ve managed on the client success side, customer success side, has expressed an interest in being a manager at some point. And so everyone has said, “My next play, my next thing I want to do is manage someone or coach someone. I really love doing that.”
Kellee Van Horne: And I really appreciate it because it definitely demonstrates that the people that work in our organization care about others, right? It’s a quality and a trait that you really want to have in your employees. But the challenge is that it’s not differentiated at all, right? And so if everyone’s a manager, then no one will report to anyone, right? It’s impossible to make everyone that’s good a manager on the same team. And so that doesn’t mean, right, that there’s no opportunity on our team. It just means that we need to be more thoughtful about what actual skills you want to build external to just managing.
Kellee Van Horne: And so I’ve got some brainstorm skills that might be helpful as you’re thinking about what are the skills that you want to talk about and lean into outside of maybe just growing your team, growing your scope? And so on the left, you have some soft skills that Udemy has said are the hottest skills based on the learning curriculum that people are reading.
Kellee Van Horne: And then on the right, I’ve put some skills that I think are really valuable to leaders as you get more and more senior, right? Understanding how to build a business case, understanding how to manage a P&L if you’re on the business side. Being able to lead a cross-functional project, right, is often a relevant no matter what kind of function you’re in. And then turning around failures, that’s something that’s really hard to do, but if you get good at it, it’s very, very, very valuable.
Kellee Van Horne: We talked about a few things in finding your next career opportunity. First, who? Who are you going to work for? Who’s going to be your partner as you accelerate your career? Why me? What are the things that are going to allow you to really crush it and build credibility in your role so that when it’s time for what next, people are already looking at you and thinking about how they can help you get to the next level?
Kellee Van Horne: It’s really, really simple in a lot of ways, but I think that it’s probably the most foundational advice that I can give and the things that I say over and over again when you have the chance to meet me one-on-one. Hopefully, this is helpful to everyone. I’ll shift back to questions because I think I have one minute. Let’s see if there’s one more that I can answer. How can people who are introverts do this? Ah, so that’s an interesting question. I think I would consider myself to be an introvert honestly.
Kellee Van Horne: I guess if you’re defining introvert as someone that doesn’t like spending time with other people or feels uncomfortable spending time with other people, I would definitely encourage you to continue to work on that skill in a safe space with a friend, because so much of business, so many opportunities come from the people that you know, right? And so you have to have at least some minimum level of rapport and then also understanding with the people around you to be able to be thought of in the moment, right?
Kellee Van Horne: It’s really hard for people to think of you and think of you for opportunities if they don’t actually know what you want to do next. And so not to say that you should change being an introvert because that is who you are, but rather think about how do you make it so that people can get to know you and know what you like to do so that they can think of you in the future? And I think that timer told me I was at time, so I will stop now.
Angie Chang: Perfect. Thank you, Kellee. There’s so many questions for you in the chat, in the Q&A. If you have a minute or two after this, feel free to pop in the chat and answer some.
Kellee Van Horne: Oh, sure. Yeah, I’ll answer them.
Angie Chang: Thank you so much. That was excellent. I think a lot of people felt very heard and helped, and we are a lot of introverts here at the Girl Geek X team, so we completely empathize that it is possible to do many things as an introvert. So definitely.
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Angie Chang: Welcome, everyone, to the final Girl Geek Dinner of 2020. We are really excited to have an evening with Gap girl geeks!
Sukrutha Bhadouria: So let’s end this year on a great happy note.
Teniola Adedipe: Hi, everyone. I just want to thank you for joining us. So we have three female leaders from our technology team who are leading the way in innovation. We’re excited to really share with you how we’re leveraging the power of our tech platform. And how do we win in a challenging marketplace?
Suja Ramachandran: It’s such an interesting field to be in because it’s changing by the minute. And as all of you have seen this year, it’s changing even faster than that. So how can I learn the fastest, build my career, and be able to provide value? That’s what I was looking for, the connection. And then Gap called.
Shruti Merkhedkar: It’s very important to have good people at work because that’s pretty much your second family. I am a mom of two kids so I have two little ones. And I had both my kids while working at Gap. So having a good work-life balance was very important for me. And I would say at Gap, I was very lucky to have great bosses, great mentors who always supported me throughout.
Belisa Mandarano: In every team that I had a chance to be a part of, you really build a sense of community with that team. And it really feels like a family.
Teniola Adedipe: What advice would each of the panelists have for other females looking to grow their career in tech?
Belisa Mandarano: This should be an even playing field. And everyone has a voice. And you should feel empowered to use that voice.
Suja Ramachandran: Bringing your colleagues along in that conversation, going past the fear to speaking up and then bringing also other women along who you see are hesitating is a big piece of creating that change in the industry.
Shruti Merkhedkar: For me personally, it’s very important for me to learn something new every year. So every time I went to my boss and I was like, “I want to do something new.” And I got it. So the opportunities that were presented to me were so exciting.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: This is just meant to be another way for people to feel like they can meet other people who are like-minded. And sponsoring companies can meet these amazing people. And so this way you have an in into the company. And you’re not just waiting to be approached when you want to make that career change or that job change.
Angie Chang: Welcome, everyone, to the final Girl Geek Dinner of 2020. We are really excited to have an evening with Gap girl geeks. My name’s Angie Chang, I’m the founder of Girl Geek X. We’ve been doing Girl Geek Dinners in the Bay area for almost for 14, 15 years now. But what we really love to do is keep coming back and going to different events and meeting other amazing women in tech and retail and biotech. And learning about all the new things out there, because we’re always on the cusp of something new. Like this year it’s vaccine or AI. And then the next year we’re always, I think, learning. And that career development part is really important. Especially when you’re going into your 10th, 15th, 20th year on the job. It’s really good to also give back and get to know the next generation of women coming up, as well as support those in our ranks. So here is Sukrutha who is my co-organizer and co-founder of Girl Geek X. And I’ll let her introduce herself.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Hi, everyone. Welcome, just like Angie said, to our final Girl Geek Dinner for 2020. As some of you might know, this was something that–we live in a world now where it’s possible for us to turn our events virtual. So this has been wonderful. At least Angie and I, when we would be driving all around the Bay Area to get to a dinner, we’d reflect on what our wins had been. We’d give each other inspiration. And so this is just meant to be another way for people to feel like they can meet other people who are like-minded. And sponsoring companies can meet these amazing people like yourself. And attendees can get to know about a company before even joining the company or interviewing at the company. They get insight into what it’s like to work at the company.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: And so this way you have an in into the company. And you’re not just waiting to be approached when you want to make that career change or that job change. And so always, always be on the lookout for yourself. Build your network, build your knowledge base of what companies might be… the ones that you might want to work at. So whenever you’re ready for that change, you already know what your shortlist is.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: 2020 has been such a challenging year for everyone. Lots of blessings as a result of us working from home and not in an office, but also a lot of challenges. And so let’s end this year in a great happy note. Thank you so much to Gap for sponsoring. And as you all might have seen, we also do virtual conferences. And so if you’d like your company to participate in the conference, do reach out to Angie and I. Our contact details are on the website girlgeek.io. And we’d love to partner with you. That’s it. Angie, do you want-
Angie Chang: Yeah. So a little bit more. We have our annual virtual conference coming up on March 8th. It is going to be our fourth virtual conference. And the theme is resilience. And we’re really looking and reflecting and thinking about how we’re going to dig in our heels and stay in the game for the next 20 years. We keep hearing that a problem with women in tech is that we’re not retained. So we’re really working on how we can be more resilient ourselves, as well as continue to help mentor and support each other through our careers.
Angie Chang: And one more thing. Let’s see, we have podcasts, we have great schwag on our website. And we’re always excited to hear your questions. So please, please ask them of our panelists tonight, put them in the Q&A below. There’s a Q&A feature. You can submit your questions and chat with other attendees. So right now I’m curious if you can drop in the chat right now, where you’re Zooming in from, so we can say hi to you. Awesome. A lot of the West Coast.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: We see people who have dialed in from Pleasanton, LA, Menlo Park. I wonder who’s the furthest. Half Moon Bay.
Angie Chang: So we have a very strong Bay Area presence. It used to be called the Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners. But now we’re just Girl Geek X. X is a variable for all the different things that we’re doing. And we’re always listening and talking about what’s next. So please keep us in your minds in terms of what you’re working on next. We are always thinking about how we can best support all the girl geeks out there with events like this, our virtual conference, and other things to be developed in the future. So, I guess, we’ve gone on long enough.
Angie Chang: And we are really excited to introduce you to a panel of Gap Inc. girl geeks tonight. So Teni is going to be our moderator. She is the head of operations for Gap special projects where her responsibilities include developing and implementing operational plans, leading and buying inventory, and much more. And before this, she was on the data and analytics team. Before she joined Gap, she spent time in the retail industry, both as a consultant with McKinsey and directly with retailers like Levi’s and Bed Bath & Beyond.
Teniola Adedipe: Great. Thank you so much for introducing me, Angie. So hi, everyone. I just want to thank you for joining us. As Angie mentioned, my name is Teni and head of operations for special projects at Gap. So just wanted to give you guys a couple of things about me before we introduce our three amazing tech leaders who are joining me. And I will introduce in just a couple of minutes. So just want to give you guys the reason why I’ve stayed in retail. And I’ll make sure each of our panelists also answer the same question. So you guys get an idea as to why we love working at Gap.
Teniola Adedipe: So for me, I love retail because it’s tangible. I think there’s very few industries that you can be in and actually touch, feel the product and what you’re working towards every day. I love going into the stores, talking to customers. And all of those reasons are the reasons I stay in retail. So, I think, particularly why I love Gap, one, is just the fact… the people. Everyone that you’re going to meet today is amazing. And all of my colleagues that I’ve worked with at Gap have just been awesome. So, I think that, in addition to the fact that Gap is one of the few places, I think, I can truly be myself. I can bring my whole self to work. And things that I’m involved in inside of work and outside of work, I can do at Gap.
Teniola Adedipe: Another thing that I do with a lot of my time is I’m actively involved in our employee belonging groups. And I’m actually the co-chair of our African-American network group. So I’m actually the chair based out of New York. And we have another one based out of San Francisco. So the fact that I’m able to do a job… used to be in data and analytics and spent a lot of my time there focused on customer analytics. But also spend a lot of my time really giving back and really trying to improve the community at Gap is really special to me. And that’s why I love Gap.
Teniola Adedipe: So I’m going to transition onto our three female leaders. So I will introduce you to them now. So we have three female leaders from our technology team who are leading the way in innovation for our global portfolio brands. So we’re deep in the holiday season right now. So everyone is super entrenched in their work. We’re just coming off Black Friday. So we’re excited to really share with you how we’re leveraging the power of our tech platform. And how do we win in a challenging marketplace?
Teniola Adedipe: We’re also going to spend some time with you guys really just getting their best advice on how to navigate a male dominated industry. So, really excited that we’re here to talk with you at Girl X Geek. And we’re going to kind of jump right into it. And then at the end of our Q&A, we will make sure that we leave time for all of us to answer questions and talk to you guys directly. So please drop questions in the Q&A. We’ll be taking them near the end. I’m looking forward to seeing all of your questions. So with that said, let’s jump right in.
Teniola Adedipe: Would love for our panelists to kind of show their faces. So we have Suja. We have Shruti. And let me make sure. And we have Belisa. So, I think, those are the three. So who wants to start first? I guess, Belisa you’re first on my screen. So why don’t you tell us about yourself.
Belisa Mandarano: All right. Can you guys hear me okay?
Teniola Adedipe: Yeah.
Belisa Mandarano: Awesome. Hi, my name is Belisa. I’m Director of IT Operations. I oversee the change management and IT service level management teams at Gap. I have been working at Gap for about 13 years, a little over 13 years actually. I started working in Old Navy’s online division. And then made my way over to the IT division about eight years ago. So some of the things that I’m doing in the day-to-day is overseeing the daily pipeline of technical platform changes that get made across all of Gap Inc. And so myself and my teams–they are the change gurus and folks who shepherd all of those changes through the organization to make sure that the changes that we’re making across the platform, that we are reducing risk as much as possible. And that we’re making sure that everyone is aware of what’s happening across the platform. That’s me.
Teniola Adedipe: Great. Thank you for introducing yourself. And, Suja, you’re up next.
Suja Ramachandran: Hi, everyone. I’m Suja. I lead the product team that powers our loyalty program at Gap. I love what I do at Gap. And I’ve been here about three years. And in that time I’ve worked both in the supply chain group, as well as the digital group. And loyalty has been in the digital group. What I primarily do is I look at both our credit card program and the program we have, where you can earn points and you use your rewards in the stores. And I try to make sure that the best experience comes to life in everything that you do. So I love what I work on. One of the biggest things that I love about it is very similar to what Teni talked about is how do you really connect with our customers? How do you find out what they want, anticipate it, and bring it to life? And how do we do that with technology?
Suja Ramachandran: So transitioning from supply chain to digital was a big change for me. But it really opened my eyes to we can do anything. So how do we take what we’re really good at and bring it to life regardless of the domain we’re in, and the industry we’re working in is what I like to do with mentoring those that I work with at Gap. One of the things I love at Gap is that I get to not just mentor girls outside of Gap, but mentor employees within. To figure out how do we get a career path for everyone? And how do we get people to be really curious about what’s around them and bring what they enjoy to life? So just a little bit about me. I’ve only been here about three years, but I’m really excited about what I’ve worked on and what’s to come.
Teniola Adedipe: Great. Thank you so much, Suja. And last but not least, Shruti, you’re up.
Shruti Merkhedkar: Thank you, Teni. Hi, everyone. First of all, super excited to be here. So thank you, Girl Geek, for giving us this opportunity today. Can’t see all of you, but just happy to hear so many voices after almost 10 months of lockdown. So this is a good change. And a little bit of background about myself. I’m originally from India. Did my schooling there, did my undergrad there. Came to US in 2006, came as a consultant for Gap. And then decided to stay here. So it’s been 14 years. So it feels like forever. I love working here. As Suja and Belisa said, it’s a great place to be. And I started my career in Gap as a systems analyst. And currently, I’m working as a senior director in the cloud strategy and services space. So, happy to be here.
Teniola Adedipe: Great. So let’s jump right in with our questions. So I know everyone mentioned how long they’ve been here. So let’s start with Suja who’s been here about three years. What made you decide to switch to retail and come to Gap?
Suja Ramachandran: That’s a great question. I would love to say it was a part of this master long-term plan that I’d charted out, but life doesn’t work that way. So for me, I was looking for, not just a challenge, but I wanted to connect the dots with what I was passionate about, what I was good at doing, and what I had never done yet. And my background is primarily in supply chain, but in the technology sector from a services perspective. So I’d worked in B2B technology. I’ve typically been the vendor. So a lot of you on the call know what that is. So you provide the services or software for others.
Suja Ramachandran: What I wanted to do is connect my background in product management, and supply chain, and solving problems, and get closer to the customer. And I knew where I could get exposure to something I’ve never really known before was in retail. It’s such an interesting field to be in because it’s changing by the minute. And as all of you have seen this year, it’s changing even faster than that. So how can I learn the fastest, build my career, and be able to provide value? That’s what I was looking for, the connection, and then Gap called. So when I came to Gap, I was really able to bring that to life. But that transition was something I knew I wanted to make. I just didn’t know how it would come to life. So I was so happy when it came to life at Gap.
Teniola Adedipe: Perfectly serendipitous, love that. So we’ve got someone who’s been here three years. And then we’ve got people who’ve been here more than 10 years. So, Shruti and Belisa, what’s kept you here all this time? Shruti, why don’t you go first?
Shruti Merkhedkar: Sure. So for me, there are two main things. First, is the people. It’s very important to have good people at work because that’s pretty much your second family. I am a mom of two kids so I have two little ones. And I had both my kids while working at Gap. So having a good work-life balance was very important for me. And I would say at Gap, I was very lucky to have great bosses, great mentors who always supported me throughout. So that definitely, was priority number one.
Shruti Merkhedkar: And then second, for me personally, it’s very important for me to learn something new every year. So every time I went to my boss and I was like, “I want to do something new.” And I got it. So the opportunities that were presented to me were so exciting. It kept me current. And that’s what kept me here. So, love everyday working at Gap.
Teniola Adedipe: I love that. So, Belisa, what about you?
Belisa Mandarano: For me, it’s been a very similar journey. When I started 13 years ago, I started in the online division. And the job that I was doing there was related to bringing marketing content to life on the websites. And after doing that for a while, I was like, “I really want to learn more about what happens on the backend side of things.” And so every time I looked and jumped to a different role… because being there that long, you have the opportunity potentially to move to different types of roles. So for me, it was really about building new skill sets. And trying to figure out, “What’s the next challenge for me? How can I solve these problems?” And in every organization, there’s some sort of problem to solve. And that was something that was really exciting for me. I was able to find those opportunities at each step in the road.
Belisa Mandarano: And then of course, both Shruti and Suja, they mentioned people, the people is key. In every team that I had a chance to be a part of you really build a sense of community with that team. And it really feels like a family that you’re with. So being on the online side or being down in the tech side there are so many people who rally together to make you feel like you’re family. And that was something that was really important for me, as well.
Teniola Adedipe: That’s great. Thank you, guys for all your answers. So want to make sure that we’re involving our attendees here. I’m going to ask you guys a question, so I’d love you guys to answer in the chat. How many times have you actually changed career paths or taken on a new role? So just put the number in the chat. It can be one, it could be five. Would just love to get an idea how many times you guys have changed. All right. We’ve got five. Five, two, four. All right. So we’re kind of in the five range. We’ve got a six. Okay great. So we have a huge range of people on the call with different… they’ve taken many different roles. Because clearly people have changed from all the way up from zero all the way up to six is what I’ve seen kind of the highest in every few years.
Teniola Adedipe: I think, the thing that’s great is that we’re a big company at Gap Inc. And there’s a lot of opportunity to take on new roles and career paths. Even myself, I’ve had the amazing opportunity to go from data and analytics, which I love, doing customer. And then actually, switching to an operations role. So I’m able to actually stay at the same company and take on a completely new career path. So I wanted to make sure that we gave Shruti and Suja the opportunity to tell us about Gap Inc. and how it’s helped to foster their own growth and development. So, Shruti, would you like to go first?
Shruti Merkhedkar: Sure. As I said, I started my career in 2006. So I started as a systems analyst in Ohio supporting the warehouses. And as I said, every year I wanted to do something new. Gap gave me all the opportunities that are possible whenever I thought, “I want to get trained on a certain technology to stay current.” That opportunity was given to me. In fact, I did my MBA staying with Gap. So it definitely, helped foster my growth.
Teniola Adedipe: That’s amazing. And even myself, I actually learned how to code when I was at Gap. So able to take part of a bootcamp. And then actually, was able to apply my knowledge. And I work with data scientists every day, or used to. And they were even very surprised at the fact, they were like, “When did you just learn how to code?” And they were like, “How are you so good at this?” And I was like, “See, this is what you can learn at Gap.” So just with that story, we’d love to hear, Suja, how has Gap Inc. helped foster your own growth and development?
Suja Ramachandran: It’s a great question. One of the reasons I also came to Gap is Gap is not afraid to take risks. And that was something I was looking for from a career perspective, a company to go to that be at risk taking on me, my career, as well as the technology I’m working on, investing on different things. How can we take those risks? Because I was working at a startup at one point, too. So I wanted the startup mindset, but the risk taking an investment of a company like Gap. Because there’s a safety net there too.
Suja Ramachandran: So when I came to Gap working in supply chain, being able to invest in different robotics and automation, and supply chain is something I was very interested in. And it was one of those things where you could dive right in. And it wasn’t that, “You’re new and you can’t be a part of it.” It’s, “What ideas do you have? Bring it to the table. Be curious, bring your ideas, talk about the business case, tell me what investment you need. Let’s try it.” That is what I wanted to hear. And it opened up my eyes to what you can try, because Gap is all over, it’s huge. So you can try a lot of different things. And there’s multiple brands as well. So you can try different flavors of what you want to do.
Suja Ramachandran: A part of that growth… another thing I really appreciate about Gap is my leadership teams were thinking about my growth before I asked about it. So even before I could say, “What’s next?” They went, “How about digital? How about leading the loyalty team?” And I said, “Let’s go, let’s do it. Let’s try.” So I love that that risk taking component is not something that requires me to step up. But the company comes forward and says, “How can we help you take those risks?” So that’s something that’s helped me from a career development. Because there’s always a little bit of fear there on what’s next and how am I going to cross that next boundary? But being able to do that with the community that’s there at Gap has helped me a lot.
Teniola Adedipe: That’s a great kind of call out. I’m sure so many people who’ve switched careers or changed roles understand that fear that comes with trying something new. So, really great for you to highlight that, Suja. So I’m sure everyone here doesn’t necessarily think of technology when they think about retail. So what makes working in tech in the retail industry so exciting? So, Belisa, can you help answer that question first for us?
Belisa Mandarano: Sure. What’s exciting for me is learning all about what happens behind the scenes when we implement technologies that help out the customer. So some of the technologies that we have are like ship from store where we’re basically utilizing our stores as little mini DCs, or distribution centers. Other things like buy online, pickup in store, these are technologies that are across the industry. But when we look at how we implement them at Gap it’s so interesting. And being in the IT service management team I get to see how it starts right from the beginning all the way to the end, which is super, super cool.
Belisa Mandarano: So from the moment that we actually procure hardware that’s going to run the applications that these live on. That’s a part of the pipeline in getting this to deployment. And then also working with all of the teams behind the scenes to make sure that when those final deployments are getting ready to go, that they go as seamless as possible. So for me, that’s what makes it exciting for me.
Teniola Adedipe: That’s great. So would love to shift gears a little bit and talk about our favorite topic of 2020, the pandemic. So as you can imagine, everyone’s shopping online, we’re all shopping online. I shopped online yesterday. And you just can imagine we’ve seen a huge growth in the number of online customers. So it’s about literally 165% is what we’ve been seeing already. So would love to get your thoughts on how has the pandemic shifted the work you’re doing? And I would love the panelists to even talk about how has the pandemic shifted the work you’re doing? And just how things are changing for you? Just as our panelists are answering the same question. Shruti, would love your thoughts on how the pandemic has shifted the work that you’re doing day-to-day.
Shruti Merkhedkar: Absolutely. I would say the whole retail industry is going through a major transformation with this pandemic. There are certain features that Belisa talked about ,ship from store, buy online pickup in store. All of these are new features that were introduced. And given that I’m primarily in the tech space, the biggest shift for us was that this year 40% of sales were comprised on our online platform. And that’s a big shift. When we started the online platform, it used to constitute 10% to 20%. Now it is going neck to neck with the stores so that’s a major shift. A lot of emphasis is being given to tech. And being in cloud strategy, I’m just super excited about all the innovation that we are planning to do in the coming year. So very, very exciting times for tech, I must say.
Teniola Adedipe: Love that. So speaking of tech, I think, all of our panelists have wonderful, amazing careers in tech. But we all know, as I’m sure all of our panelists know, tech is a very male dominated industry. What advice would each of the panelists have for other females looking to grow their career in tech? I want everyone to answer this question because I feel it’s super important. So let’s start with you, Suja.
Suja Ramachandran: Sure. No, it’s a great question. I would say a couple of different things. What’s helped me a lot… and I go back to, I think, this theme of resilience. There is this concept of being careful with what you say, being careful about speaking up. And it being challenging sometimes in a room of looking around you and it’s all male. That’s happened in every role I’ve ever been in. At some point, it makes you pause for a minute. And I don’t know why. It’s not something I’ve ever looked at going, “Why should that stop me from asking a question?” The challenge is always powering through it and just asking it. In the end of the day, if you can speak up regardless of the audience, regardless of who’s in the room, regardless of the fear that you may feel about speaking up, that’s always going to move you forward. But you have to get past that feeling.
Suja Ramachandran: And what you should also recognize is that when you look around the room and you find that you are the only one, always be thinking about, “How do I change that status quo? And how do I make sure you’re not the only one thinking that?” So something that opened my eyes is I’m speaking to a male colleague one time about it. And sharing that I was thinking that way. And he said, “That never even occurred to me.” He said, “I’m sitting in a meeting with 50 men and one female.” And never did he look around and say, “Wow, that’s odd. Maybe it shouldn’t be that way,” but I did. And I thought that in every meeting I’m in.
Suja Ramachandran: How do we also change the conversation where it’s not the lone female thinking that, but it’s every member of that 50 person meeting that thinks that. And says, “How do I change the status quo?” So bringing your colleagues along in that conversation, going past the fear to speaking up. And then bringing also other women along who you see are hesitating is a big piece of creating that change in the industry that’s helped me along the way. I’ve had other women who’ve paused and said, “Suja’s trying to say something, let her speak.” And that’s been something that’s opened my eyes to how much it matters. So those are a couple of things that’s helped me along the way.
Teniola Adedipe: It’s great. Let me see, Shruti, why don’t you go next?
Shruti Merkhedkar: Sure. That’s a very good question and a very important topic. I’m sure all of us women go through this through our journey. So my advice based on my experience too all my girlfriends here today. First, the fact that probably you are the only woman in a room full of men, do not let that affect you. Why should it matter? It just should not matter. In fact, you should feel empowered that you are driving the show in a room full of men. So use that to your advantage.
Shruti Merkhedkar: And the second piece of advice that I have, which is more important than the first one is help other women. Help them grow, help them learn, hire more women. And I practice that personally. So we need to look after each other. And that’s what my advice would be.
Teniola Adedipe: That’s great. It’s a great answer. I think looking after each other is super important. And, Belisa, what about you?
Belisa Mandarano: What I would like to say about that is sort of piggybacking off of what Shruti and Suja already said. But I tend to look at this from this should be an even playing field. And everyone has a voice. And you should feel empowered to use that voice. Because what you’re thinking at a particular time, if you’re sitting in a meeting. Regardless if it’s a meeting full of men or a meeting full of women or co-ed you should feel empowered to put your ideas out there. Because that is how really great things happen is when you put new ideas out on the table that maybe other people haven’t thought of. Or maybe other people in the room have thought of the same thing, but they’re too afraid to speak up. So feel empowered to use your voice is what I would say.
Teniola Adedipe: No, I think that’s great. And actually, it’s a great transition into our next question, which is about self-advocacy. Self-advocacy is an important skill to develop a career. What’s your advice for others on that topic? Belisa, I’ll start with you because your answer just kind of transitioned perfectly into that.
Belisa Mandarano: What I would like to say about that is… so when you’re using your voice to get what your ideas are out there… I’m sorry, can you repeat the question one more time?
Teniola Adedipe: Sure. Self-advocacy.
Belisa Mandarano: Oh, self-advocacy. So what I was going to say about that was that there was a time when I was not going to be able to make it for a meeting. And it was a really important meeting with leadership that I really had some ideas that I wanted to put out there. And some feedback that I wanted to give about how we were operating. And I wasn’t going to be able to make the meeting. And I was so upset about not being able to make it. And, I think, Shruti was one of my partners during this timeframe. And so I started brainstorming about how I could potentially get my feedback into that meeting so that my voice could be heard. And what I did is I wound up making a video expressing all of the things and the feedback that I wanted to be able to present. And the video actually got wound up being played in the meeting. And there was some really great stuff in discussion that occurred as a result of me bringing my feedback to the table. So that’s what I would say about that.
Teniola Adedipe: Great. So, Suja, I’ll pass it on to you. Do you have anything to say about self-advocacy?
Suja Ramachandran: Yeah, I had a mentor once tell me that, “There is not ever going to be another voice marketing you, other than you that’s better than you marketing yourself. There’s just not, it’s never going to happen. So you’ve got to be the first person in line knowing how to market yourself. And there’s a certain power in that.” And so one thing I encourage everyone to do is know how to market yourself. And be very prescriptive to the audience you’re marketing to. Because the other thing is, from a self-advocacy having the same statement on how I present myself to everyone doesn’t work. Having a great pitch line, one liner pitch line about myself doesn’t work. It has to be very specific to what I’m trying to get across in terms of a point. Am I trying to get a role on a project? Am I trying to develop my career? Am I trying to get a new mentor? Do I want a pay raise? Do I want a promotion? Depending on what I want, my pitch might be a little bit different. But I have to know how to advocate for myself in these different roles.
Suja Ramachandran: One of the things I did find just from a professional growth perspective is, there weren’t a lot of tools out there to tell me how to do that. What there were tools on is, there’s a lot about how you market yourself from a resume perspective on interviews, et cetera. But once you’re in a company, how do you network and advocate for yourself in the right fashion with the different people? It’s something you learn almost yourself or you have to learn through mentors and network, especially your female network. And that took a long time for me. But once I was able to do it, you start finding the pattern that it works. And when it works, you find out how it works and you grow on top of doing that. But self-advocacy, incredibly important. And not relying on others, just others, to advocate for you, it’s so powerful in terms of your career.
Teniola Adedipe: That’s great. Thank you so much, Suja. And, Shruti, anything you would like to add about self-advocacy?
Shruti Merkhedkar: Suja, you took the words away from me. I just want to say that if you don’t ask for it, you don’t get it. So go ask for it. And I have a very funny but interesting example to share based on my personal experience. So when I was working as a systems analyst in Ohio so my ex-boss, who wasn’t my boss then, he visited me from San Francisco in Ohio. So I was very excited to meet this cool team who has come from the headquarters. And I was like, “Tell me what’s happening.” And I wanted to learn all about what happens in the headquarters. And then I didn’t know how to tell him that I want more work. I want more interesting work.
Shruti Merkhedkar: So I just went to him and I said, “I have nothing to do. I need more work.” And he till date uses that as an example. And he’s like, “This is the first person in my life who has come to a person who’s senior to her and told him that she doesn’t have anything to do. She wants more work.” And as a result, I got promoted. I got a team. So the team that I was working in, I started leading that team. So I don’t know if it’s self-advocacy, but whatever it was just be honest and just ask for it. Go get it.
Teniola Adedipe: That’s amazing. We actually have a question in the chat saying, “Do you have good women role models in your current roles?” I think this is a good kind of segue talking about mentors. So mentors have been a huge part of my career. And they’ve helped me as I’m transitioning and thinking about what I want to do next and how do I get there? And I’m sure a few of you also have mentors. Would love to kind of hear from Belisa about mentorship. So why do you think mentorship is important? And what have you gained from it?
Belisa Mandarano: I’m actually a really huge advocate for having mentor and I’m going to make that plural mentors because I’ve had a few in my time. And I’ve found that the best mentors are folks who are not in the same industry as you are. And the reason that that is, is you get really caught up in the day-to-day work of what you’re doing. And the folks that you’re working with also are sort of in the same environment. But if you have someone who is maybe from the outside or from a different industry to talk to and discuss some of the things that are happening in your space, they can provide an unbiased perspective that can really help you think in different ways about how to tackle maybe an issue that you’re dealing with. Or maybe even how to maneuver career wise where you want to go based off of their experiences in other areas.
Belisa Mandarano: And what I would say about that in addition to that is that a good mentor for me, has always been someone who asks you questions to help challenge your thinking. And also gives you homework. So every time I have a session with one of my mentors, they usually ask me to take something away and go figure out a particular thing. If it’s something that I’m struggling with they’ll give me some homework. And then the next time that I meet with them we sort of have that conversation. And they are also learning from you because maybe the things that you’re dealing with in your particular area is not something that they’ve dealt with. And so it’s really great to have that connection, and you’re sharing back and forth with each other.
Teniola Adedipe: I love that. Thank you so much for that response on mentorship. It seems you’re very passionate about it and very involved with it with your own mentors. So I know we’re running up against time. I’m going to combine our last two questions for you guys into one. I’d love every single person on the panelists to answer this. So the first question that I’d like you guys to answer is, what piece of career advice that someone has given you that’s really stuck with you that you would like to share with all of our attendees today? And because everyone I’m sure wants to know, are you hiring? And what do you look for in a candidate? So if each person could answer those two questions. We’ll just go in a round robin. And then we’ll open it up to Q&A. So let’s start with, Suja.
Suja Ramachandran: Great. I think, what’s helped me it’s when I’ve been concerned… I’ve had about five or six career shifts that have come through with different companies, different things where I’m trying to seek, “What do I want to do?” I’m always striving for figuring out a challenge that I’m passionate about, but that I want to continue learning. And that I feel like I can keep growing in. When I start connecting the dots to say, “Do all of these make sense together? And am I doing things that are too disparate from each other?” I had a mentor give me advice that really helped. That said, “It’s not about connecting the clear dots, it’s about connecting the passion.” Figuring out you may have done a disparate number of career choices. But figuring out what you loved about every single thing you did should help you get one step closer to the next thing that you love doing.
Suja Ramachandran: And at one point you might find a position you want to be in for 20 years, but you also may not. And you might want to keep shifting. And both directions are okay. And that opened my eyes because at some point I would waver between, “Am I doing the right thing? Am I changing roles too many times or too many companies?” And that made me not just feel great, it made me feel like I had a plan all along, and this was what it was. So I try to connect those dots.
Suja Ramachandran: In terms of hiring, I do want to say, I love curiosity. I’m a just innate curious person, but when I’m hiring, it’s not necessarily I’m looking for someone who has skill one, two, three. I’m always looking for passionate, curious people, because that is really hard to teach someone. You can’t teach someone curiosity and drive. You can teach someone a lot of other things. But that thing when it comes to being curious and trying anything to try to get to a solution or to the next step, that’s really hard to teach someone. So that’s what I look for, that passionate curiosity and drive. Bring it to the table, we’ll hire you. It’s less about the skills and that you’ve got exactly what Gap needs. You’ve got curiosity we need you.
Teniola Adedipe: Perfect. So I want to be on Suja’s team. I think I’m passionate and curious.
Suja Ramachandran: You’re hired.
Belisa Mandarano: I think I want to be on Suja’s team.
Suja Ramachandran: Fine, we’ll do it.
Teniola Adedipe: Exactly. Great. So, Shruti, you’re up. So would love to get your piece of advice that you would like to share with our attendees today.
Shruti Merkhedkar: Yes, absolutely. And it ties back into what Suja said. So two advice. One, knowledge is power, so keep learning, keep growing. Never get comfortable with status quo. Always challenge it. And second piece of advice that has helped me grow as well in this company is don’t be a problem spotter, be a problem solver. Get things done. That always makes you stand out. Because believe me, it sounds very simple, but there are not many people out there who want to make it happen. They just want to play the victim card. And that’s where, I think, women have that strength. That’s where women stand out. So get things done. So that’s my career advice to all of you.
Shruti Merkhedkar: And in terms of hiring, I’m not hiring right now, but I will be hiring in the future. So I am looking for cloud strategy specialists. Someone who’s trained in Azure, preferably, GCP would be a good plus to have. So any cloud exposure that you have, interested in all cloud experts out there, reach out to me.
Teniola Adedipe: All right. So if you’re interested in the cloud, Shruti’s your gal. And last but not least, Belisa.
Belisa Mandarano: Hi. So for me, I think, I would say a couple of things. Don’t be afraid to take risks. And don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty. So one of the things that’s really helped me along the way is I really want to get into trying to figure out how things work. And being down in it with my team. Because it’s really hard for me to lead a team if I don’t really understand the struggles that they’re going through. And so, typically, what I’ve done is come up, I’ll come into a team, and if it’s something that’s related to managing a project, I’ll manage a project on my own just to see like what it really means and what they’re going through. And so that’s what I would say. I would say don’t be afraid to take risks. And don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty and get right in it.
Belisa Mandarano: In terms of hiring, I’m not hearing at the moment. I hope to be hiring. If I were hiring, I would be looking for folks in the IT service management space. With folks who have a change management experience and service level management experience. In the service level management space, there’s a lot of data analysis that happens and coordinating and communicating with multiple business partners across the organization. And so if you have those skills, would love to hear about it.
Teniola Adedipe: Love it. So just want to thank our panelists for the lovely questions they’ve answered and the energy they’re bringing to this. So we’re not done yet. So we have our last 15 minutes. So what we’re going to do is actually answer your questions coming in through the Q&A. So I’m going to read through the questions and anyone who wants to answer feel free to jump right in. So our first question is from Kat. So she says, “What kinds of tech challenges do your sales associates and store managers experience? How does your team address them? And do you provide training to help them?” Would any of you guys have any experience with the store teams?
Shruti Merkhedkar: Yes, I managed the team for five years, so probably I should take that. So one of the most common issues that we used to get from stores is disconnects network issues. Because every store has a local network. And we were in this process of transitioning from the… Belisa, help me here? What were those… 4690s, the big giant… the point of sales IBM 4690s. We were transitioning from those to our cool mobile devices. So the majority of issues that we had were network related where the associates were complaining about app not loading, app getting disconnects on the 4690s or on the mobile devices. So that’s the most common complaint. And what was the second question? I think there were two.
Teniola Adedipe: Hold on. The second question is, “How did your team address them? And did you provide training to help them?”
Shruti Merkhedkar: We have a great support framework. So we have level one store support teams. So the stores call in the issues into the level one store support teams. And then so they have their run books. So they do the first level of triage for any store issues. So just to reduce the meantime to resolve an incident. So they are trained. They are very well trained on all the day-to-day issues, so they help out. If they are not able to triage and resolve issues, then they escalate it to the level two or the product teams. So the necessary advice is given to the stores, and then if they need any specific trainings they are enabled with all of that cool stuff.
Teniola Adedipe: Perfect. Thank you for answering Kat’s questions. So next question we have up here is from Jill. Her question is, “Is there a formal internal mentorship program at Gap?” Anyone want to take that? All right, I will take that one. So, I don’t believe there is a formal mentorship program. I know some of our actual equality and belonging groups, similar to the African-American network group I’m a part of have mentorship programs that they’ve built out. But they’re pretty informal. It’s really just kind of matching people who are interested in being mentors with mentors who are kind of volunteering their time.
Teniola Adedipe: I would say the thing that I’ve learned about mentorship is that it works best when it’s organic. So sometimes you don’t even know who’s going to become a mentor. It could be someone you worked with. It could be someone that you collaborated with on a project and all of a sudden, you’re getting advice from them or asking for their input. And that kind of relationship evolves over time. What I will say is that as I’ve continued to grow in my career, it’s really just having like my spidey sense of just when that’s happening. Because when that’s happening, you start to realize like, “Hey, is this someone I can kind of continue to get to know? How do I make sure I continue to nurture this relationship?” Because, I think, without nurturing it and trying to invest in it, that’s really where you start to see the fruits of mentorship. And also reverse mentorships. There’s a lot of senior people that can also learn a lot from you.
Teniola Adedipe: So while there might not be anything formal at Gap, I think, a lot of people find mentors at Gap through the way that we work collaboratively across teams, across different functions. And I think there’s lots of opportunities to find people who will help you throughout your career as you continue to grow.
Belisa Mandarano: Teni, what I would also add to that is there is a Mentorloop program that I’m actually a part of. And you can find more information. We can get that information out, right? To folks if we need to?
Teniola Adedipe: Yes, absolutely.
Belisa Mandarano: So it’s mentorloop.com. That particular program is a formalized program. And there are some folks within the Gap who are a part of that program. But the program pairs folks up with people who are out all over the United States.
Suja Ramachandran: There’s also a new tech mentorship program that’s going to be launching. It’s still early in the planning stages, but I’m very excited to be a part of that. So that’s going to be new. But we will be having a formal tech mentorship, a part of Gap as well.
Teniola Adedipe: Great. Thank you, guys for adding to do that. So I have a question for you, Suja. So we have someone who asked, “What specific challenges did you face while transitioning from product? And how did you overcome them?” It’s similar to a question that’s in the chat talking about transitioning from supply chain to PDM team. So I would say answer the challenges for both.
Suja Ramachandran: Sure. I’ll give a little bit of background there. So when I worked in supply chain originally, prior to Gap, I was in consulting. So when I worked in consulting, I worked for a company that provided product software and services to clients. So I was a consultant as a part of that. What I didn’t know at that point, I didn’t know what product management was. I’d never heard of it. Didn’t know anything about the industry. I went from supply chain to a digital shop, and I did product management there.
Suja Ramachandran: And then you start connecting the dots because in the end of the day, what comes first is your customer. What you’re trying to do for your customer is solve their problems, and then ultimately, making it the most amazing experience that they can go through. That is the job of product management, is figuring out what are the right problems to solve at the right time and providing the most value when you do it. And that process when I was able to connect those dots I went, “That’s right. I can do product management.” It’s something I’d never done before that I was able to connect the dots between a world of supply chain, that I didn’t know what product management was there. To a world of product management that I thought only meant software in the digital world.
Suja Ramachandran: And when I came to Gap, how I could connect those dots is product is the software used to power anything. So if that product is powering your supply chain, your logistics. For us, that product was the tools and automation that made boxes move in our warehouse. That got those boxes to your door. All of the software and automation that made that happen, that’s all that product management helped own, manage, prioritize, strategize, and get out the door.
Suja Ramachandran: So once you connect those dots and you realize those bolts to make that happen is the same. Anybody can do product management. Anybody can do supply chain. Anyone can do digital. You just have to connect the dots to understand how that process works. And of course, there’s mechanics to make sure there’s standardization and consistency of process, but everybody can learn that. So when I was able to transition from a domain to a specific technology, to also a specific role, it was figuring out the basics of what I knew and learning what I didn’t. And then becoming a leader in that field. So it’s something I really do encourage.
Suja Ramachandran: And I want to also circle back to, we’re hiring in product management. So please do come join product management. We are hiring product management across multiple domains within Gap Inc. And those will be posted online. But looking again for strategists, technologists, solution-oriented curious, passionate people to come join at multiple levels of experience. But product management is something you can learn, but bring curiosity and passion to the door.
Teniola Adedipe: That’s great. Great answer, Suja. So we have a question from Tiffany. “What are some things you look out for before making a career switch? How do you know if you’ve learned enough from the current position that makes you think it’s time to move on?” So we’ll open up to the group. Who would like to answer that one?
Suja Ramachandran: I can answer that. I would say when you feel like you’ve stopped learning, that’s a big thing. Also culture fit. You’ve got to feel a part of the culture of that company. If you don’t feel that you’re a part of it or can grow with it, then it’s not a match. And it’s okay if that’s what you find. And I’ve been to this part in my career where you feel guilty about leaving. I’m someone who I just get loyal to a company. I get loyal to projects and teams and people, but sometimes I forget myself. And that’s something always to remember, does the career path you want, the culture you’re looking for, and the passion and the learning that you always want to be a part of, is it there? And if it’s not there, put yourself first. Exit, if you need to. Move to what you want to do and what you’re happy doing. But make sure you have a pulse on that. Don’t just put your projects and the deliverables first. Have a pulse that you’re happy. And that you’re doing what you want to be doing. And you fit the culture.
Teniola Adedipe: And, I think, I’ll build on, Suja’s answer. I think, really what I look for is, “Am I happy in my day-to-day?” If I’m no longer happy and I’m not like, “All right, I’m ready to crank in the mornings.” I’m a morning person. And I get my best work done there. If I’m not excited to do that work, or it feels monotonous and I’m not feeling jazzed about solving the problem, for me, that’s when it’s time to start thinking about something else. Because that means I’m not growing. I’m not learning as much. And I’m really looking to continuously do that. So I’m really all about continuously learning. And the curiosity to drive that. So if any of those things start to wane, that’s really when I start to be like, “All right, maybe it’s time to do something else and do something new.”
Teniola Adedipe: And, I think, this is going back to what we talked about earlier when we were asking the panelists questions, this is why Gap is so great. Because there are so many opportunities to do that within one company. Instead of always having to feel like, “I have to go someplace else in order to get something new.” A lot of companies may not have decided to say, “Hey, we’re going to take someone who is in data and analytics and trust them to be in operations.”
Teniola Adedipe: But the mentors that I’ve worked with were just like, “Hey.” I told them, “I’m looking for something new and thinking about it.” And they said, “Why don’t you think about this?” Things that I’ve never thought about before. So being able to have people that kind of ask you the questions. I think, Belisa mentioned that earlier about having people who ask you the hard questions, and you take away the homework. I think that’s super helpful. And when you’re trying to look for a career switch.
Teniola Adedipe: Great. All right. Let’s see, we’ve got three minutes left. Let me see if I can do anything… I like this question. So there’s a question here. “How do you set yourself up for excellence for your next role?” That’s an interesting one. So would love anyone’s answer on that one.
Suja Ramachandran: I have to think for a second.
Shruti Merkhedkar: How do you set yourself for excellence for your next role? I would say from my personal experience, I would say do not limit yourself. So when you are in a role, do not limit yourself by thinking that you cannot do what the person at the next level is doing. Always work towards that next job. Always work towards that. Because it’s not just going to come to you one day without you working towards it. So that’s my advice.
Suja Ramachandran: I think that’s great. I would even build on that further. I would say identify your transferable skills. So figure out excellence in your next role. If you have certainty on what your next role is, great, you can prepare yourself from every angle. If you’re not sure what the next role is, the next company is, the next anything, concentrate on your transferable skills. What are those? Regardless of domain and industry, whatever those are, which may be that you’re a great… you may be great at collaboration. You may be great at strategy. Maybe you’re great at organization. Whatever they are, double down on it.
Suja Ramachandran: Something I tell my mentees, I’ve told my teams before, “You have a choice whether you can go from a skill that you’re okay at, to great. Or you can sometimes double down on something that you’re good at and make it excellent.” It takes a lot more momentum to go from something that you’re very unfamiliar with to great. But it doesn’t actually take as much time, but you can become from good to great much faster. So find out what those things are. Find out what you’re good at. Find out what are transferrable, double down, and make them excellent. So that when you go to the next role, it’s the first thing people look at you and go, “I love it. I’m so glad I hired you for this role because you brought XYZ to the table.”
Suja Ramachandran: So figure out what those things are. And it almost goes back to that self-advocacy. When you’re marketing yourself, you’re talking about your pitch on what you’re really good at, know what those skills are that are transferable. That you can pitch to others. And what you truly are excellent at. You want to be able to work backwards from that. And figure out how to get there.
Teniola Adedipe: Love that.
Belisa Mandarano: And one last thing that I would add is, does it excite you? Like Suja said, if it’s something that you’re good at, but you could potentially be great at, it’s best to have that if you’re excited about what that opportunity is. Because that’s really going to show when you go to try to sell yourself. If it’s something that you can put your whole heart into and really believe in, that is going to show when you present yourself out. So that’s what I would add.
Suja Ramachandran: Great call out. I’m so glad you brought that up. That’s good.
Teniola Adedipe: Great. So, you guys, we are at time. So I know this hour has flown by. I want to thank all of our panelists for taking the time out. And thank you for all the great questions that you guys submitted in the chat and Q&A. So I know Amy just dropped in the chat, “There is a breakout rooms for networking.” So please feel free to click the link and go to the breakout rooms and kind of meet each other. And some of our panelists may join those as well. But just wanted to say thank you all for joining us. And I will pass it back over to Amy, if you have any parting words.
Angie Chang: Awesome. I learned so much. Thank you, Gap girl geeks for giving us such amazing advice on career mentorship. Our spidey sense, I really liked that. I’m going to listen to my spidey sense in 2021. We are going to be going over. And yes, Gap is hiring. We have an email coming out after this event. We usually do surveys. And in that survey, there are the jobs that Gap is hiring for. And they want to hire you. So please check them out. And if you want to hang out with us for the next hour, we will be doing networking in small groups. So it’s great for introverts like me, where we get into groups of four to six Girl Geeks. And we chat for about 20 minutes in each room on a topic that we set. So for example, a career challenge advice. So click on the link in the chat. And then I’ll see you on the Zoom meeting where we’ll be have having those breakout groups. Thanks for coming.
Teniola Adedipe: Thank you guys.
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Transcript of Cadence Girl Geek Dinner – Lightning Talks:
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Hi everyone, welcome to our Girl Geek Dinner tonight.
Angie Chang: We have an hour of talks tonight for you, from really amazing women at Cadence, and they will be sharing what they’re working on, and also, they have amazing career advice.
Tahrina Ahmed: Tonight, I will talk about Tensilica, a platform that lets computer enthusiasts to create their own [inaudible] specific processors, DSPs, AI accelerator, ensuring most optimized power performance, and area efficiency. And I’m glad to be here, with all of you, my fellow girl geeks.
Sanjita Chokshi: I took the tough decision to press that pause button, in professional side, and today, here I am to share with you all that journey, and what it looked like, coming back to work. Hopefully, it will help some of you, maybe now, or in future.
Rania Hassan Mekky: Today, I’d like to talk to you about a block that has a lot of importance in our daily life, which is SerDes. If you ask yourself what is SerDes, I can tell you that you have kinds of it, at home.
Neeti Bhatnagar: In this world, in this very technical world, in order to succeed in building the next generation engineering product, that ability to zoom into technical details when you need to, and then zoom out to create the larger strategy and vision for the next generation technology is a must.
Alessandra Costa: Think about, if you walk in the hallways of your company, your college, will you be recognized? Are you a familiar face? Will people trust you if they see you? They’ll think, “Oh, okay, so Alessandra, this is a person I can trust.” Lead by example. And so, without further ado, just do it.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Hi everyone, welcome to our Girl Geek Dinner tonight. I’m Sukrutha, from Girl Geek X, we’re seeing so many people coming in, and joining in right now, and that’s amazing. Angie is here, as well. So, a little bit of back history. Angie and I used to, pre-COVID, commute to Girl Geek Dinners all across the Bay area, so each event, each dinner is sponsored by a different company, and post-COVID, we’ve been doing this virtually. So here we are. Angie, would you like to introduce yourself?
Angie Chang: Yes, sorry. Every time I get in Zoom, I feel like they changed something on me, so thank you. Sorry for being a little late today. My name is Angie Chang, and I am the Founder of Girl Geek X, along with Sukrutha. We’ve been hosting these events in the San Francisco Bay Area for over 13 years now. Thank you, LinkedIn, for telling me all the time how many years I’ve been doing this.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: (laughs)
Angie Chang: [inaudible] That’s because we have so much fun going to different companies, when we’re not in a pandemic, and eating their food, seeing their office, talking to people who work there, and then most importantly, hearing and learning from women on stage, who are working on the tech, who are leading departments, and teams, and sharing their tips and tricks, as well as what’s going on, or the new processes and products that they’re working on. But we also love meeting girl geeks, in the networking sessions. So that’s why we have, now, since we’re in a pandemic, we do these on Zoom, and we have a networking session to follow.
Angie Chang: So, we have an hour of talks tonight for you, from really amazing women at Cadence, and they will be sharing their … what they’re working on, and also, they have amazing career advice. So, I learned something, and I think she’ll share it later, but it was a Girl Geek Dinner that someone learned about a returnship, from. So, I was really excited to hear that people are going to Girl Geek Dinners, and they’re learning new things, and continuing to come back, as speakers. It’s really inspiring to see that. Full circle. What else is new? So … we have-
Sukrutha Bhadouria: What else is new? We have potential … we are going to have a female Vice President of this country, which is huge.
Angie Chang: Yes, Madame Vice President, we … I was like, “Oh my God, we have to do something.” So we made some schwag. If you’re familiar with our cute pixel people, we have a new one, celebrating the woman who is going to be in the White House. So we have some schwag available on our website, we have face masks, so you can be very safe, and you can also buy hoodies, and you can get some throw pillows, bumper stickers that talk about how a woman’s place is in the White House, and the Senate. And women deserve to be in places where decisions are made, so you can find those all on our website, at GirlGeek.IO, and all proceeds for those products will be going to Fair Fight, since we believe in fairness.
Angie Chang: So, I think it’s time to introduce our first speaker, her name is Annamarie, and she is the Vice President of Culture and Talent at Cadence. She believes that employee engagement is not a nice to have, it is a key ingredient to creating a great company, and a high performance culture. She holds a JD from Santa Clara University of Law, and a BA in Sociology from UC Santa Cruz. Welcome, Annamarie.
Annamarie Dunn: I can just speak, if that’s okay? Sorry I’m not able to show up there.
Angie Chang: No worries. I know Zoom is like, changing every week, there’s always some new quirk, that we’re like, “Why is this happening?” So, sorry about that.
Annamarie Dunn: Oh, that’s okay. Well, I really just wanted to welcome everyone, and we’re so excited to partner with Girl Geek and highlight our talented innovators at Cadence, to show how they’re helping us solve technology’s toughest challenges. These six women are strong technologists and leaders at Cadence, and so I’m really excited to hear their lightning talks this evening, and for some of you, this morning, around the globe.
Annamarie Dunn: Just a little bit about Cadence, we are a leader in electronic design innovation, we’re building on more than 30 years of computational software expertise, and we’ve also been on the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For list, for six years in a row, and on their World’s Best list, for five years, highlighting our strong culture.
Annamarie Dunn: Women have played an important role in the advancement of technology throughout our 30 year history, and we’re committed to empowering women across the globe, and elevating more women in technology. Thank you so much, Girl Geek, for the chance to showcase the accomplishments and expertise our speakers bring to the field. And with that, I’ll turn it back to you, to introduce our first speaker.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: All right, so next up is our speaker, Rania. I’m going to do a quick intro. Rania is the Principle Design Engineer at Cadence, she will share about SerDes, a hardware IP that is responsible for transmitting and receiving data. Recently it has been used in several serial link applications like PCI Express, HDMI, and USB. Welcome, Rania.
Rania Hassan Mekky: Hello everyone. This is Rania Hassan-Mekky, I am a Principal Design Engineer in the [inaudible] group. Today, I’d like to talk to you about a block that has a lot of importance in our daily life, which is SerDes.
Rania Hassan Mekky: The outline of this presentation is Data Transfer, Examples of SerDes, Applications, SerDes Definition, Advantages and Disadvantage, History and Future of SerDes, and finally, Conclusion.
Rania Hassan Mekky: Data Transfer. Just ask yourself one question. Do you think how much data you are transmitting and receiving every day? The online meetings, the Zoom meeting, downloads, video streaming, it’s a lot. All this come with heavily infrastructure of network and server kit that serves this purpose.
Rania Hassan Mekky: We have one fast train that is responsible for transmitting and receiving all this data, which I’m going to talk about it in this presentation. I call it SerDes.
Rania Hassan Mekky: If you ask yourself, what is SerDes, I can tell you that you have tens of it, at home. It’s not new. One of the SerDes that you already know is USB, Universal Serial Bus. We all have some of it. This is maybe one of the very famous SerDes probably you have some on your hand, right now.
Rania Hassan Mekky: And it got evolved with time, it’s not only for transmitting the USB data and giving power to systems, but also now we can transmit high definition video, on the type C USB.
Rania Hassan Mekky: It’s not only USB, is the SerDes that we have. We have also other application like PCI Express, it’s widely used in graphic cards, artificial intelligence, and- and machine learning. CCIX it’s used in high performance computing. XAUI, it’s widely used in networking, and ethernet. And SATA, which is famous for storage.
Rania Hassan Mekky: So, what is SerDes? SerDes stands for Serializer Deserializer. Serializer means that a transmitter that takes a parallel data and convert it to serial, and send it to a media. Like, let’s say for example, like a chip, like what’s shown in this photo. Say that we’re going to get 16 bin out of this chip, and say that let’s make this as communication channel. So we will send 16 bit per second.
Rania Hassan Mekky: Instead of using 16 dedicated bins to do so, and of course, 16 BCB trace, we’re going to convert the parallel data to serial, and just use one bin, and eventually one BCB trace.
Rania Hassan Mekky: Deserializer is exactly the opposite, it’s the receiver. It will take the serial data, and convert it back to parallel for it goes to processing.
Rania Hassan Mekky: So, the advantage of this technique is less pin count, instead of using the 16 bit, the 16 bin, we’re going to use just one bin. However, we still need to transmit the data at the same amount, so if this 16 bit was meant to be transmit in one second, we still need to get the communication channel fast 16 times, to transmit the same amount of data then the same time.
Rania Hassan Mekky: We again have the first disadvantage, that we have to speed up the communication, less bit communication, and this will come with faster clocks. So, using faster data clock means that we have to increase the power, and here we’re going to have another trade off. Given that that clock will be faster, then we really have to make it running with lower power.
Rania Hassan Mekky: Another thing that we can use to help us with the challenges that we facing from getting the clock faster, and the power lower, that we can move to advanced technologies, like, say, instead of using 65 nanometer technology, for example, we can go for lower, like 28, 12, 16, something like this. And we still, we’re going to have some challenges in the design and the architecture itself.
Rania Hassan Mekky: So, let’s talk about the history and future for SerDes. Here we have a graph, for the data rate versus years for the [inaudible] data for ISSCC 430s. The green dots, these ones, represents PCI Express, the cyan dots represents storage, and the orange dots represents video.
Rania Hassan Mekky: We can see that at early beginning of series, at 1995, there was as slow as just one gigabit per second. And as time just goes, it just keep going faster and faster to the right top of the curve, here that we can [inaudible] and find that the PCI Express now is running at 72 gigabit per second.
Rania Hassan Mekky: Not only getting the clock faster and using advanced technologies and advanced design will help in the development of SerDes. We had also another breakthrough in this technology, which is a change in the modulation. Changing the modulation from [inaudible] to zero, which was the most used modulation in all techniques, to band four, pulse amplitude modulation four, that easily can double the rate. We can go from 28 gigabit per second, to 56 gigabit per second just by changing the modulation. And this will come at the cost of … more advanced architecture and more advanced designs.
Rania Hassan Mekky: This can go not only to 56, getting everything combined, it can lead us to a faster SerDes at 112 gigabit per second, not only making it high speed, but customers need other stuff, too. Needs more flexibility and configurability. We at Cadence can provide a multi-protocol SerDes that has different links that each link can be configured to serve as a certain protocol, like the photo that we’re seeing here, that we have four different lanes, that each one can be configured. Like, one to serve as a PCI Express, one to serve as a CCIX, one to serve as SATA, or whatever. This will provide more SOS configurability, maturity, flexibility and ease to use.
Rania Hassan Mekky: To summarize, you have SerDes at home, I am pretty sure of that. It’s an essential block that we use every day. Not only for the less bin counts, and fewer communication channels, it open the lead for more data to be transferred. More design challenges from faster clocks, needing lower power, using band four, and all this opens a new era for innovation. Thanks so much for your attention, I’m going to give the mic back to Angie.
Angie Chang: Awesome. Thank you. That was an excellent talk on the importance of SerDes. So, our next speaker is Sanjita, and she will be talking about jump starting her career after a care taking break. She is a lead application engineer at Cadence, and she’s a member of Cadence’s first return to work initiative, and she’ll share her experience tonight about getting back into the tech world after choosing to be a full time Mom for four years, and how her returnship, what enabled her to go back to designing cutting edge Cadence tools. Welcome, Sanjita.
Sanjita Chokshi: Thank you, Angie. Hello, everyone. My name is Sanjita. Glad to here with you all, virtually today. I joined Cadence as a returnee, as Angie mentioned. And before I took this role, I have tried my hands at different engineering fields in industrial automation, to wireless, to various software fields, before I finally realized and settled down with ASICs, which is also popularly known as silicon chips.
Sanjita Chokshi: On personal front, I am a mother of two boys, and a first generation immigrant, which means life is something … and my presentation is stuck. Oh. There you go. That’s my life. You’ve got to be the village, for your child, raising them here, and my only ally being my husband, life was full and I somewhere felt like I am not able to juggle enough and give the kind of attention I wanted to give to my kids.
Sanjita Chokshi: At one point, when they were going through crucial transitions in their lives, I took the tough decision to press the pause button on professional side. And today, here I am to share with you all, that journey and what was it like coming back to work? Hopefully it will help some of you, maybe now, or in future.
Sanjita Chokshi: What was it like? As I look back, I realize the most important part of this whole journey was managing my thoughts, and my decade long meditation habit has played a very crucial role in that aspect. Constant thoughts of, “Oh, what will people think of me? Am I making the right decision? Am I losing out on my career?” This whole circle of fear, negativity, anxiety, meditation really helped me to keep [inaudible].
Sanjita Chokshi: Over time, it was multiple different times, at points of time, that I had to remake that decision and reevaluate my choices. At the end of it, I realized one thing. I became completely unapologetic about the choices I had made. I stopped explaining to people why I took the break, why I chose to be a stay at home Mom. I could accept within me, that I have done this for myself and not for others. And all that was thanks to a meditation. I strongly recommend for any challenges you’re going through in life, this was one thing that worked wonders.
Sanjita Chokshi: Realize one more side effect of being on a break, I had a lot of time for myself. I could dig deeper, and that was the time when I really spelled out and embraced my strengths. As a result, when I decided to go back to work, I was very clear on what I bring to the table, what I have got to offer. That positive outlook, that confidence, my own confidence in myself was something I felt was the very foundation, when I decided to go back to work.
Sanjita Chokshi: More than any other [inaudible] and catching up to technology, this was the part that really gave me the jumpstart. One more thing that I would like to mention, I feel looking back, that helped, was continuous learning. As I was on a break, it was not technology, but then I learned a new language, I picked up gardening, to permaculture. At one point, I even considered a career as a edible landscape designer. I explored spice mixes, I picked up things I knew nothing about. That was the joy of learning.
Sanjita Chokshi: Now, as I join back, I am learning new tools, new methods, new stuff every single day, and all those things together, I feel is playing very crucial role, as I come back from my break, to start the journey again, in the corporate world. All in all, this is what I was, as a result of all these three things, in my break.
Sanjita Chokshi: As I decided to come back, get back to work, my very first thing was, I started going out, and when I say it, I really mean it. I attended almost 40 events, Angie was mentioning about Geek Girl. Over six months, 40 events, Geek Girl was on top of that list. Back in the day when life was more normal, and events were in person, it was a lot more fun. I look forward to see how it works in breakout rooms, now.
Sanjita Chokshi: I attended a lot of women-centric events wherein I got to meet with the whole range of women in tech, which was pretty unusual experience for me, because all this time, wherever I worked, there were very few women around me. So this was a really liberating experience. I learned a lot on semiconductor focused events, as well, on where the world is going, that gave me a perspective on how market has moved and where things are going forward.
Sanjita Chokshi: At the same time, I connected with a lot of people, learned a lot from other women. At the same time, learned about returnship initiative, which I knew nothing about. I realized, this was something … for people who don’t know what this is, lot of corporates have started programs wherein, it’s like internship, but meant for professionals who have prior experience and they have decided to take a break, to take care of family. So it was tailor made for me.
Sanjita Chokshi: Another thing that I did, and discovered more on LinkedIn, there is a setting that you are open to opportunities. As I turned that on, recruiters started reaching out to me. A few of the things, already I could see there’s a lot of traction in the market. I had to just prepare myself, and I knew that it was a process of going and finding the right match.
Sanjita Chokshi: I started talking to people and I realized, even when there is a 10 or 20% match, they are willing to engage with me, and talk forward. As I was going through all those experiences, I realized, it’s only a matter of time when I find my right match. And sure enough, I see a rec one day on LinkedIn, from Cadence, which was 100% match. I look at the job description, I look at the requirements, the minimum three years of break, three years of experience, and two years of break. I fit right in.
Sanjita Chokshi: By then, I was already ready to face that interview, and I knew that the job is going to be mine. What was life at Cadence like, as I joined? It was a 16 week program that gave me perfect time to ramp up where I had left off. In my previous job, I was a design engineer. I took customers’ designs, made it work on the silicon, as [inaudible], and the goal was to make it first time right. And I had met it 100% success rate.
Sanjita Chokshi: Now, in this job, I was offered to do the same, make it happen for the customers who are using Cadence’s state of the art technology leading tool set. So, I started with the product training first, and then I got on-the-job training, wherein I got to see, A, what is the real life experience in this job, as an application engineer, which was really going on the other side of the table.
Sanjita Chokshi: I found one thing, working at Cadence, that was one Cadence – one team, this motto that they are writing trickled down everywhere, across the teams. It was about collaboration and achieving success as a team. And I felt right at home, being in that culture. So at the end of 16 weeks, when management offered me a full time position, it was a no-brainer, for me. I knew this was the place where I’m going to be happy.
Sanjita Chokshi: Another thing that drew me was management’s commitment towards employees. This is real, they were not just talking about it. I could see it, they were walking the talk. Second thing was, focus on women. This was my first job, actually, never seen anything like this in any other company, the kind of focus that is there, on women. I am yet to finish my five months in this company, and this is the sixth women-centric event that I am attending. That tells they’re really walking the talk.
Sanjita Chokshi: All you ladies out there, one thing I would say is, make the bold choices, be confident in what you’re choosing for yourself, and go for it. Cadence is hiring, if you are matching, whether any of the profile you have the skillset, this is a place to be. One more thing I would like to put out there is returnship. See if your company is also open to starting programs like this. It’s a win/win for both sides. Down the road, it will offer professionals like us that crucial choice at some part in our life when we feel that juggling of too many balls is too much. Even the professional life ball can also be put down, temporarily.
Sanjita Chokshi: So with that, I would like to thank you all. And thank you, Angie, for giving me this opportunity here, and the platform.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you so much, that was such an interesting and personal story to share. We always are hearing more and more about people wanting to take a break, but then being afraid about how that will impact their career also. It’s especially important to share your side of the story, as well. Thank you so much.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: All right, so our next speaker is Tahrina Ahmed. Tahrina is a senior director at the Design Enablement Group in the Tensilica IP group at Cadence. So yeah, welcome Tahrina.
Tahrina Ahmed: Good evening, everyone. I’m Tahrina Ahmed, senior director of Design Enablement Group at Tensilica IP, in Cadence Design Systems. A little bit about myself. My academic career and professional background is in computer architecture. I completed my PhD from Stanford University, where my thesis was on distributed domain specific architecture.
Tahrina Ahmed: Well, from very young age, I had keen interest in math and logic that later led on to my love for engineering. And I’m glad to be here with all of you, my fellow Girl Geeks. Tonight I will talk about Tensilica, a platform that lets computer enthusiasts to create their own domain specific processors, DSPs, AI accelerator, ensuring most optimized power performance and area efficiency.
Tahrina Ahmed: In this presentation, I will cover the basics of embedded systems, followed by the definition of hardware and software co-design. Then I will go over a concise technical overview of Xtensa architecture, a quick guide to build and customize Tensilica processors and DSPs. And finally, I will end with some PPA data.
Tahrina Ahmed: Tensilica develops IP blocks to be included on the chip designs, such as a system on a chip for embedded systems. So, what is an embedded system? An embedded system is a microprocessor based computer hardware system, with software that is designed to perform a dedicated function, either as an independent system, or as a part of a large system.
Tahrina Ahmed: Some of the key characteristics of embedded systems are low cost, lower power, with high efficiency, high reliability and minimal user interface. Cadence Tensilica processors and DSPs are based on Xtensa architecture that exploits hardware-software co-design.
Tahrina Ahmed: To implement hardware and software co-design, the developers need to specify, explore, refine a flexible design strategy. It enables hierarchy of models at different abstraction levels, with hardware and software iterative interaction. After evaluating PPA trade offs, the developer finalize the design.
Tahrina Ahmed: Essentially, two major requirements for the design practice are first, each developer to embed their own design specification. Second, hardware with optimal PPA, tuned for application software.
Tahrina Ahmed: So now let’s delve into Tensilica solutions. Tensilica based architecture is a 32 bit reduced instruction set architecture, with low gate count design, which is around 20K gates for a five stage pipeline. The base instruction set supports 24 bit, as well as 16 bit encoding. Thus, the modeless 24/16 intermixing provides great code density.
Tahrina Ahmed: This architecture comprises efficient branch instruction. For example, combined compare and branch, zero-overhead loops, etc. For bit manipulation, it [inaudible] funnel shift, bit test and branch, field extract operations, etc. As mentioned earlier, that Xtensa is a flexible architecture by design. The robust nature of this architecture allows designers to scale from tiny low powered micro-controller to high performance VLIW controlled CPU. Designers can extend performance further, with application specific single instruction multiple data, very long instruction work, and IO features.
Tahrina Ahmed: So, how can you build your own unique processor and DSPs? If you have access to the basic [inaudible], using the Xtensa processor generator interface, you can choose from pre-configured templates. Then simply configure utilizing the click button features, and only include what your application needs. For example, the application could benefit from half precision, single precision operations, single or multiple load store or FMAO needs. Similarly, you’ve got a very wide range of data types, from eight to 64 bits. You can choose from 20 plus application specific DSPI cells.
Tahrina Ahmed: Finally, you can customize adding instructions, and/or IOs to meet application requirements and optimize and differentiate. So the bottom line is, with Tensilica solutions, it is easy to build, easy to optimize, easy to program. You get one development environment, with automated tools generation. And you always get to write your program in C, you don’t have to worry about assembly coding.
Tahrina Ahmed: So here’s some of our automation utilities that make the development experience seamless for processor designers. Essentially, you start with Tensilica ID that provides you with base processor, which is dozens of templates for many common applications, in addition to pre-verified options. For example, off the shelf DSPs, interfaces, peripherals, debug, etc.
Tahrina Ahmed: You can customize your own IP by creating your own instructions, data types, registers, interfaces. Then using the [inaudible] interface, within minutes you develop complete hardware design, and simultaneously, you have access to advanced software tools. Even customization is is highly coherent and straightforward with Tensilica Instruction Extension Language, that is also known at TIE language. This high level language helps you to describe hardware and software aspects of instruction extension.
Tahrina Ahmed: The TIE compiler generates software tools such as compiler, debugger, simulator. It also generates RTL and implementation flows. So now I’m going to show you this chart, that illustrates how by tuning processor ISA for application specific characteristics, developers can achieve PPA efficiency.
Tahrina Ahmed: Considering this best guess scenario, which is ATM header error correction application, by including less than 2K additional case, developers can get greater than 10 access data. How convenient is that?
Tahrina Ahmed: Even the use cases that require higher ideational date count suggest [inaudible 00:35:27] space conversion, by adding around 10K additional gates, you can still achieve around, in fact more than 4x speed up. Finally, when do you see our Tensilica processors and USBs? The good news is, our LX and NX controllers, and audio vision RLC DSPs have footprint in various products, in multiple segments, many of which perhaps you are using in your every day life.
Tahrina Ahmed: For example, in automotive, Bluetooth headsets, digital TVs and home entertainment systems, smart phones, smart speakers and [inaudible] devices. Yes. You name it, you could find Tensilica here.
Tahrina Ahmed: And with that, I would like to thank Girl Geek for giving me the opportunity to present Tensilica solutions in this event, and thank you all for joining this session. Back to you.
Angie Chang: Thank you, that was an excellent talk. So, our next speaker is Alessandra, who is the Vice President of North America Field Engineering at Cadence. She will share her journey, and what she learned along the way, with advice on leadership, insights on the importance of diversity in technology, and the inspiration to help you own your own personal brand to drive your career. Welcome, Alessandra.
Alessandra Costa: Good evening, everybody, and yeah, as was mentioned, my name is Alessandra Costa, and I manage the North America team, and I’m very proud to call Sanjita and Julia two of my members of my organization. Great presentations, you ladies were phenomenal.
Alessandra Costa: So, I’m switching a little bit, the gear from the technical side and actually, I am going to take you on a trip, on a trip to Africa. And this was us, my husband and I, in 2002. It was Fall, and we decided to go on a trip to Africa, and more precisely, Namibia. So we were extremely excited about the prospective of being gone for a couple of weeks, and then the week before leaving, I found out I was pregnant with my daughter.
Alessandra Costa: So, we really wanted a child too, but just we didn’t want the first trimester to coincide with the trip in a land that was far from home. There was a lot of debating, and lot of agonizing over the decision, and then we decided to go. So, we were reassured that the weather would be cool, because it was sort of Spring, there. We were actually going with a group of friends, and some of them I had known for quite some times, and one of them I didn’t know, at all.
Alessandra Costa: Then off we went, and unfortunately once we got there, things were quite different from the way we imagined. So, first of all, the temperature was the hottest Spring that they had in like, the previous 50 years. So it was extremely hot. The roads looked like the one you see here. Actually, some roads are paved with salt, and the terrain is not regular at all. The company, especially the person I didn’t know, was nightmarish.
Alessandra Costa: I would wake up in the morning, super hot, dry, but still super hot. I had the morning sickness. I was completely miserable and the people around me didn’t make my life better. So, every time I woke up, and you might imagine that the first thing I could dream about, could be some oasis along the way, or a final destination, in a hotel. No, all I was dreaming about was potato chips.
Alessandra Costa: Well, if you think about it, potato chips are salty, and that’s all I craved, actually, in the morning. I’m not a big fan of junk food, but I have to tell you, since then, potato chips have become my comfort food, actually, when I travel. You can imagine, my husband and I in this larger group, and every morning, being miserable, and every morning, just looking for the next stop, to get some chips.
Alessandra Costa: And some of the brands were completely unknown to me, and although I am fully convinced that Simba is a very nice guy, I was not willing to trust my morning sickness to a brand that I didn’t know. Okay? So, of course, in the shelves, among the unknown brand, there was something that I could easily recognize, and I felt comfortable with, which is Lays, of course.
Alessandra Costa: And why did I go for Lays? It’s because, again, it’s something that was familiar to me, because of course, in the US we see a lot of it. And it’s something I could trust. Of course, it’s kind of funny to trust junk food. But anyway, it’s something I could know, and I felt comfortable buying and eating.
Alessandra Costa: Now, talking about recognizable brand, can you guess the content of this can, even if you don’t read or speak Arabic? Normally when I do this presentation live, everybody recognizing this can, a can of Coke. Which is really interesting, because it means that their marketing is phenomenal, because the only thing that you can recognize really, again, if you don’t speak Arabic, is the fact that it’s a red can, it’s a particular red, right? But still, red can, white writing, and the swirl on the right, right?
Alessandra Costa: So, I think they do a pretty good job at just nailing these colors and the logo in your brain. If we look at the most valuable brands according to Forbes, which is quite a reputable source, these are the top 10. One thing that is really interesting to me, is that out of the top 10 brands, lots of them, actually, the majority of them, are actually high tech companies, which is very different from what was the reality maybe like, just 10 years ago.
Alessandra Costa: There are these big tech company that really came to the forefront of the scene, and they’re able to brand themselves to the public, and to possible employees. But what does it mean? How did Forbes rank the companies? It was based on three criteria. First of all, the financial performance of the company. Reputable company, good revenues, good margins. So that was the first thing.
Alessandra Costa: The second thing was really the weight of the brand on customer choices. Think about me, in Namibia, potato chips, I went for Lays, right? So, the brand definitely had a weight on my choice. Third, which is really interesting, is the premium, the price premium that companies can charge because of the brand. One example I like to bring up every time is, think about the Louis Vuitton bags. Especially the one with the monograms, the ones that are made of plastic, they are sold for hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollar, and it might be very high quality plastic, still plastic.
Alessandra Costa: Now, why branding is important, we talked about recognition, the can of Coke and that you can recognize it just by virtue of the colors, and of the brand, of the logo. Trust, we talked about me trusting junk food, then trusting potato chips. But also, financial value, meaning how much financial value is the brand bringing to a company. And last but not least is also inspiration. No matter where you stand on the political side, if you think about Kevin Kaepernick here in North America, he became the image person for a while, for Nike, and that was decided based on his political stand.
Alessandra Costa: So, companies spend a lot of money to make sure that you recognize their brand and you associate their brand to what they stand for. Well, how about people? That’s me when I was still going to the hairdresser, before COVID. If you think about yourself, and if you work for a company, or you’re in college, think about if you walk in the hallways of your company, your college, will you be recognized? Are you a familiar face in the environment that you work at? Will people trust you if they see you? Will they think, “Okay, so Alessandra, this is a person I can trust. I know she made some decision. I know that she delivers what she promises.”
Alessandra Costa: Financial value. If I think about Cadence, does Cadence see a financial value in me, and on the flip side, is Cadence willing to pay me the right amount of money for the job I do? And then, last not but least, let’s go through inspiration again. Will I be an inspiration for people around me? I certainly hope so, and especially for women in my organization and also outside of my organization.
Alessandra Costa: I want to share a few things that you ladies should focus on when you think about your brand. This is a presentation that normally I deliver like, in half an hour, 40 minutes, and so I am much more than this, but I just condensed, focusing on the most important thing. The first thing is really understanding the priorities of the company you work for, the group you work for, the priority of your manager, even. And then align what you do with the priorities of the companies.
Alessandra Costa: Sometimes, we like going and trying science experiment and we fall in love with a project, we fall in love with a topic, but then, does it matter for people around you? Does it matter for your manager? Does it add value for your company? An example I give, believe it or not, I love knitting, and I love also crochet. I do beautiful things, I believe so, right, that these things are beautiful. I do a lot of blankets, I have one in process, and I like to do it because I can see the result of what I do. There is something that I can touch, right? While my job is kind of immaterial. I don’t work on something and then I can just hold it in my hand.
Alessandra Costa: I do beautiful blankets, I make beautiful blankets. Perfect craftsmanship. Do you think my manager, who by the way, is the VP of Sales, of North America. So he carries basically half the revenue, of our company. Do you think he cares, if I show up at the one on one with my blanket and say, “Look, I’ve been working on this. Are you proud of me?” Of course he doesn’t care. Of course, this is an exaggeration, but every time you do something, think, “Is this valuable for my team? Is this valuable for my company?” And align.
Alessandra Costa: There are ways to align. You can listen to communication meetings, I mean, big organization, we have communication meeting, that our CEO, Lip-Bu Tan holds, we have communication meetings inside, smaller organization inside groups. In fact, my manager had a communication meeting this week. So listen to that. Learn the lingo. Learn what is important and one thing, and for especially the ladies that are part of my team, they know, I push everybody to listen to the earning calls. So, if you work for a public company, they have earning calls where they share, typically the CEO and the CFO, they share the data on how the company is doing. But above all, the analysts ask a lot of questions, about the company.
Alessandra Costa: And so, you’re going to learn very quickly, what matters to the executive of the company, and you’re going to learn how to translate those care abouts to your daily life. Okay? So, understand priorities and align with the priorities of your company. The second one, this is very much a female trait, I hear all the time, for example, when somebody tries to apply for a job, women typically, if they don’t check all the boxes, if they’re not perfect for every single thing, every single requirement of the job description, they don’t go for it. It is this quest for perfection that sometimes is really career limiting, for women.
Alessandra Costa: What you see here, this symbolizes to me the quest for perfection, sometimes imperfection being better than perfection, and this is a pottery technique that is typically in Japan, where something breaks, they fix it and yes, it was broken, but it looks even more beautiful than the original item. So, overcome the sense of the quest for perfection, because that’s detrimental to what you do.
Alessandra Costa: Last but not least, I am asked frequently, how do I change at work, compared to my life at home? Of course there are differences, I mean, the way I express myself, I do much more yelling, at home. You can imagine, right? Italian family. My husband is actually American, but two Italian women. One 100% Italian, the other 50% Italian. So there is a lot of yelling. I don’t yell at work. I try, actually, to customize my message depending on the people I talk to.
Alessandra Costa: But I myself, every single morning, I get up. I wash my face, I look at myself in the mirror, and I bring myself to work. I don’t bring another person, an avatar of what I am in real life. Okay? So, by the way, this is Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Now, there is much more than that, for sake of time, I’ll jump to the next thing. Everything I said, if you think about it, it applies equally to men and women. Why am I so keen on giving this presentation to women?
Alessandra Costa: It’s because we’re still a little bit behind, in the way we are represented, and so there is still a big gap between the opportunities we are given, the way we are paid, the political representation that we have, and the one that men have. So, again, for sake of time, I’m not going to go too much into this, but there is the World Economic Forum, it’s an international organization, measures actually what is the gender gap between men and women. As you can see, this year, so we’re talking about 2020, a woman is, let’s say, “worth” 69% of what a man is worth.
Alessandra Costa: So, we have similar opportunities when it comes, for example, to education. But when you look at economical participation, and above all, political empowerment, then we’re very behind. And so, if you think about how big is the progress that we have made since 2006 when they started measuring this, it’s only 4.6%. It’s a very detailed report. I encourage you to look at it, and also the data is split by country. We’re not doing very well in US, and we’re doing even more poorly in my country of origin, Italy.
Alessandra Costa: And talking about political representation, this is G20, few years back. The picture on the left is the original, the one is with men photoshopped out, three women are left. And one is the Queen, by the way. This is the G7, last year, G7 is the meeting of the seven most industrialized countries, in the world. And they send their representative, and here they are. How do you feel about being represented by these middle aged men? So, these people are speaking also on your own behalf.
Alessandra Costa: But alas, I had to change my presentation, because I had sent it a few weeks back. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel, and yes, Kamala, finally. This Vice President Elect, Kamala Harris. I was listening to her speech, and this is maybe the quote that impressed me the most, because it’s a quote that speaks about ambition, in a positive way, not in a negative way. Speaks about conviction, and speaks about seeing ourselves as deserving, and as having opportunity, even if other people don’t think we do, because they have never seen that before.
Alessandra Costa: But you know, women can have a place in technology. These are two women working on the ENIAC, the first computer that was created. But then what happened, women have sort of disappeared from the technology scene, and in my opinion, it starts at very early, it starts in childhood. If you Google “Best Toys for five year old girls,” look. I mean, it’s all pretend play, and it’s shopping carts and cute girls’ pots and pans. And nothing wrong with cooking, I like cooking. And on the right, look at how much more the toys on the right can influence decisions later in life. Okay? And why can’t men, can’t boys play with pot and pans and learn how to help around the house?
Alessandra Costa: Now, talking about women in high tech, the numbers are not great. 25% of computing jobs are held by women, only 25%. 50 plus percent of women are leaving their jobs in mid-career, and so I’m very proud of the returnship program that we launched, because we could find phenomenal application engineer like Sanjita.
Alessandra Costa: And in Silicon Valley, which is very liberal and advanced, only 12% of engineers in start up are women, and last but not least, only 11% of executive positions in Silicon Valley are held by women.
Alessandra Costa: Anyway, so I don’t want to just sit here and admire the problem, and just close with like, this sad and somber note, because there is a lot we can do. We can support our sisters. I hate the hearing, when that the worst enemies of women are women. So … I don’t buy into that. It comes from … think of scarcity, as if there was a limited number of resources, and if a woman makes it, the other one cannot make it. It’s a fight, with elbows in our faces. I don’t buy into that, because the possibilities are out there, and we need to be able to grab them. Share with younger women the passion for what we do. There are plenty of opportunities to be a mentor, too. I’ve been a mentor in my daughter’s school. Be vocal for women, who do dare to do it. It happens in meetings, it happens everywhere. We are interrupted, people talk over us.
Alessandra Costa: Like, for example, my boss doesn’t hear well, when there are a lot of people talking, so it’s nice when somebody says, “Okay, she’s talking,” or like Kamala Harris has said, right? I’m talking. And there are a lot of other organizations that can be supported worldwide. Girls Who Code, IEEE Women in Engineering, Girl Scout, you have the list there, and why not Girls Geek, too?
Alessandra Costa: So anyway, in conclusion, let’s go back to personal brand. Your personal brand is important. Is important for you, for your company, for your fellow human beings, for the women who are around you. Lead by example. And so, without further adieu, just do it. And with this, I’m done.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you so much, Alessandra. Next up is our next speaker, Neeti Bhatnagar, she is a senior software engineer and group director of System and Verification Group at Cadence. Welcome, Neeti.
Neeti Bhatnagar: Let me get started. Since I’m the last speaker of today, and I come after these wonderfully inspiring speakers, I’ll try and keep up. So, good morning, good evening, good afternoon, depending on which part of the world you’re dialing in from, today. Thank you for being here.
Neeti Bhatnagar: My name is Neeti Bhatnagar, and I’m the senior group director for leading Cadence’s product on virtual prototyping, hybrid software, code debug, code validation and so on. I’ve been with Cadence for about over 25 years now, and I’ve had a very rich career working as a technical leader in the R&D organization, driving innovation, especially where hardware meets software.
Neeti Bhatnagar: So, in my career, I’ve gone back and forth a few times between management and being an individual contributor. But across it all, I always had my geek, my technical hat on, because in this very technical world, in order to succeed in building the next generation engineering products, that ability to zoom into technical details when you need to, and then zoom out to create the larger strategy and vision for the next generation technology is a must. So you have to be able to go back and forth between the two.
Neeti Bhatnagar: I have an undergrad and a master’s degree in computer science. On a personal note, I’ve been privileged to come from a extended family of engineers, scientists, economists, including several women cousins who were pioneers and leaders in their chosen scientific fields. So, I never saw these limits. It never occurred to me to do anything else, especially since I loved math and physics in high school.
Neeti Bhatnagar: I’m the proud mother of a 23 year old machine learning researcher. Besides nurturing his passion for math and science, I’m really, really proud to have nurtured that sense of equality across genders. Because I’m very passionate about this, I truly believe it is our job as parents, to not only nurture that sense of equality in our daughters, but to do the same in our sons, because they play just as much of a role in making sure we have a more equitable world out there.
Neeti Bhatnagar: My husband is a senior executive in the tech world, as well. So, as two parents, as two working parents with demanding careers, our responsibilities at home as parents have never been fixed. It really adapted to the time and place, and depending on whose career was on hold, and who needed to travel, it really was a juggle. And I heard the wonderful stories from Sanjita, from Julia, about taking the break when you needed to. I am one of those people who didn’t take that break.
Neeti Bhatnagar: So, life, for the longest time was … I always thought it was just one tiny hair away from disaster. But you know, we got through it. And so to answer, to a lot of you young women who are thinking, “Can I do this?” Do it. Whether you take a break, that’s absolutely the right thing to do, if that’s what makes sense in your life. But persist, because kids grow up. And there is life after kids, and the juggling becomes better, and you have so much more time to do things you really want to, which in my case still happens to be very technical.
Neeti Bhatnagar: So, but kind of moving on to what I’m here to talk about, this is a technical talk. I’m here to talk about intelligent systems, and how they’re all around us, and the role that software, particularly, the growing role of software in these intelligent designs.
Neeti Bhatnagar:
As you know, we’re in this era of design, where intelligence has become integral to pretty much everything we’re doing, right? Learning systems that interact with our environment, and make decisions to optimize the experience of the user are pretty mainstream, now. And this has had a profound impact on design challenges and complexity. You have to consider performance, safety, low power and the cost, so you can deliver that value to the users, right? So, today, we’ll talk about one specific slice of that complexity, which is software.
Neeti Bhatnagar: You can see, intelligent design, especially a company like Cadence, where our job is to help the next generation design, pretty much anyone you can think about is using our software to design their next device, their next complicated electronic system. Intelligent design is really fueling the growth at some of these largest companies, right? It’s driving the design revolution. It is, you know, really a game changer, and it’s not limited to just autonomous … people are very familiar with autonomous vehicles and robots and drones, but the networking and the mobile space are also undergoing the same design revolution with the advent of 5G, you have these self organizing networks in the mobile space, and you have intelligent cloud and data center services that are a absolute necessity to manage that scale.
Neeti Bhatnagar: Intelligent devices are increasingly ubiquitous. This is a very wide range of devices, but examples of intelligent devices are everywhere. You may not even know what you’re using is an intelligent device. So, take modern hearing aids, or take things like built in, real time language translators that are showing up in many next generation devices and applications, so if you’re doing a meeting, and there’s somebody speaking in say, Hindi on the other side, and it could get translated into Mandarin, on one side.
Neeti Bhatnagar: So these things are becoming more and more common, and they’ll show up everywhere. And, of course, if you look at automotive systems, most of the new cars, without even going to autonomous driving, if you look at cars these days, modern cars, they all come in equipped with safety features like proximity sensors, so you get too close to a car, or a car gets too close to you, your sensors go off and alert the driver. Or you wander off from your lane, or even things like how your gears are being changed, that’s being done through intelligence. Much of this adaptive intelligent functionality is implemented through software that interacts with the underlying electronics, and hardware.
Neeti Bhatnagar: To make these intelligence devices deliver that value added experience, a lot of technical details have to come together. It requires high performance, power efficiency, and really, that perfect union between the hardware and software. Let’s take something pretty commonplace. I don’t know if you’ve recently taken a parent, or a child, or a spouse, or yourself to get one of these newer modern hearing aids? I took my mom recently to get one.
Neeti Bhatnagar: I was just blown away by how amazing these devices are. So they can adapt to any environment, they can sense are you in a crowded market space, or are you in a music concert? And then they adapt to mimic the functioning of a normal ear and brain interaction. For instance, if you’re in a concert and you’re listening to music, your brain automatically tunes out some of the ambient noises. So these devices are designed to do the same thing, so that you can maximize the experience of listening to that concert.
Neeti Bhatnagar: In order to do something like this, you need to determine, for instance, as a user, you want to know where that sound is coming from. So that the sound can be amplified in the right ear. In order to do that, it has to classify all the streaming signals. So it streams the full audio bandwidth in real time, bidirectionally, battling, challenging listening situations by simulating what the brain does with sounds from both ears.
Neeti Bhatnagar: For instance, if you get a loud sound and you’re crossing the street, and you hear a sound of a car from your right side, that device will amplify the sound in your right ear. All of this is accomplished by a combination of hardware and software. If that software and hardware don’t work perfectly together, the device doesn’t deliver the functionality for the user, and it can be life threatening.
Neeti Bhatnagar: A little bit about the specialty of this software, especially embedded software. It comes with its own unique set of challenges. The thing about it is, it’s fundamentally hardware dependent. So, many system related bugs can be tied back to this interdependence. Oftentimes, the software team which is developing the software, we talked about all of that adaptive functionality coming through software, these are software algorithms. But these are software algorithms very much designed to work with a specific hardware.
Neeti Bhatnagar: When the software team develops, they’re often developing to a spec, because the hardware is also under development at that time. Very often, the first integration between these two happens when the hardware design is already done. Now, what happens with the late integration is you find that the design functionality doesn’t work together, because they are out of sync with each other. Sometimes you have to respin the hardware design, which is very, very expensive, so this software kit becomes a challenge.
Neeti Bhatnagar: Therefore, it’s really valuable to verify the software with the hardware, before your hardware is committed and the cost of change increases. How do you do that? You do that through starting the software, even though the hardware’s not done, on something called a virtual platform. Now, what is a virtual platform, and how does it let you get this hardware and software integration started early?
Neeti Bhatnagar: The virtual platform is really a high abstraction model of your hardware. But it’s got enough of that interface details captured, that it lets you run the actual software unaltered. And what does this do for your project? Basically, the use of virtual platform enables that software development to begin nearly simultaneously with the hardware design. This is really key. We see across the board, more and more companies have huge delays, something like nine to 12 months in delay, because of the issues related to hardware and software integration.
Neeti Bhatnagar: In conclusion, intelligent designs are everywhere and they’re pervasive, and this is here to stay, and this really complicates our customers’ design challenges. You need power efficiency, you need high performance, if you’re doing something like autonomous driving, it’s all real time. And so, it’s not just hardware and software in one subsystem, these things are very complicated. There are multiple subsystems. They all have to work together in true perfection, because your life may depend on it. And you can’t just design the hardware, and then design the software, and then sign off on the hardware, before you’ve done this integration. Early software development and hardware/software integration has become a absolute reality, an absolute must. And these virtual platforms really help enable.
Neeti Bhatnagar: So, I want to close with a note that one of the most interesting parts of my job, and my team’s charter is to develop that most effective set of tools, technologies that help our customer surmount that hardware/software integration challenge. Thank you. Thank you for your time.
Angie Chang: Thank you, Neeti, that was excellent. So now we are going to be starting the break out sessions. We are going to be clicking on the link that will be going into the chat, that will be taking us to the Zoom meeting, down there. We will see you on the other side, and then I’ll explain more, once we get there, about how this is all going to work. We’re going to be in breakout groups with four to six girl geeks in each room, and we’ll have some prompts, some icebreakers, and we’ll get to know each other a bit. So see you in the Zoom meeting [for networking hour]!
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Transcript of Inflection Geek Dinner – Lightning Talks:
Angie Chang: Thank you for joining us tonight. I know there’s a lot of competition for what to do with your evening. It is time for our Inflection Girl Geek Dinner. I’m going to hand it off to our first speaker.
Mikaila Turman: Today, I hope to reach all of you, regardless of what stage of knowing and understanding your core values are. For those of you that said you know your core values, I want to challenge you to really, really, really think about how you would define your core values, if asked. Inflection’s core values of integrity, transparency, and innovation were significant drivers for why I came onboard with the company seven years ago.
Ellen Perelman: One of my favorite values is speed with rigor, which means that we move quickly, but we make sure that as we move and we make decisions, we use data to inform those decisions. In marketing, we rely on data a lot to answer key business questions and help us make decisions and measure our impact of our efforts along the way.
Mahu Sims: So, what a year this has been so far. 2020 has been a year of great challenges, and not to discount all the sad things that have happened so far, there was a lot of positivity. 2020 has made us more creative. I’ve seen people come together more now than ever before. From a year ago to now, my life did a complete 180. I learned a few invaluable lessons. My learnings fell into two general themes. If I, one, leaned into my challenges, and, two, always planned, there was no way I could fail.
Izzy McLean: By definition, it’s the application of new tech, emerging tech to solve regulatory and compliance challenges for businesses. So, I thought it might be a cool topic to chat about today, just so you can keep it top of mind in your own professional pursuits or at your own organizations.
Avanti Ketkar: When we make products, we want to think about our products from our customer’s perspective. We want to familiarize ourselves with the features and flows that are outside of [inaudible] expertise. Overall, just understanding our customers better makes us better engineers.
Mikaila Turman: If you are here networking because you’re looking for a new organization, and you’ve identified your core values, now you can take the next step and see organizations that align with you.
Angie Chang: It’s 6:00, and it is time for our Inflection Girl Geek dinner. Thank you for joining us tonight. I know there’s a lot of competition for what to do with your evening, but I plan to be reading the Twitter later, and seeing what happened. In the meantime, we are continuing with our fine tradition of Girl Geek Dinners for over 12 years in the San Francisco Bay Area. I’m based in Berkeley. Sukrutha is in San Francisco, and we’re really happy to be continuing this tradition of bringing women together across companies to hear from other incredible women, talking about what they do best, whether it’s HR, marketing, product management, engineering, you name it.
Angie Chang: So, we have a really great roster for you tonight of some of the amazing women from Inflection. First, I want to talk a little about what we’re working on at Girl Geek X. So, we have a virtual conference coming up. It is going to be March 8th, 2021, and we’ve been doing it for our fourth year now. It’s always been virtual. It’s been a full day of women talking about their new technologies, their leadership skills, and helping shout each other out, sharing what they have learned along the way, so that they can help you advance your career faster. Also, plenty of companies who are hiring also sponsor. So, they can have their speakers and their opportunities showcased to our community of 40,000 women in tech.
Angie Chang: Another thing that we have is podcasts. So, we have a great library of podcasts, which have the best of our Girl Geek dinners. They’re available on any of your podcasting services that you like to use. You can find Girl Geek X there. We have about 20-something podcasts there. You can also check out all of the events that we posted in the recent history. You can find our videos on YouTube. So, if you go to YouTube.com/GirlGeekX, you can find all our videos there, and you’ll also find tonight’s talks there in a few weeks, after we do some production, add some music, make it shorter. Feel free to loop back, and then send those videos to your friends.
Angie Chang: Also, I wanted to talk a little bit about how Inflection is hiring. I’m really excited, because when I saw the job listings, I was like, “Wow, there’s so many engineering, marketing, accounting, different roles in the tech company that they’re hiring for.” A lot of them are remote. So, I’m really excited that you can definitely apply for those jobs from anywhere around the world, and also hopefully share them with your friends, because we know in this pandemic women have been disproportionately affected, and unemployed, and in dire straits. So, please do feel free to share those job listings that are in your Zoom email, and I’m sure in a followup email. You’ll also see those job listings there. So, please feel free to share them with fellow girl geeks and anyone that needs that.
Angie Chang: So, let’s see. What else is there? I think that’s all we have for now. I’m going to hand it off to our first speaker, Mikaila, who is the Vice President of Human Resources at Inflection. She is a very skilled HR professional, who’s been working for over 16 years, and has been at the company for over seven years. She is passionate about cultivating and maintaining the culture, and intently focused on upholding the core values of Inflection, which she’ll be talking about next. So, I wanted to welcome Mikaila. Here we go.
Mikaila Turman: Hello, everyone. Hi. I’m Mikaila. Thanks so much. It’s great to see you and be with all of you tonight. As Angie mentioned, I’m the VP of HR at Inflection for the past two years, and been with the company for seven. Just a little bit about Inflection. In 2006, Inflection was started by two brothers, Brian and Matthew Monahan. They created and rolled out several people data-driven products over their tenure, most notably, Archives.com, which was later sold to Ancestry.com. Over time, other online people search products have emerged, such as PeopleSmart.com, which was a B2C subscription-based service and the bread and butter of our business for several years, and where the concept of GoodHire began.
Mikaila Turman: In 2018, the brothers handed the Inflection reins over to our current CEO, Mike Grossman. Since then, our primary product focus has been on GoodHire.com and our associated APIs. GoodHire is the easiest, most flexible, and most delightful employment background screening experience you can find. Yes, that’s directly from our website. As the VP of HR for Inflection, I’m also a GoodHire customer. In HR, I usually say, “Nothing is ever easy,” but I love GoodHire because it truly makes background checking easy. Currently, GoodHire has assisted about 80,000 organizations with their background checking needs.
Mikaila Turman: As Angie was referring to, open positions, Inflection has open positions in various departments, and we’re diligently focused on having an inclusive workplace and on increasing the diversity of our workforce. To quote our D&I statement, “We believe in empowering everyone to be themselves at work, so we can be better together.” Please check us out, and our open positions out, at Inflection.com or GoodHire.com. We’ve also recently partnered with TheMuse.com as well, if you’re familiar with that. So, you can check us out there, too. Okay. Now moving on to core values.
Angie Chang: Quick question. Is there slides that are supposed to be displayed right now?
Mikaila Turman: Yeah. I’m sharing my screen right now. Hopefully everyone can see that.
Angie Chang: Perfect.
Mikaila Turman: Okay. So, core values is a topic that I am truly passionate about for two main reasons. One, Inflection’s core values of integrity, transparency, and innovation were significant drivers for why I came onboard with the company seven years ago. I got recruited to Inflection by a previous coworker. As I looked at the website … Of course, we all do that. I interviewed with various leaders in the organization. The as-advertised core values were truly apparent in the people that I met with. As I look back now, my previous company had a decent mission statement, but it wasn’t rooted in core values. I would venture to say that the customer is always right was their core values, which does make sense for a staffing company, and you think it’s okay until you’re told you shouldn’t bother recruiting people of color for certain clients, because, well, the customer is always right.
Mikaila Turman: One of my best friends still works there. Data shows that a best friend at work is a shoe in for employee retention. But I’d argue the data and say core values may just be more important. Two, I’ve been in HR now for 16 years, and I’ve, obviously, seen a lot of people come and go in my organizations, and for various reasons. But I believe a person’s decision to stay with a company or leave a company always connects to core values, one way or the other. It’s basically like the Seven Degrees of Kevin Bacon.
Mikaila Turman: Stop for a minute, and think about this. Core values, as I say the words, core values, I know that some of you who are out there immediately said to yourself, “What are my core values?” Some of you said to yourself, “Self, I know my core values. Right?” Some of you said to yourself, “I know my core values. They’re honesty, integrity, grit, work-life balance,” yada, yada, yada. Today, I hope to reach all of you, regardless of what stage of knowing and understanding your core values are. For those of you that said you know your core values, I want to challenge you to really, really, really think about how you would define your core values, if asked, and how those core values shape your life.
Mikaila Turman: During the interview process, I always ask, “What are your core values? Tell me examples of how I would see those core values displayed in your work.” I’m continually surprised how many people, at any level, are thrown off by those questions. The answer lies in you. You know this answer, if you’re willing to dig a little deeper. Let me express what core values mean to me, from an HR leader perspective. In an organization with well defined core values, transparency, integrity, innovation, accountability, those words should be the foundation in which employees perform, work, and behave. In order for that foundation to be solid, organizations should expect employees to uphold those values, and do something about it if they’re not.
Mikaila Turman: So, true confessions here. I’m an HGTV geek. So, the word foundation makes me think about the rare occasion when I actually get to sit down and relish in the joy of watching a house flipping show with a glass of wine. Inevitably, most of the houses with the crumbling foundation are the hardest to fix up. They end up costing a lot more money. Wow! How true is that, also, for an organization with crumbling foundation of core values? Okay. But there is good news. A house with a crumbling foundation can be fixed and repaired, and it ends up beautiful and way more valuable. Same for an organization. Right?
Mikaila Turman: Regarding back to my previous life before HR, I was a personal trainer. So, the term core always makes me think of six pack abs. But we all know now that core is everything under the service, the food we put in our body, the muscles we work, the chemicals interacting internally, all the things that get that external surface of six pack abs, hopefully. When you develop and understand your core values, they should be packed with deeper meaning. So, I define personal core values as the deep rooted beliefs that a person operates from, and are externally obvious. For example, if you asked my coworkers what one of my core values may be, I’m certain that they’d say, “Mikaila has a core value of family first. Her kids and her hubs are her priority. She will adjust everything else in her life to ensure her family comes above all else.”
Mikaila Turman: So, let’s step back to where I started. For those of you that said, “Self, what are my core values,” then think about when you wake up in the morning. What gets you out of bed? What gets you on that first Zoom call of the day? Why do you do those things, even when you don’t want to? Is it because of your core value of responsibility? Is it because of your core value of money? Is it your core value of teamwork? Think about what your family members, best friends, closest colleagues would say about you. Would they say you’re the family glue, the dedicated wife and mother? Would they say you always did the right thing? Would they say you work hard and play harder? What words would they use to describe you? Because those are the obvious core values you exude every day.
Mikaila Turman: For those of you that said, “I know my core values,” again, I challenge you to dig deeper into that, and define them. Actually write a definition. Have you fully considered what those closest to you would say about your core values? So, here’s an example. One of Inflection’s well defined core values, and my personal favorite, is the Golden Rule. We are intensely collaborative and treat one another as we want to be treated ourselves, with respect, civility, and empathy. Know your core values. Take the time to really define them, as if they are as important as updating your Instagram. I mean, your resume. Then use them as your superpower.
Mikaila Turman: If you are here networking because you’re looking for a new organization, and you’ve identified your core values, now you can take the next step and seek organizations that align with you. You can ask questions in your breakout sessions. “What are the core values of your organization? How could I possibly align?” If you are currently in a role at a seemingly good company, and you just can’t figure out why you are not satisfied, look at your company’s core values. Are you and your coworkers living up to them? Do they align with your own? Sometimes employees come to me and they are unhappy, and they can’t put a finger on it, or verbalize their frustration. In those instances, I ask them, “If you are honest with yourself, what is not working for you in this role? Where is the organization not upholding the core values, from your perspective?”
Mikaila Turman: Usually we can turn things around and take some actions to get back to good. But if it’s clear that a person’s core values are not well enough aligned with the organization’s, it doesn’t work, and that’s okay. Because a company has to uphold the core values of the organization, and the individual has to uphold their personal core values, as well. Thank you for joining us tonight. I hope this chat helped you think about your core values and dig deeper, so you can live your best life in your current adventure, or into a new one, maybe even at Inflection. With that, I’ll hand the virtual mic over to my colleague.
Angie Chang: So, our next speaker is Ellen. She is the Chief Marketing Officer at Inflection, and she has over 20 years of experience. She’s worked at large public companies, like Yahoo and Intuit, and also venture backed startups. She has a journalism degree from Northwestern and an MBA from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. Go Bears! Welcome, Ellen.
Ellen Perelman: Thanks. All right. Hopefully everyone can see my screen. Well, it’s great to be with you all tonight. I’m going to talk about marketing and numbers. When I first–wasn’t in marketing, I didn’t really necessarily associate marketing with numbers, but, in fact, I was pleased to discover that there’s a lot of data underlying marketing. In fact, as an organization, one of the things that Mikaila didn’t mention, we are a very data-driven organization. One of my favorite values is speed with rigor, which means that we move quickly, but we make sure that as we move, and we make decisions, we use data to inform those decisions.
Ellen Perelman: In marketing, we rely on data a lot to answer key business questions and help us make decisions, and measure the impact of our efforts along the way. We use data to answer questions such as how much money should we invest in a campaign? How is our website performing? What content should we create? How can we drive more revenue for the business? Today, I’m going to just walk you through a couple of examples of how we do this, some actual case studies, if you will. To set some context, we, as a business, marketing is responsible for driving a lot of leads. Leads is the lifeblood of our organization. Leads are prospective customers.
Ellen Perelman: We drive leads into the business primarily through our website. We use a variety of channels or sources to drive those leads, paid search, organic search, referring websites, partner relationships, et cetera. We drive those leads to our website, and then we work, in marketing, to either convert them to a paying user or to create what’s called an MQL, or a marketing qualified lead, which we pass on to our sales team, and then the sales team works to convert those leads into opportunities, and eventually to close deals and customers. So, that sets the context.
Ellen Perelman: So, next, I’d like to talk to you about paid search. Paid search is a really big channel for us. We spend a lot of money on paid search, but we spend it efficiently, and we are very intentional about how much we spend and where we spend it. So, to just provide some context for folks who may not be familiar with paid search, or how it all works, you probably have encountered paid search ads, if you spend any time on Google. At the top of the page when you do a search, you probably see an ad. I’ve got an example of one of our ads on the left side of the screen. We bid on placements. We have hundreds of keywords we bid against, and then we measure our performance with a few key metrics.
Ellen Perelman: One is impressions. How many times did that ad show up on a search result page? Clicks, how many times did people click on that ad? Those two metrics combine to form something called click through rate, which is our efficiency of converting impressions into clicks. Then CPC are the cost per click. How much do we pay for each of those clicks? That’s certainly important, as we think about how much money should we invest in paid search? Then we drive those clicks over to a landing page on our website, which I have an example on the right. Once the lead gets there, the person gets there, we look at a couple other metrics.
Ellen Perelman: One is the number of visits to the page. The number of visits that convert into a lead, meaning how many people filled out that form and hit the submit button. The conversion rate, which is just the efficiency of us converting visits into leads. Then how much do we pay for that lead? Because that becomes really important. So, let me put it all together. This is a lot of numbers and a lot of data on the page. Just to summarize how we think about this, we’ve got impressions, how many times our ad shows up. How many people clicked on it? How many of those clicks turn into leads? How much do we pay? How much is the applied rate we paid for those leads, based upon how much we paid per click? How effectively those leads convert into customers. In this case, this example here is 20%.
Ellen Perelman: So, from 24,000 clicks, we end up with 375 customers. Well, that’s interesting, but back to the original question, which is how much to invest? Well, in our company, we are very mindful of a 12 month revenue per customer. So, how much money can we expect to generate in revenue for that customer over a 12 month period? That would be an average customer. We operate under the model of we’re willing to spend as much as we can to break even. So, our costs equal our revenue. So, let’s just say, for example, that the cost … The 12 month revenue generated from that customer is $500. So, we’ll spend up to $500 to acquire that customer. That’s not just on media expense. That’s all expenses.
Ellen Perelman: So, there’s a mathematical equation there. The gist of it is that we’ll be willing to spend up to $100 for that lead, all in, to generate that $500 in revenue for that first year. So, with the example I’ve shown up here, we could actually spend more money, because we’re not hitting that break even number yet. The key to this, interestingly enough, if you look at the math, it’s that conversion rate, that 20% conversion rate from a lead to a customer. The better we are at converting that lead into a customer, the more money we can spend.
Ellen Perelman: Let me share with you another example. As I mentioned, once we get that lead to the website, how effectively can we convert that lead into a paying customer? So, what I have up here on the screen are the steps on our website that a prospect would follow, from submitting a lead to selecting a background screening package, to maybe choosing to add on some additional options to that package. So, adding more to the shopping cart, if you will. Eventually, giving us a credit card and purchasing that background check. Now, what I’ve included at the bottom, these are all example numbers. These aren’t real numbers. Let’s assume that 10,000 people made it to that page where they could fill out the lead form.
Ellen Perelman: Let’s say we have tools that allow us to measure this. 50% drop off and never complete that stage. So, that means at the next step there’s only 5,000 visitors that make it to the select package page. Another 50% drop off. So, then 2,500. Another 75% drop off. So, the final page, 625 people make it to the page where they’re going to actually purchase a background check. Then only 15% of those actually end up purchasing. So, starting at 10,000 visits, that means out of every 10,000 visits, with this example, 94 paying customers, or a 1.9% MQL, or marketing qualified lead, to purchase conversion rate.
Ellen Perelman: So, what we’re trying to do every step along the way is to improve the conversion rate. Right here, what I want to show you is we do a lot of AB testing. So, right now, this is actually a live AB test we have in place right now. We’re trying to improve the conversion rate, getting more people to click on this page and move to the next page. This is a select package page. Now, these two pages, the control and test, might look similar to you, but there’s one minor difference, which appears to be minor, but it very likely could be a significant difference. That is on the example on the left, we do not have a description of the value or what the benefit of each package is.
Ellen Perelman: So, allowing people to make a more informed decision as to which package they should purchase. On the right we have descriptors. So, for standard on the left it says one to two business days. For standard on the right it says more comprehensive and up-to-date criminal records, one to two business days. Then how we’re going to measure the effectiveness of this test, again, back to conversion rate, is the percentage who make it to the next page, as well as the percentage who eventually make it to purchase, and the dollars they purchase.
Ellen Perelman: So, just a few key takeaways. Hopefully this came through. Conversion rate is key to everything. Optimizing conversion rate, meaning improving the conversion rate, allows us to drive more revenue and increase our budgets, and drive even more revenue. Small changes can sometimes yield really big payoffs. Thank you.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you so much. That was so insightful. Super helpful for all of us to learn and understand more, at least for me. I feel like I learned something new, and I always learn something new with every single Girl Geek dinner that we have. So, thank you so much for your time. Up next, we have our next speaker, Mahu Sims, who’s the Director of Marketing and Digital Marketing. She’s responsible for managing the marketing deck stack, reporting on marketing performance, launching digital campaigns, and maintaining the GoodHire website. She recently received an MBA from Rutgers and became a mom to a beautiful baby girl. Welcome, Mahu.
Mahu Sims: Hello. Happy to be here. Let me just share my screen. Great. So, I’m going to talk a little bit about the lessons I learned in 2020. First, since this talk is about both my personal and professional experiences, I thought I’d share a little bit more about myself. I’m the director of marketing operations and digital marketing at Inflection, as you heard, as of about a month and a half ago. I’ve been in technical marketing for about six years now. I currently live on the East Coast in New Jersey with my husband, Muta, my four-month-old baby girl, and our three-year-old Goldendoodle. I love hiphop dance, reading, exploring new tech platforms and gadgets. A fun fact about myself is that I made it to a green belt in karate as a child, and I’m looking to get back into it.
Mahu Sims: So, what a year this has been so far. 2020 has been a year of great challenges. Not to discount all the sad things that have happened so far, there was a lot of positivity. 2020 has made us more creative, and I’ve seen people come together more now than ever before. Personally, this year has been the most polarizing year of my life. I’ve faced some of my greatest challenges, and I’ve accomplished some of my biggest goals. Since I often like to learn and draw from the experiences of others, I thought it might be beneficial to share my 2020 story, and what I learned along the way.
Mahu Sims: About a year ago, in October 2019, I’d just landed a new role after working at my first company for about five years. I had finally decided to leave. A week after taking on that new role, we found out that we were pregnant. We were super excited, but I was also really nervous to enter the working world as a pregnant woman. One of my biggest fears going into 2020 was that I didn’t think I would be eligible for a company sponsored maternity leave. Now, that just seems silly. Jumping into 2020, we were hit hard right off the bat with bad news. Our baby girl was diagnosed with club foot. Club foot in itself isn’t that bad, but it could sometimes mean that your baby has larger chromosomal abnormalities, resulting in disorders like Down syndrome. So, we decided to take a test and find out. The whole time we were freaking out. We were relieved to find out that Nala was completely happy. She only had a club foot.
Mahu Sims: The next event in our life was another blow. Around March 3rd, I received a vague but demanding email from our HR team, stating that I needed to be at work the next day, and I could not miss it. For me, this meant one or two things. Either I was getting a promotion, or I was being laid off. It was, obviously, the latter. I was devastated. Being laid off is stressful, but I was also six months pregnant. Even though it wasn’t my fault, I felt like a complete failure. A few minutes later though, I pulled myself up by my bootstraps and went out to find a job. I gave myself a pat on the back because I found one in just three weeks. Due to COVID, my offer was converted into a contract offer. So, that didn’t give me the stability that I was looking for, but it was truly a blessing in disguise.
Mahu Sims: The next month my mom tested positive for COVID. Our family was extremely nervous, because we didn’t know much about the virus. We were happy though to find that she began to recover quickly. She ultimately recovered fully a few months later. We were forced to cancel our baby shower. In May, racial injustices against Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery had received national attention. This was tough for me, as a Black woman, but also as a mom-to-be. I was constantly thinking, “How do I explain to my daughter that she should be proud to be Black, but sometimes it was really hard?”
Mahu Sims: In June though, I finally got a win. I graduated from Rutgers Business School with my MBA. A few weeks later, this win was followed by a stressful birthing experience. We weren’t allowed to bring family and friends into the hospital, and we had several complications with delivery. Right on the other side of that stressful situation was a beautiful baby girl, who was happy and healthy. About a month and a half after delivery, I had to take a break from bonding with my baby 24/7 to focus my efforts on finding a full-time job again. In September, I started my role with Inflection, which has proven to be an amazing company. In October, we made another large life decision to finally move out of state to Georgia after debating for several months.
Mahu Sims: So, from a year ago to now, my life did a complete 180, but I learned a few invaluable lessons. My learnings fell into two general themes. If I, one, leaned into my challenges, and, two, always planned, there was no way I could fail. On the professional side, I learned that there were jobs out there, and getting one was possible. I managed to do it twice within just three months. I also learned that in order to get a new job that I loved, I had to own my job search. I had to think about what was most important about the location, the job itself, and the company that I worked for. In terms of location, I calculated that I spent over 2,000 hours commuting in my career so far. These hours were better spent with my daughter and family. So, I preferred working remote.
Mahu Sims: In terms of the job itself, it had to pass a passion and skills test. I was open to new roles, and I didn’t want to rely solely on my current experience. I wanted to find careers that I hadn’t thought about, but where my experience was transferable. So, I wrote down all the things that I’m passionate about and the things that I’m skilled at, and the list aligned to two types of roles: technical marketing and product management. I ended up in technical marketing again, but it was a fun exercise to do. Finally, the company that I worked for needed three things. One, a great product that customers love. Passionate employees that cared about the culture and core values. Finally, a company that cared about diversity and inclusion. I’m happy to say that I’ve found that at Inflection.
Mahu Sims: On a personal note, I learned to talk through tough scenarios. If I had the what-if conversations with my family about the tough birth, or potential defects, it could have reduced our stress in the moment, and we would have been better off for it. Finally, I needed to find ways to give back. With all that was going on in the world, this had become super important to me. So, as you’ve noticed, I’ve had many ups and downs this year. As a person prone to stress and anxiety, I needed to implement what I like to call my CORKSS framework to get through it. C stands for continue to plan. I planned through my job search and pregnancy. The more I planned, the better prepared I was. The more prepared I was, the less anxiety I felt.
Mahu Sims: I own my routine. I was extremely intentional with my time, even when I was unemployed. This meant setting time aside to learn, manage my job search, and even doing things like working out and reading. I remained introspective. I continued to inquire about my stress, asked myself why am I anxious? What can I control? I would try to ignore the things that I couldn’t, and go all in on the things that I could. I kept my physical health in mind. It’s super easy to fall into unhealthy patterns when you’re stressed out. But eating right and exercising actually made me feel better. Since I didn’t like to exercise all that much, I would pair it with something that I love. For example, I fell in love with the Hamilton play over the summer. So, I would watch it every time I worked out, which certainly increased the number of times I exercised.
Mahu Sims: Speaking to everyone. As I mentioned earlier, I love learning from the experiences of others. I joined various personal groups and professional groups, and managed to talk to as many people as I could about what they were going through. Finally, stay positive. It’s definitely harder than it sounds, but I try not to get consumed by the negativity around me. I would take breaks away from my phone to read a book, play a game, or hang out with my family uninterrupted. So, yes. 2020 has been tough so far. But I know that if I lean into my next challenge, plan my way into success, and remember CORKSS when I’m stressed, I’ll come out on the other side of it just fine. I wish the same for you. Thank you.
Angie Chang: Thank you, Mahu. That was so inspiring to hear your story and this transparency that you shared with us. I also remember that you shared your story about getting your job in COVID, which I think is super impressive. We keep hearing in the news how women are disproportionately affected by this crisis, and it’s really great to hear that you were able to get an offer, even though it was [inaudible 00:36:28] contract, but also now that you’ve found this great role at Inflection, which has shown its DEI initiatives. It’s been really inspiring to hear you share that story. So, thank you.
Angie Chang: Our next speaker is Izzy. She is a general counsel at Inflection, where she oversees, or leads, the company’s legal and risk functions. She’s been with Inflection for about five years. Before she was at Inflection, she was an attorney for Hirease, and she also received her journalism degree. I think that’s funny, because I had an English degree. So, a journalism degree from the University of North Carolina and a Juris Doctorate with honors from the University of North Carolina School of Law. Welcome, Izzy.
Izzy McLean: Thanks for that introduction, Angie. I’m Izzy McLean, general counsel at Inflection. Super excited to talk to you all a bit about this concept of regtech and how it is a really ripe area for innovation, maybe in ways you wouldn’t traditionally even expect. I think a lot of us here enjoy problem solving, and doing it in really creative ways. That’s probably a big reason why you all here have connected with Girl Geek X. I think that’s what’s really cool, in my opinion, about regtech. By definition, it’s the application of new tech, emerging tech, to solve regulatory and compliance challenges for businesses. So, I thought it might be a cool topic to chat about today, just so you can keep it top of mind in your own professional pursuits or at your own organizations.
Izzy McLean: What do I really mean by regtech? Generally speaking, regulatory technology is a new area of tech. Usually it’s software-based, but not always. It aims to ease the regulatory and the compliance burdens for businesses that have to juggle a lot of different laws, that are usually in a state of flux, or they’re ever changing. Examples would be tech solutions for companies that have to deal with GDPR compliance or privacy obligations, tools that banks use for know-your-customer or anti-fraud, anti-money laundering requirements. So far, regtech, it’s been associated with the financial services industry, but there is a growing need for regtech solutions to come out into other verticals and into SaaS services for customers.
Izzy McLean: We’re just starting to see the nascent stages of that, especially in the privacy sector where you see more changing laws. A lot of you might have heard about the recent changes with European Union and some of the privacy laws there. So, aside from that, I want to talk about today how we at GoodHire have baked in a regtech solution to our own screening services, and we’ll use a case study to work through that. Suffice it to say that you don’t have to associate regtech with financial services. We’re starting to see it in our other spaces, and I think it’s safe to say that in pretty much every vertical there is a value add for some sort of regtech solution.
Izzy McLean: Aside from the personal benefits of maybe getting your hands dirty and creating new, easier ways for people to follow the law, as they run their business or as they use your services, there are some other benefits to think about with regtech. It might be that your services themselves require the customers have some foundational knowledge about the law. That’s our situation at GoodHire, because we’re very regulated. Background checks are extremely regulated. It’s worth asking, if you have a corporate responsibility in those situations, to guide your customers toward compliant use of your product. That is the tack that we’ve taken at GoodHire.
Izzy McLean: Not only do we want to help customers understand their own legal obligations, so that they can stay safe and solvent, but we also want to make sure that those customers who are using our services follow the law, so that their job applicants receive all the rights they’re entitled to receive under the law. That’s just simply the right thing to do. Then there’s customer peace of mind to consider, as well. A lot of organizations might not have sophisticated legal teams or in-house compliance teams. When they feel that your service or your product, either by the way it’s designed or the features that it includes, if it actually helps them understand their legal obligations and then provides them a way to comply with those obligations, those customers are going to feel safe. They’re going to have peace of mind. They’re more likely to stick with you. They’re less likely to churn. All good benefits to consider.
Izzy McLean: As I mentioned earlier, I thought it might be helpful to use a case study from my experience at GoodHire to talk about how regtech can be added to an already existing SaaS service. So, GoodHire is our employment background screening service, as I mentioned. Customers use us to background check their job applicants before they hire them, or maybe throughout the course of employment. The procurement and the use of background checks is highly regulated under federal law, state law, and local law. Meaning, unfortunately for customers, there are a lot of laws and rules that they have to follow when they use our services. Those rules can differ based on the customer location, the job location, and the candidate, the location of the candidates they screen. It’s very complex.
Izzy McLean: We were finding that a lot of our smaller customers, especially, were having a hard time understanding what the law was. They were having a hard time understanding how to comply. So, that was something that we immediately wanted to improve. We decided to invest into educating our customers, so that we would raise the probability that they would follow the law and compliantly use our services. By doing so, they avoid litigation and fines and enforcement, and also they ensure that their job candidates receive all their rights under the law. Again, super important to us, as a business. We felt it was the right thing to do. So, we decided to research every applicable background check law in the country, at the state, the federal, and the local level, document them, understand them, interpret them, and then bake them into our service using the genius of our engineers.
Izzy McLean: So, on the educational resource side, we built a comprehensive guide that set out each of those laws in every jurisdiction, so that all of our customers can read it and have access to it and understand what the laws are for them, and how to comply as they use the service. Then on the automated solutions side, our engineers created the ability for us to take into account customer location, candidate location, and job location, and figure out, based on those inputs, which of the 180 legal rule sets should apply to that particular candidate, as the customer used the service. So, the research alone was about a six month investment. There was a lot of product and engineering work, as well. We now feel that compliance is a big part of our brand. Recently, I’m pretty sure compliance was rated the number five reason that customers come to GoodHire.
Izzy McLean: So, I think there’s definitely been some meaningful ROI on that one regtech project, that helped formulate that brand for us, of compliance advocacy. It really is the gift that keeps on giving, because it was built in a way that is very scalable and adaptable. So, as the laws change, we can easily just pull the levers and make tweaks internally, and update our system for compliance. I would just ask that you keep regtech in mind as a potential area of employment for yourself. There are companies that specialize in the creation of regtech tools in multiple verticals. So, that’s an option. Also, keeping in mind, if you’re at a business, for new features, or processes even, in the services and the products that you sell. If you think that you’ve identified an area that is a pretty ripe one for opportunity for regtech, go ahead and chat with your product teams. Get buy-in from executives.
Izzy McLean: I think that customer advocacy can create value for your brand, can reduce churn, and improve revenue. So, that’s a talking point you might want to use. Your competitors may already be working on something similar. So, you want to be sure that you’re staying ahead of the curve with regtech solutions. Also, you can manage cost of regtech development internally, if you form tiger teams to do a lot of the upfront research and due diligence in-house. Also, just be sure to think about how you would balance any increased risk that comes with offering a solution for compliance. That’s something that executives are probably going to want you to discuss as you make this pitch. So, those are just a few starting points, of course, but keep regtech in mind as you create and as you go out into the world and do cool, professional stuff. That’s it. Thank you so much.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you. That was awesome. All right. Next up, our next speaker, Avanti, who’s the VP of engineering at Inflection. She oversees data engineering, platform engineering, and customer success engineering teams. So, welcome, Avanti.
Avanti Ketkar: Hi, everyone. So, it’s a pleasure coming back to Girl Geek Dinner. So, today’s topic is more around how we can bring the engineering teams closer to our customers. When we talk about technology teams and engineering projects, we talk about the robust architecture we want to build. What are the different modern technologies and tools we want to explore? [inaudible ] we want to build, how much automation we want to do, and, obviously, the focus is on the quality of the code, the development processes, and generally building high energy, fun culture for the teams.
Avanti Ketkar: There is a very important aspect of building products that is often overlooked by the engineering teams. So, definitely one of the factors that we typically overlook is getting closer to our customer side. Why do we want to do that? Because when we build products, we want to think about our products from our customers’ perspective. We want to familiarize ourselves with the features and flows that are outside of our current expertise. We don’t want to just build to the requirements, but we want to build products that actually delight our customers, that gives them an excellent experience, and the products that want them to keep coming back to our experiences. Overall, just understanding our customers better makes us better engineers.
Avanti Ketkar: So, here at Inflection, we also try to do the same, and to do that, we take several measures. There is a lot of focus on working closely with the customers, not just with the product teams, but also with the engineering teams. Different ways that we can do this is getting involved into the product development side early. By early, it’s not just requiring [inaudible], but even earlier than that. Right? When there is discovery happening, when there is customer calls happening, even when the customer started requesting features and they’re not even prioritized yet. So, as early as possible being part of that whole process, I think, is very important.
Avanti Ketkar: Also, there are customer meetings that happen on different business teams. There are quarterly business reviews. There are sales pitch that happens. Customer success teams always work on retention, have continuous interaction with our customers. So, it’s really good for having those interactions, as well as understanding the customers’ complaints and requests, as we build new products. What do we do specifically to actually address those needs? We have built several different efforts and programs within Inflection, so that the engineers can work more closely with our customers. Right?
Avanti Ketkar: One of the processes we follow is something called agent escalation process. So, we have a big customer support center in Omaha, Nebraska. That is the team that is talking to customers every day. Right? In every capacity. They have emails, and chats, and phone calls happening with our customers. So, whenever our agents come across issues, we have a set of processes called agent escalation process. That directly comes to the engineers, as well as product managers. We can actually look through and understand what are the things that our customers are not happy about? We have a customer-focused on-call program, and I’ll talk about that in a little bit of detail in a bit. We also have quarterly ship-it events. That’s nothing but hack-a-thon, as some places call it.
Avanti Ketkar: These are the events where engineers take several days completely out of their routine work, and focus on fixing things, not only just for customers but different flows, anything that our agents want. In fact, two weeks ago, we had a completely customer-focused hack-a-thon, which was driven by the customer success week. That was a big event. We had a huge success. Many different features that our engineers developed actually made it to production. So, that was a very fun event. We also have a dedicated customer delight team. Even though we have all the engineers working towards the customer’s delight, we still have a team dedicated to that. So, the things that don’t get prioritized to be worked on right away, this team is continuously focusing on improving our customer experience.
Avanti Ketkar: We also have frequent communication with our internal customers, because, as you all know, the engineers don’t just work for external customers. Right? We have several internal tools and platforms and various different things that we cater to. All our customers are internal as well as external. So, one of these programs that I want to dive deeper into is the on-call program. It’s a typical on-call program, in a sense that we do deal with production issues. We do deal with production escalations. We have resolution SLAs that we place. We try to fix things within 24 hours on production if something is broken, 72 hours if something is broken but not as much of a priority. We have several guidelines as to how we fix things.
Avanti Ketkar: In addition to that, what we have done is we have taken this program to the next level. Engineers actually go on-call for an entire week. What that does is that it gives them a complete break from the routine development work. So, they don’t pick up stories. They don’t do the regular scrum work. They don’t have to attend all the meetings. What they focus on in this week is everything that is customer-centric. So, they can plan ahead of time, talk to the sales team, attend some customer meetings, or they can plan ahead, talk to the customer success team, and listen to some calls. They might be having some codes or bug fixes that they have been thinking about for a long time, and that are good for customers. They can take that time and actually work on fixing those things.
Avanti Ketkar: So, this is basically a dedicated customer-focused week that every engineer spends when they are on-call. This program so far has been very useful. This is just one of the examples that we do. We use it [inaudible] our sales, as well as customer success teams, use it. We have access to these various tools that typically engineers won’t use. What we have done is we have opened them up to our engineering teams, as well as product teams. Here is a screenshot, for example. Recently, we launched background checks in Canada. We are going global. One of the features was Canada background checks. So, you can see here, if you go to Gong and search for Canada, the tool actually shows you all the phone calls that use the word Canada.
Avanti Ketkar: So, you can go and read about what the customers are asking for. You can go in there and see if there is any feedback when the feature was launched, or what is the feature that is missing, that maybe we should implement next, and so on and so forth. So, there are several ways you can use this tool, and has been so far proved very successful. This is another tool, another screenshot. This is something we use for our interactions. So, all of our phone, and email, and chat interactions are recorded here. We can just go here. You can see I’ve filtered it with the chat. I can literally see all the chat logs from the customers that are coming to us. This is another way we can go in there when we are on-call. We browse around here, look at features that we are interested in, and learn a lot about our customers.
Avanti Ketkar: While doing that, we have learned several lessons. It doesn’t come naturally for us to think about being closer to the customers. So, it’s definitely a significant amount of work to actually double up this documentation, to double up the processes. This also needs to be a continuous feedback loop, not just from engineering teams, but from customer support agents, our product teams, our QA teams, and we need a continuous feedback loop to keep on improving our programs. This is just from the customer perspective. Right? There are more things that we are learning. Our escalations are getting fixed faster, because the engineers are learning the products and features that they were not familiar with before.
Avanti Ketkar: We are more comfortable with looking at areas that we haven’t worked on before. When we now test a product or a feature, we test it in a better way, because now we know how our customers are going to use it. So, our testing is getting better. In general, it’s making us well rounded engineers. As a result, we definitely have happier customers. So, for us, this has been a great effort and has been a great program that we’ve been running. I will definitely encourage you all to take a look and see how you can embed this philosophy into your product development process. Thank you.
Angie Chang: Thank you, Avanti, for sharing that insightful dashboards about how engineering gets closer to the customer. So, that’s the last talk of tonight. We will be sharing these with you on YouTube. So, feel free to check your inbox. It will come to you, along with the jobs, because Inflection is hiring for many remote roles and entry level roles in Omaha, and also just remotely for wherever you are. So, the roles include things like senior software engineer, help desk analyst, senior product manager, email marketing manager, senior accounts, learning development specialist, and a director of product marketing.
Angie Chang: Now, we are going to be moving on to our networking hour. So, if you are still hanging in there, go grab some water or a snack, and then come back and click on that link in the chat. There’s also a link in your email for the Zoom breakout sessions, where we’ll be putting you in rooms of four to six other girl geeks to chat for 20 minutes. Then we’ll rotate a few times, so you can meet some different groups of people. So, I will see you on the other side. Thanks for coming.
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Transcript of Sentry Girl Geek Dinner – Lightning Talks:
Sukrutha Bhadouria: We’re so excited to do this event today.
Angie Chang: It’s always super exciting to be able to go to all these companies and see what the girl geeks there are doing and hear from them. And then also be able to network with other women.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Once you turn on and see a ton of amazing people showcase their amazing achievements and talk about all the amazing projects they work on and tips and tricks they’d like to give out.
Sophia Lawhead: What I wanted to talk about was the step that everyone has to go through at some point when you’re looking through a new job, or looking for a new job, and that’s the recruiter screen. And so, this is the step that usually comes to the second step after you either applied or you’ve been reached out to over LinkedIn by a recruiter.
Virginia Badenhope: If there’s someone else out there who’s not getting the kind of traction that she wants in her career, as a reminder, that’s not a thing that is unique to you. It’s a thing that happens to a lot of people, that you’re not alone, and that it is not a permanent state.
Mimi Nguyen: So, it’s been a very windy path getting to my role here at Sentry. I was working as a creative writer for a while until I realized that my very beautiful dream of one day owning a house in the Bay area was quite possibly not going to be achieved by creative writing.
Saloni Dudziak: I lead the people organization team at Sentry, and my talk here is going to be focused on how to respond effectively to and in times of crisis and uncertainty. Even more so in that’s very not normal, new normal environment where myself and my teams have continued to be challenged to repeatedly pivot and respond in these uncertain times.
Meredith Heller: I joined as the first support engineer. What’s relevant to this talk today is building out the innovation platform. So, I’m here today to talk a little bit more about that and why I think it’s great.
Priscila Oliveira: Today’s agenda is open source. How did I become an open source contributor? How open source impacted my career. How can you become an open source contributor? And Sentry, it all started as an open source project.
Angie Chang: Stay tuned. We will be back and see you again, and have a good day. Bye.
Priscila Oliveira: Bye.
Angie Chang: Hi there. Thanks everyone for joining us. Sorry we’re a few minutes late. Once again, I had a lovely Zoom surprise. My name is Angie Chang, and I’m the founder of Girl Geek X. And for anyone who hasn’t been to a Girl Geek X event before, like a Girl Geek Dinner or our annual Virtual Conference, this is our event series that’s been running on for over 10 years now. It’s actually about 12 years that we’ve been doing these events at companies across Silicon Valley. We started at Google, and then Facebook, and then we did a bunch of all these different startups.
Angie Chang: And we just had so much fun going to these companies and hearing about what the women there were working on, from engineering, to product, to anywhere from startups to business development, to even fun things like sales and being the general counsel of a company. We also learned about, for example, being a genetic scientist. So, it’s just always super exciting to be able to go to all these companies and see what the girl geeks there are doing and hear from them. And then also be able to network with other women. So, after this one hour of talks, we’re going to be having some networking in the breakout sessions. We will be breaking you into little rooms so that you can chat with a smaller group of people, and then be able to talk about some of your career goals, your anxieties.
Angie Chang: Right now it’s a really crazy year, and so we just wanted to able to connect everyone to share about how we can stay engaged and what’s exciting for us and how to help each other be accountable to our goals. So, is Sukrutha here? I know she was…
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Yeah, I’m here. Hi. Welcome everyone. Just like Angie said, we’re so excited to do this event today. Obviously this is a different time from what we usually do it, but we’ve also been seeing that people are joining us from all over the world. Sometimes staying up at two AM to be a part of this. So, we’re hoping this is going to make it a little bit easier for our members overseas.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Yeah, just that this has always been so inspiring for Angie and I. And for me, every time I hit a difficult time where I feel stuck at work, it’s always been super empowering for me to just go into a room, virtual or not, and see a ton of amazing people who happen to identify as women, showcase their amazing achievements and talk about all the amazing projects they work on and the tips and tricks they’d like to give out. And that has helped me in turn. And I know it’s helped a lot of our attendees and even our speakers to then go on to do bigger and creative things.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: In fact, I’m noticing that Grace Hopper is going on right now. A lot of people who have posted on LinkedIn that they’re speaking who are on my LinkedIn network, their first speaking opportunity was at a Girl Geek Dinner. And we always would tell them it’s a very forgiving crowd. Go for it. Try it out. And people were always a bit nervous. And after they were done, they were so excited and feeling super empowered.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: So, that’s all I want to say. Angie, was there anything else before we hand off to the first speaker?
Angie Chang: No, I think that’s it. Thank you.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: All right. So our first speaker’s Meredith Heller. She’s a software engineer on Sentry’s ecosystem. Now she gets to maintain both Sentry’s core integrations and the integration platform. Welcome, Meredith.
Meredith Heller: Hello. All right. So, let me… okay, so hopefully everyone can see this okay. Hi, my name is Meredith. My talk today is going to be about the Sentry integration platform. So, a quick overview of Sentry, very high level, if you don’t know what it is, Sentry’s platform helps developers diagnose, fix, and optimize performance of their code. With Sentry, software teams can easily trace issues related to errors, performance problems, and trends in code quality.
Meredith Heller: At Sentry, we use Sentry every day and I could not imagine doing my work without it. It’s an incredible developer tool. And it’s grown so much over the last few years. So, these numbers are just to impress you, but also show you that a lot of people use Sentry, not only use it but depend on it.
Meredith Heller: So, a little more context about me and my journey at Sentry. 2016 was definitely a big year. A lot of change happened in that year. And for me specifically, it was the year that I joined Sentry. I joined as the first support engineer at Sentry, and then later moved to the engineering side where I’ve gotten to do a bunch of things, most of them integration-related. And most relevant to this talk today is my work that building out the integration platform.
Meredith Heller: So, I’m here today to talk a little bit more about that and why I think it’s great. So, kind of a little outline of where I’m going to go with this, talking more about just integrations in general, why we wanted to build this platform and how I think the UI augmentation really helped achieve the goals that we set out when building the platform.
Meredith Heller: So, first and foremost, integrations are important. Like I said, most of my work that I’ve done at Sentry over the past four years has been about integrations. Sentry offers a lot out of the box. It’s a great tool, but it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. People like to use all sorts of tools and the developer workflow and we want to be able to support as many people as possible. I’d say that the top three categories of integrations would be project management, alerting, and source control. Most people have one integration from each of these kind of categories.
Meredith Heller: And the other thing that makes them important is data from these integrations can actually make Sentry more useful. So, for example, our Github integration, you can have commit tracking, and that can help you triage the issues more quickly. Jira has issue syncing, which can help to decrease resolution time. So, they are pretty important to getting the full Sentry experience.
Meredith Heller: But they are also very hard. And there are a ton of things… I could complain about integrations, as much as I love them, I could complain all day. But I think the things that stood out to me the most about integrations are that they are different enough where you can’t just say, “Okay, here is our skeleton for all of our alerting.” And just plug them in and have every one of them work the same. This is because different companies have different ways of integrating, different ways of authenticating, different ways of returning response codes or the error messages. It just varies a lot.
Meredith Heller: And we have a pretty small team, so that means that every time that we decide to build integration at Sentry, we invest a lot of that domain knowledge on our team being towards knowing these external APIs, the nuances between our integrations, what integrations share and what they don’t. And then, the other part is, okay, well we’ve built the integration. That was a lot of work. Well, debugging and maintaining this integration is also a lot of work. It’s hard because you may not know what’s over there. There can be unexpected changes in those end that you’re relying on, or even the whole app that you’re relying on.
Meredith Heller: So, enter in the integration platform. We know they’re hard. Integrations are hard, and we know the importance though. We want to build a platform that makes it easier for people to build more meaningful integrations on top of Sentry. Yay. So, we went and we did this. We went and we built the integration platform.
Meredith Heller: So, now I want to talk about the UI augmentation, and how I think that helped with this goal. But first, I want to give a little bit more context. What is this? What are we augmenting? And this is straight from the docs, so there’s a lot more information that you can get on this if you’re curious, but basically the UI augmentation piece of this is the ability to add UI components to Sentry itself through this JSON-Schema-based system.
Meredith Heller: And we currently have two ways, or two places in Sentry that you can do this. So, here, I don’t know if you can see this super clearly, but basically this is a screenshot of what… if you’re looking at an error in Sentry, what it would look like. The first example here is the stack trace link. I’m not going to go over the details of this, but that is one of the ways in which you can augment the UI.
Meredith Heller: The other is this linked issues here. There’s a bunch listed here because this is a test account. But essentially, if you’re looking at this error and you’re like, hey, I want to track this in Jira. I want to track this in another service, you’d click that little plus button and this module would come up. So, this is an example of the Azure DevOps issue, which we built this integration.
Meredith Heller: But now, for other developers building on the platform, for example, Clubhouse, the scheme on the left is all that you need to define to get this module basically to pop up. We’ve already done the work to hand all the front-end stuff. You just need to tell us what fields you want, whether they’re required or not, and if you have a field that’s like a select field that you want to have the data be dynamic, meaning we make the request to your server as to get back data. You can just put the URI there. So, this is pretty cool .Clubhouse is one of the first partners to build on this platform. So, that’s why I’m using them as an example.
Meredith Heller: So, how did this UI augmentation help with out goal? This is our goal again. Build a platform that makes it easier for people to build meaningful integrations. Currently, if you look at our project management section of our integrations, basically half of these are on the platform. Clubhouse, ClickUp, Linear, and Teamwork are all on the platform. Linear and Teamwork were just added recently, actually.
Meredith Heller: It’s a win for the developers that use Sentry. There are now more integrations. They have more options. I think it’s a win for the teams building the platform because they have flexibility within the schema to find what form fields they want, whether they;re required or optional and even if they want Sentry data to pre-populate, for example, in the description area.
Meredith Heller: And it’s a win for Sentry because we don’t actually have to build the integration. The work for us is to review and publish application. And the maintenance is only for the platform. So, we’re always going to have to maintain the platform. Just because someone builds another integration on top of it doesn’t mean that the maintenance gets larger. So, that’s pretty great.
Meredith Heller: And the one last thing I didn’t have a ton of time to go over in some more detail, but I think, for me, one of the most unexpected things, benefits of the integration platform is we actually have what we call internal integrations which means I’ve been talking a lot about how you’d use the platform as another company to build on top of Sentry and have that app be distributed through other users. But what if you want to build something custom? You can do that, too. Enterprise customers have actually used the platform to build their own version of Azure or their own version of Jira because of restrictions and permissions, or even just the customizations. So, it’s been really cool to see this platform grow and be successful. And yeah, so thanks for listening. This is… hit me up if you have any more questions. I’ll stop sharing.
Angie Chang: And that’s really great. Thank you, Meredith. Our next speaker is Mimi. She is a technical writer at Sentry. And she is also an organizer for Write/Speak/Code. And she is a proud coding bootcamp graduate. And so, fun fact, she can order from a restaurant menu in under 15 seconds, has zero regrets. Welcome, Mimi.
Mimi Nguyen: Yay, thank you. All right, one second. I want to make a quick note. A bunch of us were using templates for our slides and it says confidential in the left-hand corner, but they’re not confidential. So, feel free to tell everyone how great Sentry is.
Mimi Nguyen: Okay, cool. So, I’m just going to assume you all can see my slide deck here. Tell me if that’s not true. All right. Here we go. All right, so hello again. My name is Mimi and I’m tahe technical writer here at Sentry. So, I just wanted to get started with a little bit more about me. These are my cats. That’s Maple and Pancake a couple of weekends ago when it was super, super hot in the San Francisco Bay area. And that’s my current progress on a paint-by-numbers, or as I like to call it, how to chill out and stay inside, #2020.
Mimi Nguyen: So, it’s been a very windy path getting to my role here at Sentry. I was working as a creative writer for a while until I realized that my very beautiful dream of one day owning a house in the Bay area was quite possibly not going to be achieved by creative writing. So, I went to a coding bootcamp and graduated. Then I became a software engineering intern. And now, I’m a technical writer, a role that uses two of my skillsets, writing and software engineering.
Mimi Nguyen: So, I work on docs. And let’s dive into the creation of docs and how it can foster inclusivity with your teams. All right, so three of our topics today, collaboration, inclusivity, and why words and people matter.
Mimi Nguyen: Collaboration. Cool, so we’re going to go through these pretty quickly. I never regret setting a flexible agenda, whether it be for my goals for a project or even the topic covered during a meeting. And I always share this agenda to provide visibility to other teammates and collaborators. It helps facilitate… I’m going to wait for the garbage truck to drive by.
Mimi Nguyen: Okay, so as I was saying, these agendas help facilitate meetings. Right? But also, once you all have a plan together, it’s easier to communicate that plan to the whole company because you have buy-in from your stakeholders.
Mimi Nguyen:And we all should remember that communication is hard. There is always room to misunderstand or forget details. So, make sure to track your tasks in a calendar or something like Asana, which is what we use at Sentry. But most importantly, follow up with your collaborators. Sometimes you need to be assertive, which is personally hard for me because I hate nagging people. But if you really want something done, just follow up very assertively. And if you have time, have a retro. Discuss what worked, what didn’t work. Then gather that information into templates or guides. And this will help others be more self-sufficient, but also serve as a record of your iterations. What worked for a past project might work for another project in six months.
Mimi Nguyen: Inclusivity. Okay, so through your collaborative process, you’re already being inclusive. And you’ve most likely encouraged others to be inclusive, too. And thoughtfulness in your preparation and sharing agendas and plans, this all creates a space for ideas and questions and the feeling of inclusion. Constant communication with your teammates is an exercise in being intentional and effective with our words. Different people, leaders, teammates, everyone, everyone, thinks in a unique way. And the more intentional you are with your words, the smoother the collaboration. Intentional word choice also leads to accessibility, which we’ll cover in a few slides.
Mimi Nguyen: And again, iteration. Something we hear all the time here in tech, right? But really, iteration should be embraced. Record what works and what didn’t work. Write it down and share it with others. Someone with experience sharing their knowledge with some newer folks is a form of inclusion.
Mimi Nguyen: Words and people. All right, so we’re going to talk about why American idioms aren’t international, how assumptions are distracting, and how words evolve, oftentimes for the better.
Mimi Nguyen: Okay, so external documentation is international, and that’s what I work on, external documentation. Sentry customers read our external documentation to install, configure and understand our product. That means we avoid idioms or any communication that involves a very deep level of cultural knowledge. So, I’m going to have some examples coming up, and these are things that I’ve encountered in the Sentry docs or docs from other companies as well.
Mimi Nguyen: Okay so, “roll your own.” I know many people in tech are familiar with this phrase. It usually goes something like, “roll your own SDK.” But roll your own originates from cigarette culture, and it alludes to rolling your own cigarette. So, even if your reader can contextually understand what roll your own means, it’s still more clear and to the point to say, “Make your own.” Make your own SDK is clean, and again, to the point. There’s no guessing if you have to physically roll something.
Mimi Nguyen: Okay so, this phrasing was pointed out to me by a friend. Typically in western culture an introductory class is designated with the numbers 101. This indicates it’s the first class in a series of classes. Right? However, not everyone goes to culturally western schools. To be more inclusive and accessible, it’s more clear to say something like, “Blah, blah, blah intro class.” Or even, “Class one, blah, blah, blah.”
Mimi Nguyen: Okay, hurdles. So, hurdles is a word choice I’ve recently noticed in some documentation, and I think the phrase was something like, “that’s the last hurdle in setting up.” Hurdles are these fences that runners jump over during a track event. There’s definitely an argument to be made that the word hurdles is international because there are hurdles in the Olympics and the Olympics are international. But you’re still relying on a reader to understand the feature of a track race, when really what you want to say is step. Like, “that’s the last step in the installation process.”
Mimi Nguyen: Okay, so assumptions are distracting. Being inclusive means avoiding assumptions. What is easy or simple for you may not be easy or simple for the next person. Also, how does one measure easy? Is it five minutes? What are we comparing this to? Is it running in zig-zags for five minutes? Or is it running in a straight line for 10 minutes? Do you see what I’m kind of getting at? I just avoid the words easy, simple, or normally, because they’re vague and there’s probably a better way to have cleaner communication.
Mimi Nguyen: Okay, so try your best to consider the newcomer, or what some like to call the beginner. And I try to avoid saying beginner because we are all beginners. I used to laugh when people said, “The older I get, the less I know.” But I think I kind of get it now because I know that I know a lot, but also know that I don’t know a lot. I also don’t know what I don’t know.
Mimi Nguyen: But what I do know is you should know your audience. So, being inclusive means trying to understand the needs of your audience. If you’re writing documentation for Python Developers, there’s a really good chance you don’t have to explain what pip install means. You could just write pip install and move on.
Mimi Nguyen: Okay, so words evolve towards inclusion. Sometimes you need to exclude words in order to be more inclusive. So, at Sentry, we’re constantly trying to evolve the way we communicate. For example, we’ve removed most instances of the word blacklist from our code base and our documentation. And I know this sounds kind of obvious, but changing variable names takes time. And sometimes a lot of effort, and I want to recognize that effort. We are also still working on removing instances of the word whitelist. We still have a master branch, but we are also working on removing the word master from our code base. And I just checked earlier this week and it looks like all instances of the word grandfathering are no longer in Sentry docs, so hooray!
Mimi Nguyen: Also, I am super happy to answer any questions later about why these words should be removed from your code base and documentation. Ta da! That’s it. Once again, I’m Mimi. You can tweet at me @Mimi_Dumpling. Although, the closer we get to the election, the less likely I will be on Twitter. You can also email me at mimi@sentry.io. Thank you everyone.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you Mimi. That was amazing. I learned so much. I do want to say when I was first… a few years ago when I was… well, no. I’m a lot older than I think I am. Several years ago when I was reading some articles and I saw the reference to 101, I didn’t actually get the connection because just like you said, I didn’t get my early education here.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: All right, so our next speaker is Sophia Lawhead. She’s a tech recruiter. She has a background in hiring data and software engineers. And we all know how hard it is to hire really strong engineers with diverse backgrounds, so I’m sure she has a really tough job. She’s also focused on product managers and data scientists of all levels.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: When she’s not reading through LinkedIn profiles, you can find her enjoying local stand up comedy and trying to perfect her at-home pizza making skills, which I’m sure we’re all trying to do in this lockdown pandemic situation. So, welcome Sophia.
Sophia Lawhead: Thank you. All right. I will share my screen. Thank you everyone for coming. Again, I’m Sophia. I’ve been at Sentry for about six months, and like what was mentioned, I’m a technical recruiter. So, what I wanted to talk about today is related to hiring, and it’s something that I think is relevant to everyone here working the tech industry, working at startups. And I know that about 40% of you, I think, indicated that you’re actively looking for a new role right now, or you’re considering it.
Sophia Lawhead: What I wanted to talk about was the step that everyone has to go through at some point when you’re looking through a new job, or looking for a new job, and that’s the recruiter screen. And so, this is the step that usually comes, the second step after you’ve either applied or you’ve been reached out to over LinkedIn by a recruiter. And what I’ve come to realize over my last about three years of recruiting experience is that a lot of people don’t really know the purpose of this call. They’re not really sure what they’re supposed to share, what they’re not supposed to share, what this recruiter is looking for and how they can move past this step, move through it to the next step, which is usually a lot more interesting, talking to a hiring manager or doing the technical screen.
Sophia Lawhead: That’s what I want to talk about today is in these screens, how can you best present yourself? How can you be most prepared and have the information that these recruiters are looking for? To get the most out of this call, make it quick, efficient, and hopefully pretty painless?
Sophia Lawhead: We’ll start out with what are these recruiters actually looking for? These are the four things we’re going to cover. It’s wanting to know what are you looking for. Then it’s getting into what is the compensation range that you’re going to require for your next role. And work visa needs, if that’s relevant to you. And then finally, your work history.
Sophia Lawhead: When you’re thinking about starting to look for a new job or if you’re actively doing that, think about what are you looking for? What is most important to you? What needs are not being met at your current job that you’re going to look to find in your next role? This is something that I want to know, any recruiter wants to know, and it helps us determine fit for not just this actual role, but for the company overall. So, it’s a good thing to have prepared.
Sophia Lawhead: Then the next thing you want to have ready to go is what is my compensation range? And the reason that we ask for this is actually not because we want to try to find what is the lowest amount of money that you’ll accept. That’s actually not in our best interests as recruiters, as hiring teams to try to low ball people. The reason is is it’s not great for our retention. This is something that’s been seen in the tech industry many times and most industries. If you bring someone in at a low salary, they’re not going to want to stay very long. They’re going to probably within a year start looking for something new where they can be better paid.
Sophia Lawhead: So for us, it’s really about finding what you’re looking for. Does that match what we have budgeted for this role? And making sure there’s this alignment there, mostly so we don’t waste any of your time. And so, how do you determine what you are looking for? This can be determined by not just what do you need? We all have bills. We all have rent or mortgage. So, what do you need to maintain your lifestyle? But then also, what are your goals? Are you looking to buy a house? Have a child? Open a taco truck, maybe when pandemic is over? But whatever those goals are and your needs, that’s how you determine what your ask should be. What level you’re looking for.
Sophia Lawhead: And something a lot of people don’t take into consideration when they’re thinking about that is it’s not just about your base pay. It’s about the whole package, right? So, some companies, for example, will often a referral bonus, or… I mean a… sorry. Annual bonus. And that annual bonus is something that you should factor into your ask if you want to keep that same level of compensation at your next role.
Sophia Lawhead: So, the next thing to think about is what if I need work visa sponsorship? I know a lot of people in this industry do. So, if that’s something that’s applicable to you, it’s really good to just come to the call with all your details prepared. The policies of what a company can and cannot move forward with are pretty black and white and generally set by the HR and finance team. So, if you… if this isn’t brought up by your recruiter, definitely ask them. They should be able to tell you right away or get that information for you. And if we have the information about your expiration date, up to date with what type of visa you have, where you are in your visa journey, this can help the whole process move swifter, especially actually the end process of creating an offer for you if you get to that stage. So, it’s in your best interest to have this information ready to go.
Sophia Lawhead: All right, and the final step is and many ways most important is thinking about what is my work history? What is the story I’m telling through my work history? So, what we want to know in your work history is really about the last five to seven years. And that’s because a lot of hiring managers don’t really consider past about six, seven years to be super relevant to what you’re doing today.
Sophia Lawhead: As we all know, technology moves fast especially if you’re using a different language, if you’re doing a different skillset, if you’ve moved up. What you were doing back then, it’s not that it’s not a foundation that you built on, it’s just not necessarily as relevant today. So, that’s why it’s more focused on the past five to seven years.
Sophia Lawhead: Your LinkedIn is where you can put all of your work history. And I encourage you to put every single detail in there. I think you can never have too much information when it comes to that. But you want to keep your resume to the one page, and that’s why I think that you can cut off after about five to seven years.
Sophia Lawhead: So, and when you’re thinking about who’s looking at my profile? Who’s looking at my resume? Most likely the first person at any company is going to be someone non-technical. I myself don’t have a STEM degree. I, like many engineers and tech workers out there, Google things on the fly. That’s how I learned. So, I will be looking up any terms I don’t understand, but the way for me to understand it the easiest, fastest and be convinced that you will be a right fit for this role is for you to break it down in simple terms for me. So, to use as little jargon, as little acronyms, and as little internal terms as possible.
Sophia Lawhead: For example, here at Sentry we have a visibility team. And if you just put on your resume I’m on the visibility team, I don’t really know what that means unless I work at Sentry. But saying I work on the data visualization team, I instantly know what you did. So, that’s what I mean by breaking it down into simple terms. And it also shows me you deeply understand what you did if you can explain it to me in a very simple way.
Sophia Lawhead: So, when I’m looking at someone’s past work history at each job, and when I’m asking them questions about their work history in a call, and all recruiters do this. What I’m really wanting to know is at your work, what you’ve created, the app, the data pipeline, whatever it was, what was the purpose behind it? What did it accomplish? Why was this created? How did what you engineered, what you built, the dashboard you made, how did that affect the business goals? Did it move the needle? Did you affect KPIs, especially if you can show me with numbers or percentages that’s very… indicates that you were a big part of the process and your work was impactful.
Sophia Lawhead: And also, I want to know what did you work on? What were you responsible for? How involved were you with planning? Also, team size and structure. This all goes back to knowing how responsible you were for it and how much work burden was on your shoulders. For example, if you are on a project and there was a team of 20 working with you, that’s really different than working with two other people. That’s a lot heavier work burden, a lot more hats. So, it’s a very different work experience. And then also, I always want to know what technologies you worked with.
Sophia Lawhead: So, when you are booking your recruiter calls, those recruiter screens, I think it’s great to have this checklist to think about. This, if you have all of these boxes ticked, you’ll be totally ready for your call. So, I would review the company website and the job description before the call. You’d be surprised how many people do not do that. It will definitely set you apart.
Sophia Lawhead: Something I would do even maybe before setting up the call, too, is test out the product if you can. Can you do a tutorial? Can you read reviews? Can you create a free trial version, free subscription? That might tell you if you even want to be working on this product, but it will also surface a lot of really good questions for you and give you a better sense of what you would be doing day-to-day.
Sophia Lawhead: And then, think about again, your desired compensation, know your visa details. Also some things to think about and have ready to talk about are your flexibility around things like title, how far are you willing to commute, are you willing to relocate, will you need assistance, how much assistance in terms of monetary assistance would you want? Having that ready to go can really help you in those first calls know, is this company going to be right for me? Are their policies, are their location, everything going to line up with what I’m looking for?
Sophia Lawhead: And again, talking about things like unusual work gaps like length or short durations. That’s something we’ll ask about. So that’s actually something you can put on your resume if you want, and then that kind of cuts out that conversation. We already answer it, so it can make that call a little bit shorter.
Sophia Lawhead: And also, come prepared with some questions. This is another way to set yourself apart. And it does surprise me how many people will say, “I don’t have any questions.” And so, here’s some ideas of questions that you can ask. It just shows your interest. It shows that you are invested in this role, but these are all important things for you to know. Benefits that are important to you, is there things like parental leave? That’s something that a surprising amount of people don’t ask about til the very end of the process. Pandemic plans. What does that look like for your company? Any of these I think are great to ask.
Sophia Lawhead: And so, I’m going to leave you with two tips that are weird a little bit. A little out there, but they’re definitely effective. And this is great if you have a little bit of anxiety. If these calls make you a little bit nervous. You don’t really like talking about yourself. So, the first one is every recruiter should be on LinkedIn and have their own profile photo. If they don’t, I would be a little suspicious. I’m just kidding. But so bring up that photo, have it in front of you and talk to the photo while you’re on your call, almost like it’s a video call. And that can actually give you this sense of a real person is talking to you. It gives you a sense of I’m having a real conversation. It’s much more fluid, natural and can bring the anxiety down a little bit.
Sophia Lawhead: And then the next one is called superhero pose. And I think was on a Ted Talk potentially, but so in those one to two minutes while you are waiting for that call to come to you or you’re waiting to make the call, sit and… or you can stand. Either one’s fine. Put your hands on your hips, elbows out, chest back or chest out, shoulders back and take a couple deep breaths. And I did it before this event. It definitely instills a sense of confidence, power, it calms down the amygdala, brings down the adrenaline and it can really just set you in the right mind frame to have this call and have it go well. And I, like I said, I’ve used this on three on-site interviews and I received an offer for all of them. So, tested and proven. Very small sample size.
Sophia Lawhead: But that has been my presentation. If anyone has any questions, and interested in Sentry, want to talk about roles, please reach out to me. That’s my email. But thank you for your time.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: All right. Thank you so much. That was so amazing and actionable, Sophia. I learned a lot. So, what do you think you… where did you get this idea of the superhero pose?
Sophia Lawhead: I’m trying to remember. I was actually thinking about that. It might have been from a Ted Talk. I was also a psych major, so it might have been something that I picked up in my psych classes. But it’s something that’s been out there. It’s something I didn’t make up, but it is actually surprisingly effective.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Yeah, I’ve tried it, too, actually. So, I do think it’s been… oh, someone just posted it. It was a Ted Talk delivered by Amy Curry. Thank you for sharing. I’m going to switch over to our next speaker, Saloni. She’s the VP of People. She’s an experienced [00:38:43] who has worked with many, many early and mid-stage high-growth companies, building and running key foundational [inaudble] from the ground up. While when not People-leading, she’s a wrangler of little humans and puppers while experimenting with different cuisines and attempting her hand at horticulture and farm-to-table foods. Welcome, Saloni.
Saloni Dudziak: Thank you very much. It’s great to be here. Hi everyone. I’m Saloni. I’m glad you could join us here with our wonderful, delightful speakers and hear a little bit about what our Sentry geek girls are passionate about.
Saloni Dudziak: I lead the people organization team at Sentry, and my talk here is going to be focused on how to respond effectively to and in times of crisis and uncertainty. I have generally been passionate about these topics and obviously even more so in this very not normal new normal environment where myself and my teams have continually being challenged to repeatedly pivot and respond in these uncertain times.
Saloni Dudziak: So, I’d like to start with a little bit of history and talk about where we were just at right before the world kind of got turned upside down with this global pandemic. We were about seven months into what will be a 16-month process that involved completing a total gut and rebuild of 36,000 square feet across two floors of a high-rise building in the financial district in San Francisco. However, as things began to start unfolding in late February and early March, we made the decision to shut down all of our physical locations in early March. And then once the shelter in place order in the Bay area was enacted, our construction on the new build out was paused until around mid-June.
Saloni Dudziak: So, as of this week, we’ve finished our build out on one of our floors. We’re set to finish another one in November. Obviously, it’s been a very bittersweet process to see a year and a half long project come to fruition and then no certainty of when we’ll be able to enjoy that space. And I think that almost every single People leader and anyone on a People team would agree that navigating those initial few weeks and then all of the many months that have followed have been extremely challenging in many unusual and unprecedented ways.
Saloni Dudziak: So, unfortunately I wasn’t able to deliver live tour as I planned. We’re still in move-in phase, and it’s a bit messy. But I’m giving a quick sneak peek to one of our spaces because I think it really represents the care and effort that our folks have put into the small details. And it’s a good indication of what the rest of the space will look like.
Saloni Dudziak: So, we’re in the middle of an office build out, and then this new crisis ensues. What’s the first go-to step? The number one motto in my home is don’t panic. And I think that’s key when you’re responding to a crisis, whether it’s momentary or ongoing. So, this starts by putting on your metaphorical life vest, taking a step back, assessing the situation quickly and then responding with an action plan that will need to be highly iterative as the nature of responding to crises means change is imminent and requires adaptability.
Saloni Dudziak: So for me, using the shelter in place example, putting on my metaphorical life vest meant establishing a very regular routine to my day. I’ve been a distributed worker in the past, so that gives me a bit of an advantage, but this was more than just that. This was a crisis that was changing day-to-day and week-to-week. So then, my goals were to assess this unfolding situation on a daily and weekly basis in a much more structured way. So, time blocking when I would check in on the news. What type of information I was consuming, making sure I was taking care of how often I was consuming that information.
Saloni Dudziak: And so, obviously not panicking doesn’t mean that I wasn’t or haven’t been stressed. There have been certainly highly-stressful times. But it does mean that I could more clearly understand what I could control and thus, respond to those events, and let go of the things I couldn’t control.
Saloni Dudziak: So, once you’ve got the two buckets of things you can control, things you can’t control, you’re setting yourself up to be more adaptable and able to respond effectively when things do change again. And then a part of this will soon fall establishing a positive psychological mindset where you can view a setback or a situation as temporary, changeable, it’s specific, that it will pass and it won’t remain in a permanent state.
Saloni Dudziak: So, if I took all these initial lessons, I can then formulate an action plan to respond to crises and that involves communicating with your teammates often, providing regular updates to establish some consistency as events unfold, and providing tools and resources for this different state of working.
Saloni Dudziak: So, what does that look like in real life? When you’re dealing with crises, finding ways to be resilient and adaptable is the first thing you do. You prioritize your connections to your people who will provide you with that positive reinforcement. People who will support and uplift you, but also give you the space to just be and feel your feels. Could involve joining social support groups or simply relying on your friend groups, partners, family members. I think just knowing somebody that has your back and will help to actively help build you up sets the foundation for that psychological resiliency.
Saloni Dudziak: The next up is having a sense of purpose and proactively working towards some set of goals. If you don’t feel connected to something that drives you, it’s really hard to stay resilient. So, making sure you’ve got something to work towards to make progress on. It doesn’t have to be big or grandiose in nature, but it does need to inspire you.
Saloni Dudziak: And then ultimately, don’t burn out. This goes back to kind of the life vest analogy where you need to make sure you’ve got yours on, but then you have to continue to inflate it. And when it inevitably starts to deflate, this could be setting your boundaries and taking breaks from being other people’s person, so that you can replenish yourself, avoiding negative outlets, getting your sleep, taking care of your physical health and practicing some form of mindfulness that will work for you.
Saloni Dudziak: So, if you’ve gotten resilient and adaptable, and once you’ve not panicked and come up with a plan of action, how do you maintain that motivation and productivity? If you’re an individual who’s trying to stay motivated or if you’re a manager trying to help your team stay motivated, you first need to understand what it is that drives them, and what their sources of motivation are.
Saloni Dudziak: I like referring to the infamous Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. I’m also a previous psych major as well. This touches upon all of the key elements humans need in varying degrees to feel productive and motivated. And even though in the original theory it’s presented as these stacked building blocks, these hierarchy of needs often overlap with each other. Some take more precedence than others depending on individual circumstances and are often situational in nature.
Saloni Dudziak: Ultimately what you’re doing is finding out what motivates yourself or your teammates. And once you’ve spent time understanding this, you’re able to start building the frameworks for keeping yourself and your teams motivated.
Saloni Dudziak: I’d like to share a little bit of some of the ways we’ve worked towards inspiring continued motivation and productivity over the past many, many months that involve some tangibles and intangibles. We had rolled out this wellness stipend in January for our employees. And I think typically people associate wellness and health with physical well-being, but we’ve tried to specifically highlight to also consider using this for psychological and emotional well-being, even more now so than ever.
Saloni Dudziak: We also created a wellness guide with a ton of different resources in addition to the stipend, and various ideas on the ways that you can use the stipend. And then we also included meditation and mindfulness resources, ways to keep your kids or your inner-child busy and engaged, ideas for staying social while staying home, physical wellness resources for home fitness options, and then self-care and emotional well-being tools, too.
Saloni Dudziak: We also introduced resources for working from home. So, initially when we moved to this distributed work, we weren’t sure how long this would take given the shelter in place date kept being moved. And once it became clear that the timeline was going to be a longer term, we wanted to make sure that employees had the ability to get their home spaces set up properly. And so, the stipend allows for setting up an environment that allows you to have the right tools for productivity.
Saloni Dudziak: And then for us internally, we also wanted to create a how-to guide for distributed workforce. So, more qualitative information on how to be effective in this remote environment.
Saloni Dudziak: And then, of course, you’re constantly reiterating the focus on communication because you don’t have the luxury of a quick chat over desks or passing through hallways. How you communicate and how often and the forum which you’re doing so are very important in this kind of crisis distributed world. And then, reinforcing those expectations for managers at every level to stay connected with their teams in multiple ways.
Saloni Dudziak: Doing a pulse survey regularly. We’ve been doing that to gauge where our people are at and our organizational health by gathering real-time data. We can continue to tailor our processes and responses to meet people’s needs, and then address any blind spots. And then of course, always encouraging and supporting a healthy mindset, leading interactions with empathy, understanding, allowing for flexibility in trying times, trying to find joy and humor in small moments and being compassionate are all key to crisis management.
Saloni Dudziak: So, ultimately building resilience and being adaptable, finding ways to stay motivated and productive are really hard. I can’t stress how much people just need to be kind to themselves and acknowledge that sometimes there’s going to be moments where it’s just not going to happen. And that’s okay. But having the tools and resources that can help you navigate through those types of moments is really key to finding those ways to get back on track.
Saloni Dudziak: And ultimately, everyone is playing a game of Twister. Sometimes you might have all your hands and feet firmly on the grounded spots, and sometimes you might feel a bit of teetering. But always go to the just don’t panic.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you so much, Saloni. That was really insightful, and I love that image of Twister. That was really fun, but yet true. Our next speaker is Virginia. She’s the general counselor at Sentry. She’s a tech lawyer who’s been around the block, having practiced at firms big and small, as well as tech companies ranging in size from startups to [inaudible]. Oh, and she also tries to make sure her kids are doing what they’re supposed to be doing in remote learning. That’s a super mom and super parent, I have to say. Welcome, Virginia.
Virginia Badenhope: Thank you. Okay. So, hello everyone. Thank you for having me. I am the general counsel of Sentry. And as was stated in my introduction, you can see that I have had a long career arc. I’ve been at big law firms. I’ve been at small law firms. And eventually, I made my way to a number of tech companies. And what you can also see on this slide is that I didn’t really find my niche until I was kind of like seven years out of law school. And twice during that time I thought about quitting law altogether.
Virginia Badenhope: And I highlight that because part of what I want to do in the talk is to acknowledge how normal struggle is, and that… I don’t know. If there’s someone else out there who’s not getting the kind of traction that she wants in her career, as a reminder that that’s not a thing that is unique to you. It’s a thing that happens to a lot of people, that you’re not alone and that it is not a permanent state. I think this talk is also sort of a follow onto what Saloni says in terms of different ways that you can try to be resilient.
Virginia Badenhope: So, one of the major factors of my early misery was that I started my career in some big, prestigious law firms where the primary form of feedback was yelling. Right? And I think the thought was that that was what was necessary to achieve the level of perfection that clients expected, that the partners of the firm expected. And I also think that in some ways that that kind of unforgiving environment was by design. It was intended to help toughen us up because I guess the thinking was law is a profession where it’s someone else’s job to find and exploit all the flaws in your work.
Virginia Badenhope: And I guess from the law firm’s perspective, this was effective because all the work that I produced was perfect. Right? From the header to the footers, to the pagination, to whether the text was full justified or left justified. Every detail was perfect.
Virginia Badenhope: The thing is that when it came time for me to supervise other lawyers, I knew that this was not how I wanted to be. So, I wasn’t that way with other people, but somehow I never learned to stop yelling at myself. And I think part of what contributed to that was this idea that you need unflinching criticism to get to the kind of success that I wanted. And that if you had anything less than that, then it’s just sort of BS and it’s the kind of stuff that ends up on SNL as sort of self-affirmation that is really laughable.
Virginia Badenhope: And it wasn’t until I hit a roadblock with my kids that I started working, knowing that I needed to work on this sort of idea of criticism. And what was happening is that I was finding myself yelling at them more and more. And I felt really bad about it. I was able to get the behavior that I wanted most of the time, but I’m pretty sure it was damaging my relationship to them. And my deepest fear was that it was actually damaging not just the relationship, but them.
Virginia Badenhope: And I didn’t turn the corner on that until somebody pointed out that sometimes the reason that people are hard on other people is because they’re hard on themselves. So, then the suggestion was okay, so if you learn to be gentler with yourself, maybe you’d be gentler with the kids, too.
Virginia Badenhope: And so that was really when I started trying to break down this idea that you need to have this sort of unforgiving, unrelenting criticism in order to be successful.
Virginia Badenhope: And so then I started looking around for different kinds of inspiration because I’d been to talks before. I had been to… these were not new concepts, but none of them really stuck. And so, I’m going to share some things that did stick just because it helps it… it’s easier for me to think about these when I have key specific things to think about.
Virginia Badenhope: So, the most influential book I have ever read and the most helpful in my life is this book about actually How To Talk To Kids So That Kids Will Talk and How to… How To Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk. And some of the core concepts that it revealed was, one, that it is actually possible to be kind and gentle at the same time. To be firm and gentle at the same time. Because I had this idea that if I was gentle, it meant that you were kind of ignoring problems and you were just sort of giving this sort of everything-is-happy point of view. And the point of the book is no, that’s not true. You can stick to the whatever standard you have, but you don’t need criticism to achieve it. That there are better ways to engage cooperation.
Virginia Badenhope: Another key point that it makes is that feelings are actually easier to deal with if you acknowledge them rather than if you push them away. And that was like… it’s probably second nature to a lot of people, but for me, that was sort of like a revelation because I was brought up to be like if you have a bad feeling, the way to not… you just need to push it away and… like it’s a sign of strength to be able to just set it aside.
Virginia Badenhope: And then the last kind of insight from that book is that it’s really hard to get to problem solving if there is any kind of distress going on. Right? So, if you don’t feel good or if you feel defensive or whatever, it’s just really hard to get any kind of input and to put your mind in a place that you could actually solve the problem at hand, or get to the behavior that you want.
Virginia Badenhope: And so that kind of flows into the next kind of inspirational thing that I heard which is that you don’t get people to change by telling them that they’re bad. You get them to change by asking them to be better than they’ve ever been. Right? And I think the important thing about that is that it’s hard to get anywhere if you don’t feel good. And so, if you make a judgment about you’re not good at something or… like if I had said, “I’m impatient with the kids.” That connotes… or “I’m an impatient person and that’s why I yell at the kids.” That connotes some kind of… like something of the identity and some kind of permanence. And it’s really hard to make any kind of change from that space.
Virginia Badenhope: And so, I’m learning now not to judge. Right? Whatever it is I’m feeling or whatever difficulty I have is to basically suspend judgment and see if I can get to the problem-solving element quicker. And the imagery I like to use for problem solving is soccer. So I spent a lot of time watching youth soccer. And one of the things that I’ve noticed is that the players who are the most successful are the ones that basically shrug off a mistake and move to the next thing. Right?
Virginia Badenhope: So, if it’s impossible to win every tackle. You are going to lose the ball some percentage of the time. But the ones that are the most successful are… they don’t just go uh, I lost the ball. They’re like, man, I’m going to get that ball back. And they immediately pivot to try and to recover the ball. And a lot of the times they do because what… they’re looking to the next thing. They’re ignoring whatever happened in the past and then moving on to the next stage, which is sort of like the problem solving aspect of it.
Virginia Badenhope: And I noticed that one of the most useful things that a coach can say is to basically acknowledge the problem, but then immediately say next time. Right? That didn’t go well. You’ll get them next time.
Virginia Badenhope: And so, here are some examples of reframings that I have found to be helpful. And I actually had to use a lot of reframing on getting ready for this own talk. One second I thought I was a genius for coming up with this topic, and another it was like, oh my God. Who cares what I think? This is a dumb topic.
Virginia Badenhope: And I don’t know how that happens, but I’m not going to judge. I’m just going to try and reframe that to be in a more helpful spot. Right? So then, it went something like well, even if not everyone is interested in this topic, I can’t be the only one who has self-doubt from time to time. No one is confident all the time. And so, if one person feels like this is helpful, or that she is not alone, that might be good enough.
Virginia Badenhope: So, be brave and show some vulnerability. So that was sort of the thinking that got me to this point. And I thought it was pretty meta to be having to employ the techniques that I was talking about to get through the thing that I was trying to do.
Virginia Badenhope: And so, here’s some examples of reframing that I have found to be useful. So, I try to get rid of shoulds. I should’ve blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right? That’s backward looking. I try to change it to be like well, I can’t change what’s already happened, but I can still do X, Y, and Z to improve the situation, mitigate the damage, whatever. Basically recover from whatever the mistake was. And followed up with next time I’m going to do something else.
Virginia Badenhope: So, this isn’t like you ignore that something didn’t go right or that you sort of gloss over mistakes. It’s just that okay, there was a mistake, and now here’s what I’m going to do to fix it.
Virginia Badenhope: Here’s another should. I should be or I should blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I think it’s been more helpful for me to reframe it like I would like to. Right? So basically suspending the judgment but still acknowledging whatever it is that you’d like to have happen. I’m not good at. So, we basically banned this from the house. The children are not allowed to say I’m not good at. I told them I would rather have them swear or curse, say bad words, but I do not want to hear I’m not good at. They can say I’m not good at blah, blah, blah yet. But what is preferable would be to say, okay here are the things that I can do to get better. I can develop the following skills. Right? That’s very different than I’m not good at. Because I’m not good at, again, implies some kind of permanence.
Virginia Badenhope: Here’s another one. Comparing. Oh, So and So is so much better at me then blah, blah, blah. And so, then I try to turn that around. It’s like oh wow, I really admire that person. What is it that I can learn from her? A little bit more helpful than judging myself against some standard.
Virginia Badenhope: So, it kind of goes on. I can’t stand it. You can say… or I can say I can handle it even if I don’t like it. There it is. I can’t. Reframing I can’t into the thing that I can do, which is to learn techniques. And then finally, oh that was dumb. What was I thinking? I try to reframe that. Well, that didn’t work. Let me try something else knowing what I know now.
Virginia Badenhope: And so, those are just some examples of reframing that I have found to be helpful. And so, so far I’ve shared ways that I had found to be successful in getting myself out of a negative spot. Now these are the words that I use or that I have found to be most helpful in encouraging other people. And these are the words that I use with my children when I’m… to help them gather the strength to face their challenges. Right? Because sometimes it’s really powerful to know that someone else believes in you, even if you don’t yet believe in yourself.
Virginia Badenhope: And so, I tell them I have confidence in you. And I have found that this phrasing has advantages over you can do it or it’ll be fine because there’s no possibility of getting pushback that’s like, no I can’t or you don’t know that, because the only person who knows how I feel is me. And I feel confidence in you. So there. Thank you.
Angie Chang: Thank you. That was a really great talk on reframing. I really appreciate that. So, we have one more speaker. If she’s still here, Priscilla. She is a software engineer at Sentry. I know she was here. So, great. We will find her and bring her right up.
Priscila Oliveira: Hello everyone. Before I get started, I’d like to thank you for joining me today in Girl Geek X and thank you for this opportunity. It has been a while since I’d like to give a second talk being this talk about my experiences in the open source world. So today, I’m going to talk about how open source impacted my career.
Priscila Oliveira: My name is Priscila. I’m a software engineer at Sentry and an open source contributor. In the open source community, you may know me as a maintainer of [inaudible]. I’m coming to you from my home in Vienna, Austria, and I’m really excited to give this presentation.
Priscila Oliveira: Today’s agenda is open source, how did I become an open source contributor, how open source impacted my career, how can you become an open source contributor and Sentry, it all started as an open source project.
Priscila Oliveira: So, I’d like to start this presentation by asking you do you know what’s open source? Let me tell you. Open source is [inaudible] creating and sharing content and software in a collaborative and public way. It’s when someone puts out an idea and a community forms around this idea, making it better. The community is made up of different people around the world who share ideas, opinions, experiences and learn from each other. Open source is really cool.
Priscila Oliveira: So, how did I become an open source contributor. My first contact with open source was years ago when I was in a technical high school back in Brazil, and I was told to install Ubuntu Linux because it was nice and I didn’t need to pay for it. Back then, I didn’t know much about open source. I only knew that it was some sort of a free software that I could use and people were very excited about it.
Priscila Oliveira: Many years passed and I found myself living again in Vienna. By the way, I’m from Brazil. And one day I felt the need to integrate more in the tech community. So I decided to join a local meetup called React Vienna. In this meetup, I was introduced to Verdaccio, a private NPM proxy registry. I was introduced to this open source project by it’s main maintainer, Juan Picado.
Priscila Oliveira: And after a few more meetings talking about open source, Juan convinced me to try to contribute. And that’s how it all started. So, at the beginning, the imposter syndrome began to take hold. I thought that I had to understand the whole application very well before anything, that my code had to be perfect. After all, everything was going to be public and everyone could see my code.
Priscila Oliveira: But besides all these thoughts I said to myself, “You know what? Just submit the pull request. Just do it.” And that’s what I did. This was my very first open source pull request. It was very simple. I just disabled an [inaudible].
Priscila Oliveira: So, how open source impacted my career. After more than two years contributing, I can say that my mindset changed, and this has had a great impact on my career. I see a couple of things different now. As for example, documentation. Documentation makes everything easier for those who wanted to use a project and those who are wanting to contribute. We have to think that not every contributor is a developer, and not every code is readable enough. Documentation is important.
Priscila Oliveira: Feedback. Always give constructive feedback. Code reviews are opportunities to learn and to ask and to share knowledge, et cetera. If we just agree with something, expand why and try to give examples of what is it that could be a better solution, a better option. And if you get bad feedback, don’t take it personally and try to get something positive out of it.
Priscila Oliveira: Communication. While you’re working on an open source project, you will contribute alongside many people from all around the world with different cultures and backgrounds. You have to be always polite and respectful.
Priscila Oliveira: Tests. I learned how important they are. They increase [inaudible] ensuring that the release version is always a stable build and that no users will be impacted by bugged developmental code.
Priscila Oliveira: Networking. Open source allows us to work in on real world projects and helps us build networks. You will have also the opportunity to meet many interesting people, even if only virtually. This is also related to job opportunities.
Priscila Oliveira: The most visible way to measure our contributions outside of work and to be discovered is through open source projects. I would also say that nowadays, most of the companies value open source projects a lot. And one of the reasons behind this is that these projects are part of their code base.
Priscila Oliveira: So, when you mention during an interview that you are contributing to open source or that you have contributed, it will definitely make the interview more interesting.
Priscila Oliveira: I’d like also to share that I truly believe that open source helped me a lot when it came to interviews, and also to get the job that I currently have at Sentry.
Priscila Oliveira: So, how can you become an open source contributor? I’ll just say that you should start by choosing a project that you like and believe in because it has to be enjoyable.
Priscila Oliveira: Read the contributing guideline and project documentation. You mustn’t to read the whole documentation at once, but only parts that you need in the moment.
Priscila Oliveira: Simple pull requests. Do like I did. Just simple tasks at the beginning until you feel more confident to work on something more complex.
Priscila Oliveira: Hacktoberfest. I think that is no better time talk about Hacktoberfest than now because October is already here, knocking on our door. So, this is one event that offers a good opportunities for new contributors. And normally, the projects that participate in this event use the tag good first issue or Hacktoberfest in their issues indicating simple tasks for beginners. By participating, you may also get a new T-shirt. Look, I have this and this T-shirt, and I hope to get a new one this year.
Priscila Oliveira: A common misconception about contributing to open source is that you need to contribute code. But there are several other ways to contribute. As for example, writing maybe could improve the project’s documentation or write tutorials for the project, or help with the translations. Here at Sentry, this is one of the core responsibilities. All our engineers regularly contribute or review our documentation.
Priscila Oliveira: You could also helping people. How? Maybe by answering questions about the project on Stack Overflow or Twitter, for example.
Priscila Oliveira: Sentry, it all started as an open source project. I think a lot of people are familiar with Sentry, the company or the software. What many may not realize is that Sentry is also an open source company that started from a personal frustration from our co-founder David Cramer. Back in 2011, Cramer was frustrated with the lack of exception tracking, so he decided to create his own project using the Django framework. The project was named Django DB log. Since it was open source, at a point many people got interested and involved over time. The project grew and in many communities were created around [inaudible]. The wider community contributions has been code documentation, user experience, et cetera.
Priscila Oliveira: If you are interested in open source and in contributing to Sentry, a good place to start is in our documentation. I’d like to end my presentation by saying contributing to open source can be intimidating at first. But in the end, it’s rewarding.
Priscila Oliveira: So, that’s it. I hope this presentation has inspired you and you have enjoyed it. Thank you. Yes, if you have any questions, any questions please send me here.
Angie Chang: Great. Thank you. Thank you, Priscilla. So, she’s still here. You can chat with her. And now we are going to… oh wait. Before we go to our break out sessions for now, we want to quickly share that we are so happy that Sentry’s partnered with us and that are hiring. They will be hiring for head of customer success, solutions engineering, product marketing and all kinds of engineering.
Angie Chang: So, there’ll be email after this event, which will ask you some questions about ratings for the event. But also, there are some links to the jobs there. So, please check them out or send them to a friend who’s interested. Stay tuned. We will be back and see you again. Have a good day. Bye.
Saloni Dudziak: Bye.
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Transcript of CodeSee Girl Geek Dinner – Panel Discussion:
Angie Chang: I’m glad we are still finding the opportunities to get together and hear from amazing Girl Geeks about what they’re working on. Tonight, we are having a panel of female founders of dev tool startups who will be sharing about their stories and what some industry trends are and really educating us in that space.
Michelle Ufford: Women innately just want to help. We want to help solve other problems in other people and when you’re in dev tools, you get to interact with your customers a lot more than you might be in more of like an external facing product role. I think that there’s a strong opportunity to recruit women to dev tools.
Renee Shah: I love the connection too, between new dev tools and getting more women and under represented groups in the dev tools world. I wouldn’t have thought of that.
Shanea Leven: We need to be able to just support more women in developer tools and there just needs to be a few pioneers to just say that it’s cool!
Marissa Montgomery: You can get started whenever you want, even if you just want to start it as a side project. You don’t really need anyone’s permission. Invest in the people that are cheering for you. I would say go for it if anyone wants to.
Shanea Leven: We just need to say, “This is what we’re doing. Hey people, come join us.” Learn from all you amazing women in what you do and just have some people to say, “Yes, let’s all do this together.”
Angie Chang: And then we’re going to have three JavaScript engineers talk really quickly about some things they’re working on or have worked on.
Karin Goh: A lot of my days definitely spent in Chrome Dev Tools, so I just wanted to share some tips and tricks that I’ve learned along the way that have really helped me get my job done on a day to day basis.
Palak Goel: Ember.js is an open source free JavaScript client side framework, which helps us in building web applications. There are different kind of other JavaScript frameworks like React and [inaudible] that you might have heard of.
Pearl Latteier: My goal is to answer for you two questions. First, what is a progressive web app? Or PWA as the cool kids say and why might you want to build one?
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Hi, I’m Sukrutha. I am CTO of Girl Geek X, I also work at Salesforce as an engineering manager by day. Super excited for tonight’s virtual dinner, or should I say “dinner” in air quotes, not the virtual part. Obviously, with Covid and everything, we have taken it virtual, but we used to have these in real life. Angie, how does it feel to be doing these virtual dinners?
Angie Chang: It feels good. I’m glad we are still finding the opportunities to get together and hear from amazing girl geeks about what they’re working on.
Angie Chang: Tonight, we are having a panel of female founders of dev tool startups, who will be sharing about their stories and what some industry trends are and really help educating on that space. And then we’re going to have three JavaScript engineers talk really quickly about some things they’re working on or have worked on.
Angie Chang:We are going to move on to the panel portion of the evening, we have four panelists, actually three panelists and Renee who’s going to be our moderator tonight. Renee is a principal at Amplify Partners where she focuses on developer tools and infrastructure startups. She graduated from Harvard and also an MBA from Stanford GSB. Welcome, Renee.
Renee Shah: Hi, guys. It’s great to be here, thank you for having me. Angie, are we ready to kick it off?
Angie Chang: Yes.
Renee Shah: Great. I am so excited to moderate this panel just because we have so many fabulous women on it. Without further ado, I thought that all of our panelists could introduce themselves and talk about their path to becoming CEO.
Shanea Leven: I can go first. I’m Shanea, I am so excited to be here with really great personal friends and people who are inspiring me every single day. I’m the founder and CEO of a company called CodeSee and we are a code comprehension platform that helps professional developers quickly explore, understand, visualize, and reason about their codebases. And we’re just really, really excited to help JavaScript developers really understand, onboard into new codebases, really understand how it works with our new system. We’re really, really excited to be here and chat about our journey. Michelle, why don’t you go next?
Michelle Ufford: Oh, sure. Hello, I am Michelle Ufford. I am the CEO of Notable, which is a early stage start up that is focused on collaborative Jupyter Notebooks for data driven enterprises. I am very excited to be here, this is actually my first talk as a CEO officially. This is going to be fun, thank you.
Marissa Montgomery: Hi, everyone. I’m Marissa Montgomery and I’m the founder of Instantish. We’re building an issue tracker that is for small teams that move quickly and it’s different in two ways. One is that it’s designed for everyone in the company to use, so not just engineers or designers. The second thing is that integrates really closely with Slack. Yeah, also excited to be here, thanks.
Renee Shah: Great. Those are wonderful intros and my first question would be, other than building something meaningful for the world, which all three of you are doing, what do you love most about your day to day?
Shanea Leven: Okay. I get a chance to talk to developers just like everyone here, basically every day. And I get to hear about their problems, I’ve personally experienced their problems. The same problems that we’re solving and as we’re building CodeSee, understanding large scale codebases is exactly what everybody else deals with. I get a chance to not only learn a lot, but just build something that I know that my people need, essentially. That’s probably the most fun.
Michelle Ufford: For me, it’s everything. I feel like I am having the time of my life, living my best life and that sounds cheesy, but it’s true and even the hard days. There’s a lot of long days, a lot of hard things and challenges that come up, but yet it feels different. It feels different because we have built such an amazing team, it’s such an positive environment and it’s really much more focused on problem solving and how can we rather than focused on all the reasons why this might not work. It’s been such an extraordinary experience.
Marissa Montgomery: I feel very much the same way. I just feel very creatively fulfilled every day with what I’m doing. It’s cool because as a CEO, you obviously wear many different hats, like you’re hiring. I code probably three to four days out of the week still, so I really enjoy that. Also, just working with an awesome team and getting to talk to customers is really exciting and inspiring.
Shanea Leven: I think all of us have probably worked at big companies before. I feel like it’s just this really awesome transition to be able to not be at a big company, but then you get a chance to create your own company. It’s a really awesome experience to be a part of that.
Renee Shah: I can imagine. Got what you love and maybe in the opposite fashion, what do you feel like is most misunderstood about being a CEO in dev tools or just an early stage CEO generally?
Shanea Leven: I think, for me it’s a lot about the sales aspect of it. That you don’t just get to code every day, because I get a chance to code and I get a chance to work on the product just as much particularly, at this stage, as any other person in the company. I think that particularly if you’re venture-backed like we are, I actually get a tremendous amount of help often by a lot of people. When we were raising, I texted Renee and Michelle very often. It’s not you have to do all these other things, sure there’s new things that I’m doing like learning about HR, learning about accounting and finance, but those are all just a really great opportunity to learn new things. I think that part is misunderstood, particularly when you’re building a product for your own market. The “selling” part of it is just like you’re just talking to your people, essentially.
Michelle Ufford: I would agree with that. I think that what I did not fully understand was how much of the job is really just communication and translation between your engineers and your potential customers and your investors and your advisors. It’s just a completely different way of communicating and even though I got into a pretty good place, in terms of speaking with engineers and with business leaders. It is very different when you’re trying to do sales calls. The way that you approach it or the types of things that you talk about are very different and you really have to shift and evolve and then yet, still be able to go back and talk to the engineers and business leaders. I think that was something that was unexpected, but has been very positive.
Marissa Montgomery: I would definitely agree with that. It’s a lot of context switching and when I envisioned building a company, I envisioned spending a lot of time just designing and coding with the team, but it’s a lot of communication and finding the people that are most excited about your product and communicating really closely with them and keeping them updated. Also, I was surprised just at how much time hiring and interviewing takes up. Obviously, a super valuable exercise and great use of time, but that was definitely something that surprised me.
Renee Shah: Those are great answers. I wouldn’t have thought about how much selling and hiring and just overall… I thought my cross-functional communication days were Google only, but it sounds like they keep going. Because a lot of the folks on this call are technical and we had some fantastic technical talks, I would be curious what trend everyone is most excited about in the dev tools world that’s upcoming. Marissa, do you want to maybe kick us off?
Marissa Montgomery: Sure. I don’t know if this is a trend or maybe a theme, but I’ve been really excited when I see the blending of the different stages of the engineering life cycle. You’re discussing what work you want to build, you’re creating issues, you’re writing code and then there’s the whole PR and code review process ,and then deploying and monitoring. It’s been really cool to see, there’s the typical concept of linting where while you’re in your IDE editing your code, you have this tool that’s making suggestions that you normally catch in code review, which is a later stage.
Marissa Montgomery: I’ve been seeing a lot of interesting things like that, like design linting and it’s been cool to see GitHub’s code scanning feature as well, which is they scan your codebase, I think it’s opt in, obviously, but they scan your code base for secrets that you might have published publicly which you would have caught much later. It’s kind of cool to see new tools and features that blend those stages together.
Shanea Leven: Michelle, you want to go next?
Michelle Ufford: Sure. For me, I’m a data person, it’s the convergence of the data and machine learning and data visualization with dev tools. I find that really exciting because when I was doing a lot of development work, there was so much stuff that was tedious, it was just the routine stuff or just trying to track down and understand the codebase or all of these things that were tedious and were not really value add to the company. I thought, man I just wish I could get to the cool stuff a lot faster. I see with the convergence of these things and I think of the kinds of dev tools that Marissa and Shanea are building, I think we’re going to see that you get more time to spend on the fun stuff and less time worrying about, why did my codebase break again?
Shanea Leven: Yeah, thanks. I was actually about to mention that I am actually very fortunate to get to ride this trend. As new types of people, women, under represented people, get into engineering, our dev tools need to evolve with it and I get a chance to build a developer tool to help people learn how large scale codebases work, so that we can spend more time building the things that we were meant to be building, as opposed to spending 60% of your time figuring where this line of code is. Actually there are a bunch of startups that are popping up in that space to really help you understand and build features faster and help you understand in a very different way than traditionally you’ve had to understand a codebase because you’re — traditionally, the way that you get it in your head is you read code one line at a time, you hold it in your head, you imagine data as it flows through your system.
Shanea Leven: That just doesn’t work for everybody. I’m excited to solve a problem like that because I’ve personally struggled with that problem of holding whole codebases in my head and I see that as a starting trend as these tools start to merge together. How we add visuals, how we add visualizations and just make it easier for people to comprehend so that we can do our jobs better.
Renee Shah: I love the connection too, between new dev tools and getting more women and under represented groups in the dev tools world. I wouldn’t have thought of that and that’s a nice segue too, of just what do you think we can do to get more women in dev tools? And maybe, Michelle, you can kick us off.
Michelle Ufford: Okay, so I have a theory. You guys tell me if you agree or not. I believe that we actually will see more women in dev tools, we’re seeing a decent surprising amount there, because women innately just want to help. We want to help solve other problems and other people and when you’re in dev tools you get to interact with your customers a lot more than you might be in more of like an external facing product role.
Michelle Ufford: I think that there’s a strong opportunity to recruit women to dev tools, but we need to make sure that we are supportive of them and we are explaining the problem space to them and the opportunity in a way that really resonates for them. I think a lot of this stuff is more like a language barrier, I know I’ve had many conversations with females about what does dev tools really mean and once I explained it to them they’re like, “Oh, that actually sounds more fun than this other stuff that I’m doing.” I think there’s a real opportunity for us there.
Renee Shah: Shanea, what about you?
Shanea Leven: I’m quite prolific in my thoughts. Basically piggy backing on what Michelle said, we need to be able to support more women in developer tools and there just needs to be a few pioneers to just say that it’s cool and it’s really awesome, particularly with dev tools — I think they are basically force multipliers because you enable developers to do something better to enable their end users.
Shanea Leven: We just need more women in Dev Tools. Snowflake had the biggest freaking IPO ever and it’s like, there’s no women there on their founding team. We just need to say, “This is what we’re doing. Hey, people come join us.” Learn from all of you amazing women and what you do and just have some people say, “Yes, let’s all do this together.”
Renee Shah: Totally.
Marissa Montgomery: I would… Sorry. Yeah, I definitely agree. There should definitely be way more women in dev tools. I get really excited when I meet female founders, it’s super exciting to me, all of you. One thing that I think is helpful too is talking about the different between a sponsor and a mentor and I think a lot of people talk about how they think, “Oh, I should mentor this person to help them get to the next stage of their career, to find the confidence to start a company.” And it’s really about sponsoring them. Talking to their manager about the great work they do, putting them up for opportunities. If they’re starting a company, advocating for them when you’re talking to other investors to get funding. Stuff like that.
Michelle Ufford: Can I just add on one more thought? This is just more generally with women in technology and something that I think that we really need to do is, we need to have real honest conversations with our leadership when we’re not happy and be willing to walk away. Being willing to leave that job or leave that team because it’s not a good fit, rather than leaving the industry, which actually might be a good fit if you were on the right team. I think that there’s a lot of people that just feel like, “I’ve got this job, I’ve got this team, I’ve got this project, I’ve made a commitment. I have to see it through.” The reality here is that employment is a two-way street and they need to be treating you well and you need to be performing for them and if one of those pieces is not working, then it’s not the right fit for you.
Shanea Leven: Yes, snaps.
Renee Shah: I love it. I can see in the comments, you’re getting a “well said.” Totally agree with that and I can’t think of a better group of three women to lead the way, especially for female CEOs and just CEO in general, let’s be clear. When I think about early stage startups, I’m also fascinated. You have incumbents that you’re competing with, you have other early stage startups and in dev tools particularly, you have open source projects as well. Which aren’t mutually exclusive from companies, but they’re there. What do you see as the biggest threat to early stage dev tools companies? As leaders, how do you think about mitigating those threats? And maybe, Shanea, you can kick it off for us.
Shanea Leven: Yeah. I think, honestly… Okay, this is going to be spicy. I think that the thing that’s the biggest threat is just the reputation of our industry. A lot of companies do a lot of really shitty things and there’s a lot of things that could be threats. I can talk about the big companies. I’ve worked for the big companies, I’ve worked for Google and all the places, but I think if we don’t do the things that require creating a good business.
Shanea Leven: If we don’t think about our users, particularly in developers, if we don’t think of all of the different types of developers or we aren’t thinking about the people that we’re serving or the teams that we have in our companies and making sure that we support them, that’s the biggest threat to early stage companies. There’s plenty of opportunity, there’s plenty of things left to build.
Shanea Leven: There’s plenty of problems that need to be solved. We need to be able to get a group of people together and support them and make sure that they can live their best lives building solutions for the world and not doing really kind of shitty things to them.
Renee Shah: Yup. Marissa, what do you think?
Marissa Montgomery: Yeah, I definitely agree with that. I’d also say, something that came to mind for me was just focus and discipline for companies, but that’s not a threat, like a certain trend or something. Especially with developer ttools, you have so many choices with what stack you use, which services you integrate with and there’s a lot of different things that you could build, but I think it’s important, especially in the early age to simplify that mentor model for the user and really double down on what your product is best at.
Michelle Ufford: I agree with both of those. What I’ve seen is it really comes down to two really big things and there’s a lot of different threats like the team that you build and who you choose as your investor. There’s a lot of potential challenges, but there’s a huge opportunity in the marketplace and what you really need to do is make sure that you are really thoroughly understanding your customers.
Michelle Ufford: You cannot assume that just because it worked at that one company or two companies that you were at, that it’s true of the general industry and so having lots and lots and lots and lots of conversations with potential customers and not even that you’re trying to sell to them. You’re trying to understand the problem space and if this idea that you have really makes sense for them.
Michelle Ufford: And the second piece of this is really making sure that you have a business model that’s going to work and it’s going to scale. I think that a lot of people have these really great ideas, but there’s no really good way to monetize them and if you take that time to think about it up front, you can kind of shift the business in a direction that would be more viable.
Renee Shah: I think those are all great answers. Just doing a lot of up front work and understanding the dev tools industry and being really focused. Awesome, awesome answers. Sort of similarly and piggy backing on that topic, I’m sure a lot of folks on this call would love to be CEO someday. What is the one piece of advice you have for a new founder? And maybe Marissa, you can kick us off.
Marissa Montgomery: Sure. I guess I would just say, you can get started whenever you want, even if you just want to start it as a side project. And you don’t really need anyone’s permission and there’s going to be people early on who try to reduce your idea or dismiss it. Probably more people than are excited about it, but just listen to the people who are excited about it and invest in the people that are cheering for you. I would say, go for it if anyone wants to.
Renee Shah: Michelle, what are your thoughts on being CEO and your advice for new CEOs?
Michelle Ufford: I think trust and transparency go a long way and you need to find partners and advisors and potentially invite those advisors to be investors in the company. If they are people that feel like they are up front and honest and direct with you and people that you can trust just to give you the truth, I think that is so huge to find those right partners. People like Shanea and Renee who have given me advice as we were starting. I think that those things are so incredibly valuable and it makes all of the difference.
Michelle Ufford: The other piece of this is really, don’t try to do it alone. Go and find a network of support and find out people who have done this before because if you pull all of that information, you’re going to find a lot of very common themes and those are really good lessons for you to learn vicariously through others, if you can.
Renee Shah: Yeah.
Shanea Leven: I’ll speak to that. The advice that I would give, because I would say very similarly to what Michelle said. Most of us are really just learning as we go and that’s very similar to if you’re a CEO or you’re a junior dev.
Shanea Leven: In addition to what hasn’t been said, what has really, really helped me besides my support system, it’s reading a lot. I read a lot, I listen to Audible a lot and getting frameworks and getting information in as quickly as possible has really helped me to grow my career and I didn’t just one day decide to be CEO. I kind of stepped up over time and grew over several years until I had the confidence to do it. And the same things that I do today are the same things that I did five years ago.
Shanea Leven: I think that all the things that we’re talking about today, finding your support system, being transparent, actually communicating your needs, are relevant at any stage whether you want to be a CEO today or if you are just getting your first developer job.
Renee Shah: Yeah. I think all of that is well said across the board. You made me think of something, which is just how much content there is out there right now. Whether that’s articles and podcasts and Twitter, and I think it’s an awesome time to learn, particularly in the dev tools space. Very curious what everyone’s favorite thing is, your most helpful thing is to read, whether that’s for company building or just to your domain specifically. Open to recommendations and maybe, Michelle, I’d love to hear your recommendation first.
Michelle Ufford: This is a great question. I don’t have any one source that I go to, in fact I try to aggregate across a variety of sources just so I can make sure that I’m not missing something. I would say some of the ones that I enjoy reading the most would be articles on Medium, taking the time and just liking the stuff that you like and you’ll continue to get good recommendations.
Michelle Ufford:There’s also something called Stratechery, if you’re not familiar with that, and that has been also just something that I really enjoy reading and hearing Ben’s thoughts on it.
Renee Shah: I’m a big Ben Thompson fan as well. I’m right there with you. Shanea, what about you? What’s your favorite thing to read?
Michelle Ufford: She’s muted.
Renee Shah: Oh, yeah I get it. I was in that boat earlier on the panel.
Shanea Leven: I was trying to move my chair and not disturb anyone, so I muted myself. Actually, what I’m reading right now is not related at all to dev tools, so I’m going to share anyway. Unapologetically Ambitious is what I’m reading right now, it’s about… Her name is escaping me, but it was just released. She was a female CEO of color at a tech company. She used to work for IBM, and it’s just about how to be…unapologetically ambitious.
Shanea Leven: I’m not really podcast person because it sounds like talk radio without the music, but my very first podcast that I actually really love is by Bethenny Frankel, she just launched a new podcast [Just B]. She had SkinnyGirl Cocktails and she’s had some pretty amazing people on. Bozoma Saint James from Netflix, CMO Netflix and she’s pretty famous. Mark Cuban was on there and it’s just a really awesome, just fantastic person to listen to, very entertaining while I run. As far as business and how to just live your best self.
Renee Shah: Love it. We all need to be a little bit unapologetically ambitious.
Shanea Leven: For sure.
Renee Shah: Marissa, what’s your favorite thing to read?
Marissa Montgomery: My go to recommendation, it’s kind of a timeless book. It’s High Output Management by Andy Grove and I actually read it once a year, every year. I’m probably due for my re-read. It just has such great advice in it, I especially like the first chapter where it talks about this manufacturing process. I think it’s called the breakfast factory and it’s really cool because it talks about how you assess quality at each step and I think it’s just a great framework for thinking about any sort of process. And then it also has a great section on one on ones and how they’re really under valued as a management tool and it talks about different strategies for how to invest in them. Every once in a while, I’ll still Google some notes and re-read the notes and re-read the book.
Michelle Ufford: Actually, Marissa, you just made me think of another book that I absolutely love, which is called Principles by Ray Dalio. If you’re not familiar with that, that’s just a book that really describes different principles that they use to articulate what the goal is at Bridgewater so everybody has clarity. When you really, truly break it down, it’s like this makes a lot of sense because there’s so much miscommunication in the organization, that by defining your principles up front. Everybody knows, here’s how we’re going to make decisions and here’s how we’re going to operate. Saves a lot of confusion and misunderstandings down the road. If you’ve not read that, I would recommend it.
Renee Shah: I’ve read Principles too and I will +1 that one. There’s a question from the audience, so I want to ask it, which is, “there’s a perception that dev tools should be free, at least for individuals.” I totally agree with that. “How do you tackle it and get your first customers?” Shanea, do you want to kick us off?
Shanea Leven: Yeah. I agree. It’s weird because in order to get customers at all, you have to meet their expectations. If everyone determines that it should be free, then you should have some free component. What we do, what we’re playing around with is our data flow, which is our first visualization, is going to be free. It’ll be based like a credit and usage system that they’ll be an amount of credits that you can use, just try it out, understand what’s going on and then they’ll be features for larger teams and enterprises that features that most individual developers don’t give a crap about. And then those things are things that you pay for. That’s basically how I would tackle it.
Renee Shah: Marissa, what do you think?
Marissa Montgomery: Oh, sorry. The question was about free tools?
Renee Shah: Right. Is there a perception that dev tools should be free and what do you pay for? Is it an open core model, bottoms up?
Marissa Montgomery: Yeah. We have thought about offering a free tier. One thing that we have done until then is we invest in open source projects, which is really just energizing because anyone can contribute and give feedback and ideas. That’s been something exciting. These projects are geared toward solving the larger problem that a lot of our customers face, so it’s kind of like if Instantish can’t address that problem completely right now, at least we can give you these resources or free tools in the meantime. It’s one of our company values, is just generosity. So when you’re doing something, not always thinking about how is this going to directly lead to revenue extremely quickly, it’s more about proving to our customers that we’re on their side and actually trying to solve their problems. Even if that’s doing some free tools. I’m just really excited about open source in general, so definitely wanted to incorporate that.
Renee Shah: Michelle, I’d be very curious to hear your thoughts as well.
Michelle Ufford: I agree. I think that there is certainly a perception that dev tools should be free and I agree with Shanea that they should be up to a point. There is this expectation, but I think that also, we should look at giving away dev tools for free in a different light. Which is that we really need to level the playing field here for small/medium sized businesses. In our case, we’ll be giving away a community edition that’s going to be fully functional Jupyter Notebook that’s very collaborative and it’s meant to be good for a single individual or good for a team and then you can grow all the way up to the enterprise.
Michelle Ufford: When you’re in that single person mode, you usually don’t have a lot of support. You don’t have a lot of understanding from management about why you need to buy these things. It’s not really until you start growing that you’re able to get those types of budgets behind you and then you got other companies that are non-profits or that are small businesses that just don’t have the money or can’t afford it at all. And yet we need to give them the same kind of tools so that they can continue to compete and stay in business.
Michelle Ufford: I’m a strong advocate for open source, I’m a strong advocate for some sort of freemium type of model for a lot of these dev tools or generally just software tools in general.
Renee Shah: It makes a ton of sense. I know we’re about at time, so I was going to get to our very last question, but I want to read a comment from the audience first. Which is, “Marissa, Shanea, Michelle, keep speaking, building excellent companies. You have the right stuff to grow and create.”
Shanea Leven: Aww. We heart you.
Michelle Ufford: Thank you.
Renee Shah: My final question, which I am actually personally dying to know the answer to is that, any tips or tricks to hire and sell? Because I certainly see it with the companies that I work in and I think those are the two of the absolute hardest things to do, particularly at the early stage. I couldn’t think of a better group of people to crack that for us. Michelle, maybe you can start off with your thoughts.
Michelle Ufford: Sure. For both the customer selling and for hiring when you’re in this early stage, it comes down to transparency and spending the time. If you have somebody that is an amazing employee, that’s at some company that it’s a very prominent company and you’re trying to recruit them or just some place that they are that they’re not quite sure that if they want to make that leap, especially in today’s times. You need to give them all of the information so that they can really make an informed decision. It’s not really about pushing them one way or the other, it’s about really laying out your case and saying, “Look, here’s why I think this is a great opportunity. Let’s talk about the company and the company culture. Let’s talk about the team. Let’s talk about the customers. Let’s talk about what this is going to look like in the next year, in the next five years, in the next 10 years.” When you take that time to answer all of their questions and really lay out your case, we’ve been very, very successful with recruiting taking that approach.
Michelle Ufford: Similarly with customers, the same thing. Just being transparent about where we are, what our goals are and trying to find things that are win wins for both of us has been very effective as well. Also, on taking the time with customers, take the time to research them, take the time to read their blog posts or watch their videos or trying to understand the business. If you’re in the super, super early stages and you really need those customers, take the time to personalize your demos. It’s going to take time, but when they look at those demos, it’s going to feel familiar. Now they’re not sitting there trying to understand, what is this all about? They can see things that feel familiar and they can immediately start to grasp the benefit of your product.
Renee Shah: Great tips all around. Especially the piece on personalized demos, that’s one I haven’t heard yet. I’m going to definitely hang on to that in my back pocket. Shanea, what do you think?
Shanea Leven: Funny story, I definitely stole Michelle’s job description. That was the key piece and everybody that we interviewed loves it by the way. I think that it’s our responsibility as people on call that grow into leadership positions to create culture from the beginning and we have had heavy time and energy put into making a good interview process and making sure that it’s fair, making sure that we are bringing in people who are kind, self-aware, who provide good feedback and good communication skills in addition to their tech skills. Because as we decide to grow the company, we want to make sure that we actually walk the walk, is that the phrase? Walk the walk of having an inclusive culture and we have turned down some really awesome people because there has been some red flags in our interview process.
Shanea Leven: Just personally and it’s really, really important to us and I think that that carries over, not just in candidates, but also in our customer calls. The way that we do business, the people that our customers interact with, they can clearly see that we desperately care about our people and really care about the problem that we’re trying to solve and that just makes everything a lot easier, to be honest with you. I think that’s generally kind of the way that I’ve approached things throughout my career, before building a company, if that makes sense. Even on just teams.
Renee Shah: Marissa, what do you think?
Marissa Montgomery: Yeah. I would definitely agree with that. Authenticity goes a long way in showing that you care about your customers. Selling was definitely something that I had to adjust to, I’ve never done it before. I’ve been in engineering all my career, so it was very different and I try to default back to just listening as much as possible. Which is interesting because sometimes I’m really excited about talking about features that we’ve released and things like that. I think just listening to the people that you’re talking to as much as possible is always a good thing.
Renee Shah: +1 to everything, and I see a question. I’m assuming Angie will give me a warning if we’re very over time, but I may just get this one question from the audience so that they can participate too, so actual last question — “would love your insights on pivoting your business. How hard is it when you try to love the problem you are trying to solve?” I’d be curious because I actually don’t know this, but I actually don’t know if any of you have had to pivot, so I will just let the first person, if somebody wants to just chime in.
Shanea Leven: I had to, not necessarily pivot, but because I have experience in products, we did a lot of, “What could we build to solve this problem?” first. And so we initially had an idea and then we pivoted before we built it, which made it a little bit easier. In the event that we talk to our users and we talk to the developers and they were like, “No, this is hella stupid. You shouldn’t build this.” We would have absolutely thrown it out without question and built what is important for them and I will still do that today. Everything that we built, I could probably throw out tomorrow and start again. We just need to make people happy. We just really want to make people happy.
Michelle Ufford: I do think that there’s something to that, do what you love or love what you do and I couldn’t be an astronaut, so I decided to be in dev and to love that and it’s really worked out well for me. It actually was a conscientious choice for me to sit there and say, “This is what I’m going to do. I think this is a great career and I’m just going to really go with everything and really embrace it.” It’s been really great. I think that whenever you’re trying to start a company, you have to have the same mentality. You truly have to love what you’re doing or you’re going to be miserable. If you’re not finding the right problem space or if something doesn’t feel right, I think you just need to continue to try to solve that problem and pivot until you can find something that works for you and for the market and for your customers and as a business model.
Michelle Ufford: The way that I’ve seen it in my experience has been that there’s always a path forward, always. You just need to sit there and take the time to look at it, think about things from different perspectives. If you can’t see it, go talk with others, get their input and see if that opens up your eyes, but I truly believe there’s always a way forward.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you so much, ladies. This was super insightful for me and to everyone else. I’m sure you’ll be able to get a chance to look at the amazing comments that everybody had to share. Thank you all.
Angie Chang: Why don’t we get right to it? Our first lightning talk is from Karin, who is a Senior Software Engineer at Salesforce and she graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in Computer Science and minored in Human Rights. We’re really excited to welcome her to give a quick lighting talk, so welcome.
Karin Goh: Hi. Let me share my screen. Cool. I’m Karin, I’m a Software Engineer at Salesforce, where I’ve been doing front end web development for about two and a half years. A lot of my day is definitely spent in the Chrome Dev Tools, so I just wanted to share some tips and tricks that I’ve learned along the way that have really helped me get my job done on a day to day basis. For those of you who aren’t really familiar with what the Chrome Dev Tools are, it’s sort of like a browser in built IDE that allows you to explore everything that’s on your page. This is everything from the DOM to your source code to all the network requests that are going out among a lot of other cool things.
Karin Goh: I’m just going to jump straight into a demo. This is a super simple web page that I have. It’s just a bunch of inputs and some buttons and it’s sort of like a calculator, except instead of adding numbers, we’re adding strings based on these different inputs. For example, if I take these two things and I hit this build query button, we get some output. Straight off the bat, it looks a little suspicious because we’ve hit na here and eu, but we’re seeing two na’s. What I would do from here is I would open up the Chrome Dev console and you can either do that by doing command shift I or what I personally usually end up doing, is right clicking and hitting inspect.
Karin Goh: Now that I have this open, I can use this nifty little tool and sort of explore all the different elements on my page and so what I usually like to do is select the button that did the thing that looks incorrect. If we look down here, we can also see the console and some suspicious looking things and you can actually just click straight on these things and it’ll take you to that line of code and you can easily see what’s happening. In case you have a lot of things, for example, there’s just a lot of noise because I clicked the button a lot of times, you can actually filter this. And this is really helpful because you can just really filter by type or even by source file. If you’re working in a large codebase, you probably have way more than just the one file and you can see exactly where your console logs are coming from.
Karin Goh: But back to the bugs that we’re trying to figure out. In this case, I know there’s only one file so it’s definitely somewhere in this demo.html file, but if you’re new to a team or you’re new to the code, you might not know where to look to actually fix this bug. What I like to do is I actually, again, like to go to the button and I think a really easy way to figure out where the code is, is if you go over to this event listeners tab you can actually see a whole list of all the event listeners on something. In this case, I just have a simple click function and I can jump straight to the code. Then from here, what I would do, is I would stick a break point in, and you can do that just by clicking on the line number. You can also make this a conditional break point.
Karin Goh: Other things you can do are adding logs, so if you don’t have a console.log statement, but you want one, you can actually do that straight in the console here. I’m going to go ahead and click this button and now we can see that our debugger is paused. From here, we have some pretty basic IDE functions, so I’m just going to go ahead and step into my code. Now we see a whole bunch of stuff appear. These are all my variables and my local scope, this is pretty badly written code so there’s a lot of things here and they’re pretty poorly named, but we’ll just go with it. You can also see the call stack.
Karin Goh: Again, this is really simple code, but if you’re working in a more complex code base, this becomes really helpful because you can just jump around and it’ll take you straight to that line of code and it’ll open up the file so you know exactly where it is. We’re going to just jump ahead and now we’re trying to figure out why it says na twice instead of the expected eu. Again, this is pretty trivial code, you could probably eyeball it, but you could also just step through it and what I like to do personally, is add these watch expressions. You can actually see the variables down here, but obviously there’s a lot here and I know that can become pretty overwhelming. If I know I’m looking for something in particular, I’ll just go ahead and add it up here.
Karin Goh: In this case, I want index list. There’s also a console down here, so theoretically you could type what you want to look at every time you step over a line of code, but that becomes pretty inconvenient if you’re really stepping over a lot of code. You can also hover, there’s a lot of ways to view the same information and there’s definitely easier ways and harder ways, but there’s a lot of ways. This is sort of how I would begin to approach a bug if I had one, just looking at all these different things, looking at what’s happening with variables, stepping through code, stepping through my call stack. That’s sort of just an introduction of what you can do there.
Karin Goh: One quick thing I want to show, also, is sort of how you can play with these DOM elements and style them straight in your browser. From here, you can actually just drag and drop your elements in case you want to see what it looks like somewhere else. You can also pop over to styles and you can do CSS straight in there. For example, if I want to change the color of the button, you can see here it’s green now and I can just sort of play around and it’ll immediately update. You can also update classes or edit HTML. There’s really just a bunch of really powerful stuff you can do straight in the browser so that you don’t have to keep going back and forth between your IDE and the browser. You can also force state, so this is helpful if there’s something that’s only happening when you’re hovering.
Karin Goh: And there’s definitely a lot of really cool things to explore in the Chrome Dev Tools console. If you haven’t already, I would highly encourage everyone to explore all the different tabs, all the different buttons. They also like to hide things in the little things, so just definitely look around. There is lots of neat things you could do. Hopefully that was a good introduction and you learned something and you’ve all been inspired to use the Chrome Dev Tools more. If you have any questions, you can ping them in the Zoom chat or you can connect with me in LinkedIn. Thanks.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you, Karin. That was awesome. Our next speaker.
Palak Goel: All right. The topic of today’s session is UI automation with Ember.JS. Before I talk about testing what exactly is Ember.JS? Ember.JS is an open source free JavaScript client side framework, which helps us in building web applications. There are other different kind of other JavaScript frameworks like React and [inaudible] that you might have heard of. A very important aspect of development is that we want to make sure that every time we are bringing light to the production, the existing functionality is working as is. There are no regression bugs introduced and in order to do so, either we maintain a manual checklist and execute those test cases every time we are going live or we’ll be a little smart and use all those online infrastructure and tools that are open source and automate these test cases.
Palak Goel: Talking about testing. Ember provides three types of test out of the box, unit, integration and acceptance. Unit test actually forms the foundation of your test suite. Whenever you are writing tests to actually test the method, you’re actually writing test to test your code, those kind of tests they fall into category of unit test. An example is like, you might have a function in your [inaudible] which is taking a string import and string has comma separated numbers and after taking that as an import it is stripping the numbers on the string and returning the sum.
Palak Goel: If your unit is like a lot of possible combinations around this method that you can have. Like the import can be empty string or that import of the string can have decimal numbers or fluid numbers or it doesn’t have numbers at all. If you’re actually testing your method with various combinations, those kind of tests they would fall into category of unit test. If anywhere you create unit [inaudible] like model or [inaudible], adapters in your web app and Ember auto generates the file for you.
Palak Goel: You would have to definitely build those test cases on that. Talking about the integration category. Whenever you’re developing a web app, you will be adding component to your applications. An example is like, your web app can contain an image tile where you click on the image and it enlarges and you click again on that image and it restores back to its normal size. If you’re having test cases around a component, a single entity, those would be categorized under integrational rendering test.
Palak Goel: The code category application or the acceptance test, they actually refer to test where you are actually mimicking the user interaction where you are actually mimicking the user story and automating that as your test case. I’m going to give you an example of how can we add an acceptance test case. I have this web app in my local, it’s a super simple web app, it has Super Rentals home page and there is about and contact. You click on about, it’s going to land you on about page. You click on contact, there’s contact page. On Super Rentals home page, you can see the listings of a few different properties.
Palak Goel: Let me tell you the source code is available online on GitHub, so in case you want to explore it after the session, feel free to download the source code and explore it for yourself. Here is the source code for this app and this is where test resides. There is this folder called test and as I mentioned that there are three categories, unit, integration, and acceptance to categorize the test. Let’s try real quick automating a scenario where if a user types about, we want to make sure that he lands into the URL is about and that this about page gets [inaudible] and let’s say that it’s this contact us button on this particular page.
Palak Goel: How would we automate that scenario? First things first is that under acceptance test you would have to create a test file. Either you can create via manually new file or you can use the power of EmberCLI that gets installed when you set up Ember on your end. You would have to install it explicitly. We’re just going to run this command. It’s a simple, simple command which is going to create a file for you. I named my test file as about. You could name it anything you want. This is how the test file got created with a boiler plate called [inaudible] into it. I want to explain these three statements that we have in our record and so the first thing is importing the [inaudible] Q unit. Q unit is the actually test framework that comes by default with Ember.JS.
Palak Goel: There other testing frameworks that are available in market you can use it too, but this one is default. What it does is like you see that there is a third method, this third method has support from Q unit. There are other things that Q unit support is like organization of test, maybe you want to label your test or you want to skip your test. All those organization of test cases, all that support, you can get that from Q unit. The second package that we’re importing over here is Ember test helpers, this is a super important package because it provides you support to mimic all those user interactions that I talked about.
Palak Goel: For example, you want to mimic a click event in your test, that click event comes from this Ember test helper package. A really important point about this is that this package makes sure that whenever an event is run, all these events are asynchronized, so whenever these events are run, it makes sure that Ember is returned into it’s synchronized state. Before execution under the step after the event would make sure that even that has currently been executed is completed. There is a promise that is being returned and then only you move to executing another line. This particular set of line set of application test is helping and [inaudible] the application instance and all these interaction helpers that I just talked about in Ember test helpers.
Palak Goel: You get this test case and what this test is doing is it is just visiting this about URL and making sure that the current URL is this one like /about. You can add test case further and you can just make sure that, as I mentioned we want to automate the scenario where contact us button is getting rendered on this particular page. I have this code already, I’m going to just copy paste it to right [inaudible]. What this set of code is doing is it is finding the DOM element, which is referring to contact us button, this is the CS selector for this particular button and once it finds a button, it is clicking on this particular button. Once you click on it, it is going to navigate user to this particular link so we can add in a solution for that also that user gets navigated to the current URL after the button is clicked is getting in touch.
Palak Goel: One more thing is like the current URL, this support is also again coming from Ember test helper and it is asynchronous helper. This supports both synchronous and asynchronous. Since I’m using this click, I would have to mention that we that we are… We have just created a simple test case where we are trying to automate that if user lands on this about page, there is this particular button and if he clicks on contact us button, he gets to getting in touch page. Now, before I wrap my session up, let’s see how can we run the tests. There is this particular command and where tests are [inaudible], this is going to spend the server [inaudible] and all those test cases that are here in my project are going to run.
Palak Goel: Just going to execute this command and the support for this particular command also comes from CLI. This is how the test server looks like and imagine I had 28 tests including all integration, acceptance, and unit test cases. They all ran in a few milliseconds. If you notice that I have this set of code where I’m mentioning them with you, this helps in actually scoping of your test cases. If you do not want to run all your test cases and you just want to filter out by a particular [inaudible], you can just click it from here and then maybe just apply it just to run the particular test file. That’s what I had, I’m going to wrap my session up now, but let me tell you whatever I just said, it’s very preliminary information, but I hope this can act as a primer and everything that I showed you is open source.
Palak Goel: It’s there on GitHub, the source code file at Ember is open source. You just go ahead and download the source code and install Ember at your end and keep exploring. That’s it.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: We’re going to hand over the mic to Pearl next. Pearl, I’m going to do your intro. Pearl is a Senior Front End Developer at Propeller Health in Wisconsin Madison. Welcome, Pearl.
Pearl Latteier: Thank you. What a fantastic panel. I was really thrilled to be able to hear your experiences.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Can see your screen and we can see your video and hear you so go ahead and get started.
Pearl Latteier: All right. Well, I’m thrilled to be here and thrilled to have just heard that fabulous panel. Let me get started here. My name’s Pearl, I work at a digital health company in Madison, Wisconsin, so a couple hours difference, so it’s almost my bedtime. I won’t doddle. Whoops, sorry. Technical difficulties.
Pearl Latteier: In the next five to seven minutes my goal is to answer for you two questions. First, what is a progressive web app, or PWA, as the cool kids say, and why might you want to build one? I’m not going to talk about how to build one, there’s no code in this presentation. We don’t have time for that, but I’ll point you to some resources to get started.
Pearl Latteier: What is a PWA? A PWA is a website, this website that I’m showing you is a PWA. It’s also the site for a conference that I’m organizing, so you can take a look at that later. But getting back on track, a PWA is a website that can act like a native mobile app in some important and interesting ways. For instance, a PWA is installable. Here’s an image of that website that I showed you installed on my laptop and you can see it looks like any other app that you would have installed. You can also install a PWA on your device’s home screen, it will live like any other app you’ve got on your phone in a little icon and when you click the icon, it will expand without the browser Chrome around it.
Pearl Latteier: It will display just like any other app will display. Not only is it installable, but PWAs work offline and this work offline stuff is super important. This brings us to the heart, really to the magic, of the PWA. The superhero of the PWA is the service worker. A service worker is a web worker, like Spider-Man, but unlike Spider-Man it’s written in JavaScript and it acts as kind of a proxy between your web app and the network. In our normal day to day, our web applications interact directly with servers on the network.
Pearl Latteier: You can drop a service worker in there that can mediate those interactions. Service workers can intercept network requests and this means that some pretty cool things can happen. For example, say your web app makes a request to a server and you’ve got a service worker, the service worker could see that request, pass it onto the server and then when the server responds, the service worker can take whatever assets are in that response. Images, data, HTML, CSS, it can take those assets and tuck them in its cache. The service worker has it’s own cache and it can put assets there and then the next time it receives the same request, the service worker could say, “Oh, well I already have the assets that I need to respond.” So it can just respond with the assets in the cache.
Pearl Latteier: And that’s pretty huge, that means that your application can respond to a request without making a round trip to the network. It can even respond when there is no network access at all. I think that this is super exciting, I think the implications of this are pretty huge. A service worker can make your web application super reliable, regardless of network connectivity, and it can also make your web application super fast. Because the service worker can serve assets from the cache without having to make the round trip to the network, it can load almost instantly if it has the assets it needs in the cache.
Pearl Latteier: Even if you don’t really care about installability, a progressive web app can really help you have great performance. I think that’s pretty cool, right? This is just only scratching the surface. Service workers aren’t the only tech involved in progressive web apps and there’s a lot more that service workers can do. But enough about service workers, let’s talk about you. Should you build a PWA? PWAs aren’t the solution to every problem. For instance, if you need to interact with device APIs that aren’t supported by browsers, then it would make a lot more sense for you to make a native app.
Pearl Latteier: But if your use case allows it, a PWA can be a great alternative to a native app. First it’s a lot cheaper and easier to make one web application than multiple mobile apps plus a website. And in addition, if you’re a web developer rather than a native developer creating a PWA is working with a completely familiar web stack. It’s HTML, JavaScript, CSS. Even if your target isn’t mobile and using the progressive web app techniques can make any web application quicker, more reliable, and installable and all together more awesome. There are lots of resources out there for getting started. These are a few that I would recommend, I would start with the free course on Udacity. It’s a good course and a great place to start. If you have any other questions about resources or anything else, we can do what a good service worker would do and take it offline. Thank you.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you so much, Pearl.
Angie Chang: We are now going to roll into breakout sessions. We’re going to get off the Zoom and go to a Zoom meeting where the breakout sessions can commence. We’re going to have girl geeks in groups of four to six. This is the feedback we got last time, which is that people like to meet in small groups so we’re going to be doing that! Just follow the link in the chat, it’s also in your email that you received when you signed up for this event. So we will just click on that and head over and meet you at that Zoom meeting. Which is again, the link in the email that confirmed this event at about 5:00 Pacific Time. I’ll see you on the other side!
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Transcript of Confluent Girl Geek Dinner – Lightning Talks:
Angie Chang: We have people joining us. Very exciting. Let’s just catch up, Sukrutha.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Hi.
Angie Chang: Hey, good to see you.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Good to see you, as well. Happy Sunday.
Angie Chang: I feel when we were talking about this Confluent, I’m like, “There’s a confluence of events.” We have the pandemic and now we have these California wildfires, and we’re all set to run at any moment, but we’re all here and we’re really excited to host this event with all of these amazing Girl Geek speakers. First of all, I wanted to first talk about why it is so important, and it means so much for women to be speaking about their expertise. When we started Girl Geek dinners, about 12 years ago, we were just so thrilled to have all of these women speaking on stage at places like Google and Facebook, and talking about their expertise, whether it was product design, product management, engineering, venture capital, entrepreneurship. We kept getting all these requests to have more of these events over and over again. Here we are, in 2020, hosting over 250 events, at over 150 companies. Since the pandemic has started, we’ve taken our events online, and we are so thrilled to be able to continue to do this work of bringing amazing women on screen, sharing their expertise and the challenges that they face in the workplace.
Angie Chang: Because as we know in the tech leaver study that the Kapor Center ran, the reason why women and underrepresented people leave tech is because they feel that there is a bias or there is some unfairness. We want to help people understand, and level the playing field so that they can succeed and they can continue to be awesome in the workforce, and with the help of a community. That’s really what we are. We have over 23,000 women now on our mailing list, who are excited to go to events like this and continue to support each other, and share what we learn so that we can help people who are earlier in their career. We don’t always mean earlier as when you’re out of college or anything, but I feel there are so many women that we talk to, who are trying to get back to the workplace after having a kid or two, or care taking responsibilities, and want to help be able to give these women a pathway and inspiration, and connections to make that step, and continue to work in this industry that we love, that’s called tech.
Angie Chang: It’s also super interesting because there’s so many types of job titles. I didn’t know until going to all these events that there were titles like—When I met Sukrutha, she was a software engineer in test. I was like, “Tell me about your awesome job of yours.” Now, she’s an engineering manager. It’s been a super interesting ride to learn so much. I think now, it’s 6:03, so hopefully everyone has joined us. It is our first… This is our second Confluent Girl Geek Dinner. We are so excited to have all of you here. My name is Angie Chang, I am the founder of Girl Geek X. It was formerly known as Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners. Over the years, we have actually expanded what we do beyond dinners, to podcasts, to our annual conference, to all of these different initiatives that we’re actually going to be talking about later. First of all, I’ll introduce Sukrutha.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Hi. Thanks Angie. Hi, everyone. I’m Sukrutha, like Angie said. Girl Geek Dinners and now Girl Geek X, the goal is to bring us all closer together, and this is more important now with the pandemic, with all.. I would say, living at work, not even working from home anymore. We have difficult situations, all of us, where we’re not white boarding or in a conference room, and so that opportunity that we would have otherwise had, where we would have been able to network with people within our company, or even across companies, is getting harder and harder. The availability of opportunities, or the visibility of it, reduces when you don’t meet and talk to other people. This is why we’re excited that we’re able to even live in a world where we can do a lot of what we already were doing, virtually. We encourage you to get your companies to sponsor a Girl Geek, a virtual Girl Geek dinner, because with all the craziness of the week, you want to disconnect, and you want to be able to meet other people who are like you.
Sukrutha Bhadouria:That’s the feedback we would oftentimes get from people who would come to their events. They would tell us that it was such a great escape. They would come to these events, meet other cool people, and then feel energized and charged to go back and ask for what they need to do to get that next promotion, and get that next raise, and learn tactics on how to deal with the glass ceiling, or the sticky floor, or the broken rung, or whatever challenges that they might be facing. One of the big topics that keep coming up is the fact that we don’t always notice opportunities because we just don’t even know about them. Sometimes people are often offered opportunities just because they are the first person someone thinks of just because they’re right in front of them. These are things that we definitely deal with through all of our events. Before we go any further, Angie and I always ask this question. Who’s attending a Girl Geek dinner for the first time? Please comment in the chat below if this is your first dinner, virtual or not. We’d love to know.
Angie Chang: Also, we want to do a roll call, see where everyone’s dialing in from today. Berkeley, California here.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Yeah. I’m dialing from San Francisco.
Angie Chang: Cool. I see people from the Bay Area. People were texting me talking about packing up their cars and getting ready to leave at a moment’s notice. Thank you for hanging in there with us.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: I’m seeing some interesting locations. Mexico City, Sydney, Singapore. Wow. I’m loving this. This is awesome. Auckland, New Zealand. The chats are going so fast I’m doing my best. I’m not a girl, that’s okay we welcome everyone.
Angie Chang: For sure. We do Girl Geek Dinners because we want to give women the opportunity to be on stage as speakers at these events, but they are attended by everybody. We like our allies, and we’re very inclusive at the end of the day. South Korea, thank you for joining us.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Oh, that’s awesome. We’re getting more and more people telling us where they’re from. This is so fascinating to me, to see how the minute we go virtual, we’re able to reach more people, which is part of why we wanted to do our annual conference virtually. That’s why we dropped the tag Bay Area in the first place, because we were going way beyond the Bay Area at that point. Someone’s talking about how their car is packed and ready to evacuate if needed. Good luck and stay safe, everyone. Angie, what’s on your mind right now? Besides the wildfires and the pandemic and the heat.
Angie Chang: Actually, Sukrutha and I have been chatting, she’s been itching to apply to be a Tech Fellow. I looked into the opportunity and I was, “Sukrutha, it’s perfect for you. We could come up with a great talk for you.” At the same time, we get so many Girl Geeks who come to us, really excited to become speakers, who want to be able to share their story, figure out their own narrative, and to be able to be established as an expert or a leader, or a speaker. We’re actually putting together, right now, the beginnings of a program that will be launching this Fall, that we’re piloting for small groups of women who are like minded and with similar goals, to meet several times to help each other get to that next level, and create that narrative and establish those goalposts, so that they can go toward it and have accountability buddies. Stay tuned for that, we’re really excited. Let us know via email or Twitter, if you are interested in this. This is something that we are planning on announcing in the next month, so stay tuned.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Angie and I were also talking about how, for me, I was consistently… Initially, I would have that one goal, and then I would go after it and then I would have this void. It was really important to me to continuously move the goalposts that I had in the first place, but also appreciate the one that I just accomplished. Think about that, think about your goals, but also appreciate how far you’ve come. Oftentimes, I feel once I passed the goal, I’m like, “Oh, that wasn’t that hard.” And I discount it, but it’s pretty impressive every time you look back to see how far you’ve come. Don’t forget to do that in respect to that regard, too.
Angie Chang: For sure. We are actually going to have to move on to tonight’s Confluent Girl Geek speakers. We have an exciting night of women giving lightning talks and then a fireside chat. Stay tuned for that. Our first speaker is Anna McDonald. She is going to… Sorry. Anna McDonald has over 20 years of experience, and she will be speaking tonight to us about how popular and necessary event streaming has become.
Anna McDonald: Hi, everyone. I’m going to go ahead and share my own screen here. All right. How’s that looking? Good?
Angie Chang: Looks great.
Anna McDonald: All right. Excellent. I’m here, I’m going to talk about event streaming in seven minutes or less. Hopefully, people will time me because I timed myself and I made it three out of four times. I am a customer success technical architect at Confluent. Hello. There we go.
Anna McDonald: Prior to this, I was a principal software developer at SAS Institute for 16 years, which is a super long time for most people to stay at one job. Then I met Kafka two years ago, I like to talk about her like it’s a person, but it’s not, I know that. I’m well aware. I’m working on it. And decided to work on it full time at Confluent. I’ve been here for almost a year, and I love it. I could not love it any more.
Anna McDonald: Other things about me, I love event streaming, integration architecture, and I take horrible photos. I like this slide because I just want anyone else out there who also takes horrible photos to know you’re not alone. That’s about me.
Anna McDonald: The way that I want to run this presentation is, we’re going to start and talk about three of the most popular patterns in event streaming. Then we’re going to talk about how you might bring that into your organization. And then we’re going to talk about once you’ve decided to do that, and you know what events to track, what goes into an event in terms of a schema. What’s important to track, no matter what. Let’s get started.
Anna McDonald: The first event pattern that’s pretty popular is event notification. And that’s where you just kind of throw out an event and that’s it, you’re done. This could be something like, “Hey, an address got updated.” Or, “Hey, an order was placed.” Maybe there’s something in your organization that you need to do every time someone places an order, no matter what. It’s very simple. It’s easy. It’s a great first step for eventing, and this is one of the main ways people get started into events.
Anna McDonald: The next one is event carried state transfer. That’s where you go one step further and you say something like, “Okay, I’m not only going to tell you that an address was changed, but I’m going to give you enough information about that change to let people downstream update, maybe a local cache, or a steet store.” That really becomes a more valuable event. Then the third one that people talk about quite often is event sourcing. Event sourcing is very, very wonderful, and very, very complex. It’s not a good fit for everybody. It basically comes down to tracking every single change that’s ever happened to an entity.
Anna McDonald: The way to know if you’re doing it is, is your state optional. However your application is maintaining state. Can you blow that away and then rebuild it from an event store? If you can’t, you’re not fully event sourced. This can be great if you want to time travel. Me, for example, I would love to time travel back to March 13th, before the pandemic ended, and maybe play out these things a little differently. That would be good. Maybe, I’m thinking. In an organizational setting, a lot of times people want to do things like, “Hey, let me test this new model for energy pricing, or demand, or on older data and see if we can make it more accurate.” If you need to do things like that, event sourcing might be for you.
Anna McDonald: What do you do now that you say, “Okay, well I want to bring a eventing into my space.” There are three things that I recommend everybody does. One, know the events that matter. Nothing is more important than being prepared. Don’t ever just dive in. There’s something, it’s a process called event storming. It’s where you get together with all your lines of business and you say, “Okay, I know that most of us care about addresses. We need them to do our jobs. We want to know and what states we’re doing well. What else do we care about? And what do we need to know to act on it?” You get everybody together, you decide what events are important. They should be things in plain English, again. And then you can act from there. The second is to know your systems. If you don’t know where these things happen, you’re going to fail. It’s not very valuable to track orders placed 50% of the time. You need to make sure you understand what systems these events occur in.
Anna McDonald: Then here’s my next most important capture, broad categories of events. Don’t be narrow. If somebody says, “Look, we have a new mandate. And that mandate says, we got to know every time an order is placed in Italy.” Grab every order, every time an order is placed. You can filter later downstream if you need to, to just have orders from Italy. If you’re going to go ahead and do that work, make sure you make it count. Always grab a big categories. Once you have this wonderful stuff, and you know, “Oh, I want to event. This is how I’m going to do it. This is what’s important to my organization.” What does that event look like? This is a common question I get asked all the time. What should go in an event? I will tell you, right now. One of them is the name. You have to have a name for your event, that’s just common sense, don’t be silly. It should be something in plain English, like I said, or plain whatever language that you want to communicate in. It doesn’t have to be English. It could be any language, but the name should be order placed, address updated, something that makes sense.
Anna McDonald: The next is event production time. Here’s where it’s going to get just a little bit complex. There’s absolutely no guarantee that the system that throws this event, is the system it happened in. That would be way too restrictive. There are patterns like derivative events where you can derive events from change data capture from a database, so there’s no guarantee that a decoupling hasn’t occurred, that you’re going to need to know what time the event was produced, as opposed to what time the event actually happened. There could be a disconnect there, and both are really important things to track.
Anna McDonald: The next is source systems. I really dig legacy applications, more to the point, I really dig killing them and retiring them, and having people get to work on new fancy employable things. I like to call the source system an old evil application. I also like dinosaurs. Then, event creation system. Again, the system that created the event might not necessarily be the same system it was thrown it. Then your detail block. This is going to be what makes that event storming all worth it. You’re going to have the information that you need to make these events valuable, to multiple lines of business. They’re all going to love it. “This is just fantastic. I’m so happy. That’s it. Time. I think I made it. Now, I’m done. Thanks, everybody.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Hi. That was awesome. Thank you. All right. Thank you so much, Anna. That was really insightful. I want to introduce our next speaker, Leslie Kurt. Leslie joined Confluent as a field engineer and will share how through self exploratory and networking, pivoted her career path to product management. Welcome, Leslie. This is definitely a talk a lot of us, we definitely want to hear how you can move from one role to the next. I know product management is something that a lot of people are interested in. It will be fascinating to learn how Leslie’s navigated and adjusted that way. A lot of good comments for Anna. People commenting on how exciting and interesting your doc was, Anna. Welcome, Leslie.
Leslie Kurt: Welcome. Thank you for having me, as well. One second. I’m trying to get the screen to share. Does that look all right?
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Yeah, looks good.
Leslie Kurt: Awesome. Well, hello everyone. I am Leslie Kurt and I am a product manager here at Confluent. A little bit about my background. I have worked at two different companies, and I’ve had two different roles at each company. My bio really tees up my presentation today, as I will be talking about how to navigate an internal career transition. Specifically, I’m going to talk about my most recent internal career transition, where I moved from a sales engineer to a product manager role here at Confluent.
Leslie Kurt: First off, I want to provide a little context and background as to what motivated my internal transition. Both times that I made a career transition it was based on what day to day activities made me the happiest at the end of the day. Throughout my career, I have periodically and consistently checked in and asked myself the following questions. What makes me happy? What do I want to learn? What am I good at? What challenges me?
Leslie Kurt: Every couple of months, I would sit down and write down all the projects, interactions, tasks, that answer these questions for me. As I started to compile this list over time, I realized that this list of things really answered the question of what career path should I take for me?
Leslie Kurt: If I think back to where I was about a year ago today, I recall some of the things that helped lead me to want to make this transition from sales to product. I had learned that I really liked talking to customers, and working with new technologies. I knew that one of my strengths was my empathy, and advocating for customers. I knew that I liked solving problems and figuring out how to make a solution work for a customer, but I was also really interested in improving the product and how to influence the direction of the product to improve the experience for the customer.
Leslie Kurt: I also knew that I missed building things from back when I was a software engineer, and I wanted to figure out a way to incorporate that back into my day to day. As I looked at these individual pieces, I realized that these types of activities described the day to day role of a product manager. I realized that it might be time for a career transition.
Leslie Kurt: Before I made any rash moves to change my career path, I wanted to make sure that this was the right move for me. I decided to dip my toes in the product manager pond. I did this by finding more ways to interact with the product managers in my company.
Leslie Kurt: When a new product was released, I would reach out to the PM who had launched that product, and ask them questions on what it took to build that product, what types of decisions and trade offs they made, and what their role was in the release. I even collected some customer feedback from some of our different products and presented it to a few product managers to try to put myself in their shoes and see if this was the right role for me.
Leslie Kurt: After observing, and even trying out some of these day to day activities of a product manager, I reflected on the experiences I had had. I sat down again and asked myself the same four questions from before. What makes me happy? What do I want to learn? What am I good at? What challenges me? It was also important, at this point, for me to reflect on if I wanted to make the transition within Confluent, or if I wanted to join another company. For me, I really loved the company culture here at Confluent and the direction I could see the product going.
Leslie Kurt: I also had a good understanding of the culture of the product team here. I could see myself fitting in well with that team. After reflecting, it became pretty clear to me that this role, product management, was what completed my puzzle, and that I knew that I wanted to stay at Confluent. So I decided to make moves towards an internal transition.
Leslie Kurt: The first thing that I did was talk to my manager. This wasn’t and isn’t an easy conversation, but I knew that transparency was key when navigating an internal transition. A few tips in bringing up this conversation are, one, expressing interest early. As I was dipping my toes in the product manager pond, I let my manager know that I liked working closely with product management. I liked completing this feedback loop between our customers and the product team.
Leslie Kurt: Second, is that internal transitions are beneficial to the company. My experience on the sales team would help provide a unique and valuable perspective to the product team. Third, it was important for me to reassure my manager that having a seamless transition was a priority to me and that I was willing to put in the work to ensure that the team was left in good hands.
Leslie Kurt: Now that I had talked to my manager, it was time to reach out to my network within Confluent and express interest for the new role. But after expressing interest, I realized that it was also important to be patient. With internal transitions, timing was everything.
Leslie Kurt: My goal was to put myself out there so that if and when an opportunity arose, I would be the first person they would consider for a job. After a period of time, I was lucky enough that a position opened up. I went through the application and the interview process, just like any other candidate. I will caveat that interviewing for a position with coworkers you already work closely with is a bit strange, but all in all, it went well. I was offered the job.
Leslie Kurt: Now, it was time to figure out how to make the transition seamless. I had promised my manager that was a priority for me, and it was. One thing that helped me a ton in this process was having a hard stop on my role as a sales engineer and a clear start date for my role as a product manager. I wanted to provide my best self to both teams. I realized that I couldn’t have one foot in both roles and still provide my best work. I negotiated a start date that would provide me enough time to wrap up loose ends and train my replacement on the sales side so that when I started my first day on the product team, I could really hit the ground running and devote all of my attention to the new role in my new team.
Leslie Kurt: One problem I had not foreseen was the difficulties I would have adjusting to the new role. Over the last two years, I had known myself as, and other people had known me as a sales engineer. Then, one day, thanks to my hard transition date, I showed up and was now a product manager. I found myself continuing to play the sales role, just now, on the product team. I thought like a sales engineer. I asked sales questions, and I was constantly putting myself back in my old role. While this was a potentially valuable perspective on my new team, it was not allowing me to embrace the new role. I realized that I really had to reframe the way that I thought about problems, so I watched other PMs on my team and how they thought about problems, phrased questions, et cetera, in order to reprogram my brain for the new role.
Leslie Kurt: Lastly, internal transitions are not easy. I could not have done it alone. I was extremely fortunate to have many coworkers and friends, willing and available to provide me advice, guidance, and reassurance during this process. So thank you to Brandalyn Powell, who had navigated an internal career transition at Confluent before me and provided endless advice on how to navigate the transition. Thanks to Dani Traphagen, who was a mentor to me from day one at Confluent, and has continued to be a mentor to me after the transition. Thanks to Larry McQueary, who was my sales engineering manager, for being supportive in helping me pursue the career that I wanted, and to Mike Agnich, who really helped me navigate the product management process and transition. With that, thank you, everyone, for listening. It’s been a pleasure to speak with you all today.
Angie Chang: That was really great, Leslie. That was, I think, really illustrative of how someone can advocate for the role that they want and then get the right help that they need to get there. We had some questions about, for example, how would you advise a Girl Geek on finding the support within the company, or, if not within her company, if her manager says no, how can this person still be able to gain the skills that they need to become a product manager or a different job?
Leslie Kurt: Yeah. I think when I was looking for people to provide advice and mentorship during the internal transition, I looked for, one, mentors that I’d already had in the company. I think building those up from the day that you start is important so that you have them available to you when you need some guidance. The other thing I did was, I looked for other individuals within Confluent who had actually gone through the process before so that I could really understand the inner workings within Confluent and what that process looked like.
Angie Chang: Cool. Awesome. Thank you so much. We’re going to move on to our next speaker, Victoria. For anyone, who’s curious, please use our Q&A feature. It is a little button down below that says Q&A. You can ask a question to our speakers. You can upvote them so that we get the best questions out of the crowd, and we can ask the speaker for you. Let’s see, where is Victoria?
Victoria Xia: Awesome.
Angie Chang: Great.
Victoria Xia: Let me pull up my slides here.
Angie Chang: I’ll introduce you. Victoria hopes to encourage open conversation by sharing her experiences and counter-tactics she’s found helpful in combating negative patterns of thinking, a common phenomena of imposter syndrome. Welcome, Victoria.
Victoria Xia: Thanks, Angie. Can you see my slides?
Angie Chang: Yes.
Victoria Xia: Awesome. As you now know, my name is Victoria. I am a software engineer at Confluent working on the event streaming database, ksqlDB.
Victoria Xia: My freshman year of high school, I somehow made it onto the varsity tennis team where I was the worst player by a noticeable margin. I was frustrated with my performance and didn’t enjoy the sport as a result. I also felt out of place on the team, since my teammates had all been playing for many years, whereas I’d only learned recently. I felt like I was pretending to be someone I wasn’t. After a particularly rough practice session, where it seemed as if less than half of my shots went in, I shared my frustrations with my coach. His response was, “Hey, remember when you started? Almost none of your shots went in.” I said, “Gee, thanks. That makes me feel a lot better.” But sarcasm aside, he was right.
Victoria Xia: I’d been so caught up in my current performance. I’d forgotten how far I’d come. I’d forgotten to enjoy myself along the way. What I learned from this first exposure to imposter syndrome is that if you’re a perfectionist like me, you’ll never be satisfied with where you are, but that doesn’t mean you need to beat yourself up over it. Don’t forget to step back, look holistically, and acknowledge your strengths and the progress you’ve made in addition to seeing your weaknesses.
Victoria Xia: Fast forward to 2018, a couple of weeks before my master’s thesis deadline. I was frantically assembling plots and turning outwards when I learned that the startup I’d signed a full-time offer to join after graduating, had been acquired by a company called Confluent. That was the first I’d heard of Apache Kafka or event streaming. I was unsurprisingly behind the curve when I started at Confluent a few weeks later. It didn’t help that this was before Confluent’s first new grad recruiting season, which meant I was the only new grad engineer at the company.
Victoria Xia: It was intimidating to be surrounded by people who knew more and had more experience than me, but it was also an amazing opportunity to learn. I was lucky to have a manager who emphasized the importance of focusing on learning, rather than feeling pressure to get things done. He explained it’d be better for both me and the team in the long run if I took things slow and ramped up on solid foundations, rather than rushing to get things done with partial understanding. He couldn’t have been more right. I eventually ramped up.
Victoria Xia: Things got better, before taking a turn for the worst. Because Confluent was doubling in size each year, that meant, when I was less than a year out of school, I’d already been at the company longer than half the other employees and was seen as a veteran, though I definitely didn’t feel like one. I felt like tasks that took me weeks could have been done by any of my teammates in a matter of days and found myself working long hours in an attempt to make up for the difference. My manager said I was doing fine. I wanted to believe him but found it hard to accept. It turns out these thought patterns are common enough to have a name, the imposter cycle.
Victoria Xia: The cycle starts with a task or anything on which our performance may be measured. This triggers worry and typically leads to either procrastination or over preparation. Once the task has been completed, we reject any praise or positive feedback, dismissing it as luck or something else outside our control, which allows us to repeat the cycle with the next task. To break the cycle, we first need to realize it’s happening in order to stop encouraging thoughts like, “What if I disappoint?” and, “I just got lucky this time,” and instead accept our accomplishments and say, “I can do this,” knowing that it’s okay and totally normal to sometimes slip up.
Victoria Xia: Additionally, the most effective countermeasure, in my experience, is sharing how I’m feeling with others and realizing I’m not alone. One day, during lunch at the office, pre-COVID, of course, I ran into a friend on a different team who was a few years older than me. As we caught up, I was amazed to learn she was feeling all the same things I was. Perceived pressure to deliver, even though her manager said otherwise, feeling behind her more experienced peers, and working longer hours as a result. I couldn’t believe someone I so admired, and looked up to, shared my insecurities. I felt suddenly more okay with myself and was able to break the imposter cycle in doing so.
Victoria Xia: A big part of imposter syndrome is feeling alone, but we can counter that by finding friends, family, and colleagues to serve as personal cheerleaders who we can share our feelings with. Unfortunately, imposter feelings can be hard to talk about, since at its heart is the fear that others will realize we’re frauds. Sharing our insecurities feels like it might contribute to that, but personal cheerleaders help overcome this by making us feel safe and not alone.
Victoria Xia: So to recap, overcoming imposter syndrome starts with identifying what’s happening. A few weeks ago, I received an email asking whether I’d like to give a lightning talk, with the Confluent Girl Geek X event. I was excited, but also a bit apprehensive since I couldn’t think of a topic I felt qualified to talk about, particularly to an audience with more industry experience, tech experience, and life experience than me. I fought these doubts by thinking about my strengths and choosing a topic I feel strongly about and reframed my fear of failure as an opportunity to expand my comfort zone and grow. Rather than worrying about audience members being disappointed, I focused on the fact that if my talk helps even a handful of people overcome imposter syndrome, then that’s wonderful.
Victoria Xia: Of course, I shared how I felt with my friends and with the event organizers too. Their validation gave me the confidence to be here today, which I’m extremely grateful for, since one of the most harmful consequences of imposter syndrome is to cause us to give up opportunities we might otherwise take. That said, while these strategies for beating the imposter are powerful, they also have their limits. If you find yourself in a toxic environment, where those around you put you down or belittle you, it’s better to address or leave the situation than focus on internal reframing. Additionally, it may be prudent to seek professional help, especially if your physical or mental health are suffering.
Victoria Xia: To sum up, focus on your own progress and growth rather than comparing yourself to others, watch out for the perfectionism trap, and remember that imposter syndrome is common when starting something new, or if you perceive yourself as different from those around you in any way. Acknowledge your strengths in addition to your weaknesses, reframe intimidation and fear as learning opportunities and chances to grow, know that it’s okay to mess up sometimes, find personal cheerleaders to talk to. Remember you’re not alone. Go grab that opportunity you’ve been wanting to take. Thanks.
Angie Chang: Thank you, Victoria. That was an excellent talk on imposter syndrome and breaking out of that cycle. We do have a question for you from Puja. She asks, “Do you think imposter syndrome is mostly seen in women?” She relates to this feeling. Most boys around her know less but are very confident.
Victoria Xia: Funny that this is asked, actually. In digging into this talk, I did look at the academic research. It’s pretty split. Earlier studies suggest that imposter feelings are more common in women. More recent studies are more ambiguous about it. In terms of my personal experiences, I think, for me, it’s any time I’m in a situation where I feel like the odd one out. That could be being in tech, in an industry that is male-dominated, it makes total sense for women to feel more this way, or in situations where it’s hard to point to leaders or success stories that look like me. Again, it’s depending on the industry. It makes a lot of sense.
Angie Chang: For sure, I think you had the example about the tennis. When you played tennis, was it girls’ tennis?
Victoria Xia: It was girls’ tennis, yeah. In that case, the reason I felt different was just because I was new to the sport. It was definitely an internal feeling rather than my teammates making me feel different or anything like that. That was enough to trigger it.
Angie Chang: Well, thank you so much for sharing your story. It seems to really have resonated with a lot the girl geeks in the audience. I think we have time for one more question. Someone asked, “Would you suggest sharing your feelings with coworkers, managers, or people on your team? Why or why not?”
Victoria Xia: I think my metric is just whoever I’m comfortable with. I have my go-to friends and family members, of course. If I have friends at the office or people who I can trust to understand where I’m coming from, rather than to misinterpret, or even worse, accidentally spread information that I wouldn’t want to be spread, then I find that those are great people to talk too. I guess my advice there would be to trust your instincts. I think we tend to have pretty good reads on who’s trustworthy and who we want to open up to. If you think someone’s trustworthy, then I’d say give it a shot, even though it can be scary to talk about.
Angie Chang: Thank you. Let’s see. I think that’s all the questions we have time for. Thank you, Victoria, for joining us and giving us a great talk. Now, we will be moving on to our next speaker.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you, Angie. Evelyn Bayes is our next speaker. In terms of a quick intro, Evelyn will share her many experiences of coming out, the benefits of living an open life, and some helpful strategies to achieve it. Welcome, Evelyn.
Evelyn Bayes: Hey, thank you. My talk is “Coming Out at the Workplace”. A little bit about me, I’ve been at Confluent for roughly two years now, in the last year as a manager. Prior to that, I was with a mobile service provider named Instaclustr, and then Accenture before that. No formal education as a software engineer, but instead I taught myself after taking a related class in the last year of uni.
Evelyn Bayes: If you’re not LGBT, you might be wondering, “Cool topic, but this doesn’t apply to me.” But actually, most people go through a coming out experience at some point in their life. Some people go through many, and plenty of these happen at the workplace. For one person, their coming out experience might be letting their boss know that they suffer from mental health issues. For another, it might be telling a colleague they’re dealing with domestic violence. These coming out experiences have different subjects, but the reason for people staying silent and coming out are often very similar.
Evelyn Bayes: In this talk, I’d like to share some of the lessons learned on coming out from the queer community, why you should consider coming out, and how these lessons learned can be applied to your situation. Before we get into things, I thought I’d share a few more details that my About Me left out. First, I’m bisexual. Second, I’m transgender. Third, I suffer from major depressive disorder. These are all things I’ve had to come out about at some point, sometimes more than once. Granted coming out as transgender felt like a bit of a bigger deal at the time, but I think coming out gets easier the more times you do it. Either way, I’ve learned from my mistakes. I’d like to share that experience with you.
Evelyn Bayes: Now you know that coming out is something that applies to you, you might be thinking, “Okay, why should I come out though?” Well, first, you’ll feel better. I’m not saying it’s easy, but I can say, at the bare minimum, you’ll feel free. Free of the burden of keeping a part of you and your experience secret. Second, and more importantly, you’ll have access to support. Many workplaces have a number of policies and resources in place for people going through a range of life experiences. These include provisions for carers leave, access to counselors, heck, my partner gets gender diversity leave that covers things like dealing with paperwork associated with transitioning, surgery, and a range of other things.
Evelyn Bayes: Third, you’ll have access to community within the workplace. I personally know at least two other trans women at Confluent. No one else is going to get my weird pickle jokes. I swear. It’s a thing. Ask a trans girl. Finally, there’s pride. Pride in being out. Pride in being visible. Nothing beats knowing you’re the reason someone felt safe to speak up. Safe to be themselves. Safe to seek help. This happens more than you’d think. I’ve been on both ends of this. Earlier this year, I had a girl reach out to me a few months after I gave a speech at Accenture. My own experience of coming out as trans, it had given them their own courage to begin their own journey coming out in the workforce. You’ve been listening to me ramble for a bit. Now, we’re at the crux of it, so let’s keep it short.
Evelyn Bayes: Step one, find resources. You’re going to want something short, a good one-pager on the subject of your coming out experience. You’re going to want to be able to link people to it on demand. What’s pansexual? Is that someone who loves pans? Link. What are your pronouns, or what are pronouns? Link. What is it like being someone who suffers from whatever? Link. Nothing is more cruel than the burden placed on people going through these coming out experiences, than the expectation that they educate every man and his dog on the topic. Don’t do it. Make them teach themselves.
Evelyn Bayes: Step two, find an ally. This might be a favorite work colleague, a manager, or someone who just feels safe. I, personally, stress seriously considering anyone with the phrase “diversity and inclusion” in their title. Those people kick ass. My all-time biggest coming out success was with my friend and colleague, Rachel. She was with me every step of the way. She fought so many of my battles. Today, she advises on global policies for gender diversity at Accenture. Rachel’s a rock star.
Evelyn Bayes: Step three, create a plan. A plan can be as simple as a few dot points to discuss with your manager, or as complex as an organization-wide email followed by an instructor-led educational session for your team with a Q&A, while you take a much-needed vacation, but a plan is vital. Also, that is legit what they offered me at Accenture and so much regret for not taking it.
Evelyn Bayes: Step four, do it. But in case you still need a little inspiration or you need to see it in a practice, on top of being bisexual, transgender, and suffering from major depressive disorder, I’m also non-monogamous, sometimes referred to as polyamorous. For me, that means I’m in a loving relationship with my partner, and also with my other partner, both of whom have other loving relationships of their own. If you want to know more about non-monogamy, I suggest checking out www.morethantwo.com. In particular, I’d suggest checking out their frequently asked questions page. For anyone working at Confluent, please feel free to talk to Sam Hecht. He’s been given the rundown. Have a lovely day. Everyone and good luck with your own coming out experiences.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you so much, Evelyn. When you get the chance, you must read the comments, some really, really amazing comments. I want to just read out one that says… Kathy says she’s watching with their eight-year-old daughter and 11-year-old non-binary kid. They’re finding this really helpful too. The 11-year-old plays hockey with mostly boys, so related to a lot of what you spoke about. Thank you. This has been helpful.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: And for people who want to be allies as well. So we have one question from Elizabeth. Evelyn who were some of your champions in coming out at work? How did your manager support you? I think this will be helpful for us to know how to support our colleagues and coworkers?
Evelyn Bayes: Yeah. So first of all, my friend, Rachel that I mentioned, so she worked with me on my first job at Accenture and she was actually the first person I came out to out of anyone, not just in the workforce, as trans. And so she, like I said, she fought so many battles for me. She represented me in so many different ways, helped me some steps through it. But in other places, I think Confluent’s probably a good example. With Confluent, I guess I never felt the need to come out as trans. it’s just I’ve always been very open about being trans and the big things that they do is they just, they support me when people get pronouns wrong or things like that. And it’s really just normalized, but a good example would be coming out as non-monogamous to my boss, which was quite a scary experience.
Evelyn Bayes: And he was the first person I came out to at Confluent, but was just generally supportive. And when I told him about this, he was thrilled about it. And he’s also just stepped up as the executive or one of the executive sponsors of the LGBT inclusion program as part of a Confluence diversity and inclusion program. I’m not sure if I’m getting the wording on that right. But I think a lot of people are just, they’re ready to step up and be supportive. People will amaze you. Probably my favorite story is and I’ll try and keep it really quick.
Evelyn Bayes: When coming out at Accenture, I remember having this colleague who was devoutly Muslim and would pray morning and evening and afte. I came out — at the time, it was so uncomfortable because I was a bodybuilder and had just gotten rid of my beard. And it was a pretty traumatizing experience, but he came up to me and took me aside and said that if I ever needed anything, he was always available and there to be supportive and people really care.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Oh, that’s lovely. Someone else commented that they’re non-monogamous. So definitely when you get the chance please do take a look at the chat. So many good comments for you. Quickly, one last question. What is something you think people shouldn’t ask or shouldn’t say? What’s the one thing that people ask you and you feel like, “Oh my gosh, don’t.”
Evelyn Bayes: There’s always one with everything. Like I said, I got that question. When I came out as pans, like pansexual to colleagues. I remember them joking about pansexual being people who are attracted to pans. I’ve had a lot of people… The big one for me, which always blows my mind, is when people ask me about what I’m going, what surgeries I’m going to go get with my body parts. And I’m like, it is no more appropriate for you to ask me about my genitals as it would be for me to ask you about your genitals. So you start. But I think just asking for good educational research and doing the research yourself is good. There’s so much burden placed on people when they’re coming out. And it’s so unfair to get these questions all the time.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Of course. Yeah, definitely. So I had a feeling that’s what you would say when I asked this question. So thank you so much, Evelyn, for your honesty, for the education you just provided. All right. So thank you. That was a great talk.
Evelyn Bayes: Absolute pleasure.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: So up next.. What you would have seen as in person getting off the stage and getting on the stage is what you’re seeing right now. Our next speaker is Candace. Blackfluent is the name of the Black and African American community Slack channel at Confluent. Candace and other black employees are taking it to employee resource group status, which is awesome. Welcome, Candace.
Candace Garton-Mullen: Thank you. Can everyone hear me? Wonderful. So as you can see here, hopefully on my screen. I am the Executive Business Partner, which most of you know as executive assistant and I work with Roger Scott at Confluent. Which you can see here on this next slide. I’ve been a business partner to Roger Scott, starting at New Relic. And now at Confluent for the last few years, I’m not…
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Candace, sorry to interrupt. We can’t yet see your slides. You need to share your screen.
Candace Garton-Mullen: Oh, so sorry. Let me go backwards. I’ll share my screen. And there we go. Now, can you see my slides?
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Yeah. I can see your slides now.
Candace Garton-Mullen: Wonderful. Okay. Moving forward then. This is the slide that I’d gotten to was talking about my partnership with Roger Scott. I will, again, be back to this slide later on. So I’m going to move past that.
Candace Garton-Mullen: First, I think it’s important to explain what Blackfluent is. In the literal sense. The word is a combination of ‘black’ and ‘confluent’ as a result of the company name. Plus the focus group name. To me personally, it means how to speak to your black colleagues, peers, and community members. Taking you back to the beginning of my journey. This is my very first day of kindergarten in 1984. That’s my mom and my almost four year old little brother helping me onto the bus. My father was taking a photo.
Candace Garton-Mullen: After stepping on the bus. I looked for a place to sit down and for the first time in my life, I heard the utterance of this word… A little boy called Danny was the little boy who spewed the word at me and caused me to wander up and down the aisles of the bus. Very much like the scene from the beginning of Forrest Gump, I eventually ended up sitting in the front seat, which was reserved for students with disabilities, which I didn’t know at the time. I sat next to a young man called Eric that had mild form of cerebral palsy. Eric was my first friend and he taught me a lot about humility in the years to come.
Candace Garton-Mullen: After school that day I went home, told my parents what happened, which prompted what we call ‘the talk’. ‘The talk’ is the formation of what becomes a natural understanding of the way that the world works when you’re a child. A world that our ancestors were thrust into and that we inherited.
Candace Garton-Mullen: This creates a dynamic in which we culturally were taught, what was expected and proper of us to blend in a white owned world. In other words, we are all ‘whitefluent’, regardless of if we choose to behave in a manner that shows that or one that potentially helps us in the world, we are taught and aware of how we need to behave should we decide to.
Candace Garton-Mullen: Moving along to my journey to high school. This is Hudson high school in Hudson, Ohio. Hudson is a small middle class, upper middle upper class suburb in Ohio, which is extremely similar to the dynamic of Palo Alto. If you’re from California. You can see by the demographics taken from the year 2000 in the upper right hand corner, that I was the literal minority in my high school. Especially at that time in 1997, when I went. Specifically, you can see me swimming in the sea of my senior classmates.
Candace Garton-Mullen: And if you can’t find me yet, I’m right there. More importantly on the day that this picture was taken, it’s the same day that everybody signs yearbooks, passes around school pictures and hopefully gets one from their crush. I received one from someone who is not my crush, but I think I might’ve been his. Kyle passed me this picture at the end of homeroom. On the last day of school and disappeared before I had a chance to process the PS. “I’ve always wanted to tell you that you’re super pretty for a black girl.” I know what Kyle was trying to say. Unfortunately, the veiled insult in the comics took precedence even in my 18 year old mind. Kyle was definitely not Blackfluent. At the time. I didn’t realize how desensitized I was to things like this, because it’s just the way that things have always been.
Candace Garton-Mullen: After high school, college, and a decade in the legal field in Ohio. I moved to San Francisco. When I arrived. I leaned on the same tools that worked for me in Ohio. I learned that I was able to move forward really quickly and blend, as many of us do, if I wear my hair straight, instead of curly. These quotes were taken from an article written in 2013. So you can imagine how much more applicable they were in the eighties and the nineties. The fear of wearing my hair in its natural state of curls in corporate America was really real. And as I mentioned, it followed me to the bay area wherein I wear my hair straight for every interview. And for the majority of my 10 years at Salesforce, Lyft, and Ripple. It wasn’t until I arrived at New Relic and began working alongside of Roger Scott, that I was encouraged to bring my authentic self to work. And then again, encouraged to bring that same authenticity with me to Confluent.
Candace Garton-Mullen: I’m very thankful to Roger and to New Relic in general, either way. When Roger asked me to join him at Confluent, I was extremely nervous that I would be sliding backwards into the blending. But a few weeks after joining the company, I was approached by the head of diversity and inclusion team and asked about the possibility of forming an employee resource group. Now known as Blackfluent. Within those efforts. Our newly forming resource group came up with the following mission statement. The mission statement is to grow and empower the black communities within and outside of Confluent while fostering meaningful action from allies.
Candace Garton-Mullen: We want to promote understanding through community engagement. Promote awareness through professional development. Demote discomfort through encouraging a sense of belonging. Demote misunderstanding through allyship. Offering a safe space to engage. And some of the ways we plan to do this are through the Executive Sponsorship using our executive sponsors and their connections to get the things that we need to make this group work for us and for the employees. The equal opportunities in organizations with career counselors and such. Observing other mentorship programs from other companies to get ideas about how we can help the people in our company and grow inside and then outside, when they’re not even at work and community building and leveraging resources from previous jobs. It’s really important to the group, it’s leaders, and me specifically to create a space where any, and everyone can be Blackfluent, should they wish. And I look forward to working with my colleagues at Confluent to provide a space where they can do that, learn and grow and thank you all for your time.
Angie Chang: Hey, that was really awesome. Thank you, Candace.
Candace Garton-Mullen: Thank you.
Angie Chang: We have a question for you from Valerie. She asks ‘Do you like the idea of the word ‘Blackfluent’ becoming mainstream vocabulary because it’s such a positive word and fluent has a connotation of being well-read in a subject and fluent indicates someone that has taken the time to study the subject as opposed to generally getting it?’
Candace Garton-Mullen: Yes, absolutely. That specifically I came up with the word Blackfluent. So it means even more if it were to go mainstream because it’s like hashtag Blackfluent, my word, but also obviously the bigger implications of that being that it would be so great if we can make that a mainstream word that people use to represent that type of inclusion and the way that they can speak to their peers with comfort. That would mean a lot.
Angie Chang: Awesome.
Candace Garton-Mullen: Absolutely.
Angie Chang: Thank you, Candace.
Candace Garton-Mullen: Thank you.
Angie Chang: Great. And now we’ll be moving to our last speaker of the evening, Tejal. She will be speaking about being pregnant and networking. It can be hard, but being new at both is altogether a different ball game. So Tejal will be sharing her CPR technique to ease you through the bump and help you deliver like a boss.
Tejal Adsul: Oh, thanks for the awesome intro. Hi everyone I’m Tejal Adsul and today I’m going to share my journey of working while pregnant. So a little about myself. I did my undergrad from Pune University and Master’s from Arizona State with specialization in software security. And after graduation, I joined Intel and was pretty much working on securing data trust for solid state drives. And after working for a couple of years for a big giant, I was highly motivated to join a startup. And so I went ahead and I joined Springpath, but my startup dream was pretty short lived because we were soon acquired by Cisco and I was back with the big giants. And so now I joined Confluent, another startup, and I’m mostly working on platform wide security features for the conference platform.
Tejal Adsul: So as most of y’all must have heard the famous saying that be careful what you wish for you will get it, but be even more careful what you work for, for you will get it even more quickly. And I like to call it my year 2018 as my genie year, because it was determined to grant me all my wishes. Well, not all, but most of them. So when I was looking to join a startup in the year 2017, I joined for a software engineering position at Confluent. But unfortunately, by the time I applied, that position was already filled and I went ahead and joined Springpath instead. Luckily, in 2018, they had this position for platform security engineer. And as they were just forming a brand new security team, and I felt like this is a perfect opportunity for me because it’s in the domain of my expertise and the company I had been following for quite some time.
Tejal Adsul: So I applied, went through all the interview process, and joined Confluent in October. Now Mr. Genie then decided to grant me my second wish about the same time. And I came to know I was pregnant just after a month of joining Confluent. Initially I was super ecstatic, but soon my excitement was replaced with a lot of anxiety because I somehow believed in the stigma that pregnancy derails your career. And now I had to choose between the two, but as I was going through the entire process, I realized it’s not really choosing of one over the other, but finding the right balance between the two. And so I go in this technique, which I like to call a CPR, which helped me transition into a working mom. So the first daunting task, which most of us face, is how, and when, should I break this news to my manager?
Tejal Adsul: And honestly, my first gut feeling was, Hey, I don’t really need to tell them at all. Right? And if I start to show, I can just blame all the good free food they gave me at Confluent and no one will ever know, but then you have to pee like a freaking million times in a day and no exaggeration there.
Tejal Adsul: There is absolutely no way you can hide it. So I was so nervous wrecked that I decided to have this conversation with my manager pretty early on. I was almost just eight weeks pregnant and I just scheduled a quick one on one with him. And I just broke the news that, Hey, I know I just joined, but I am pregnant. And I was so surprised that he took the news so well.
Tejal Adsul: Rather he shared his own experience, as he was new to the parenthood as well. And that instantly put me at so much of ease. So this is one of my recommendations to all the moms to be. When you are comfortable, have this conversation with your manager and preferably early on and divide this conversation into two separate meetings. First, schedule just a quick meeting to announce the good news. So it gives them time to think through any concerns that they have, but most importantly, schedule a followup meeting in another two, three weeks so that you can gloss over your work plan, job requirements or your maternity leave plans, but be sure to be highly prepared for this particular meeting so that you can answer of any concerns that they might have.
Tejal Adsul: Being pregnant is like having a flu or being hung over all day every day. And this is especially true in the first trimester. So you cannot really work with a hundred percent of your capacity. So you have this limited energy and limited time before you go for your maternity leave. But most importantly, you have limited caffeine. So it’s highly crucial to plan how and where you want to put this energy into. And that brings us to the P in the CPR technique. And this is a very important lesson I learned during my pregnancy. And it took me some time to get into this mindset that you cannot do everything and you cannot do everything perfectly. And that is perfectly okay.
Tejal Adsul: So if you’re going to choose to do X, you are definitely going to miss out on doing Y. So for instance, I choose to do all these fill-ins or hard slogs. I am going to miss out on those quick wins and major projects. So what I did and what y’all should do is spend some time using this graph and try to analyze where and how you’re going to put this limited energy and time to achieve those quick wins and impactful project. And once y’all have wisely chosen your X, y’all can then use it in the conversation meeting, which we just discussed.
Tejal Adsul: Lastly, stress, nausea, those mood swings, all these are part and parcel of pregnancy. All you can do is embrace them and try to relax by consciously inculcating relaxation techniques into your day to day routine. So I used to literally schedule breaks after every two hours. And when I say schedule, I literally had them on my calendar and every time I got those pop up reminders, I would just stop working on whatever I was doing. And I would just listen to music or walk around the office or meet a friend on a different floor. And these 10 to 15 minutes of break would give me my energy back and it helps to improve my efficiency highly when I was actually working. And my biggest reward of working while pregnant is that I have this daughter who has intimate knowledge of Apache Kafka because we pretty much started our journey together. Thank you.
Angie Chang: Thank you, Tejal. That was a really excellent talk about delivering like a boss. We are going to now go into our Fireside Chat with Neha.
Neha Narkhede: Hi there. Can everyone hear me?
Angie Chang: Yes. Can you turn on your video?
Neha Narkhede: I’m trying that. Can everyone see me?
Angie Chang: There you go. Perfect. So I’m going to do a quick intro. So Neha is a Co-Founder at Confluent, the company behind the popular Apache Kafka streaming platform. She is one of the initial authors of Apache Kafka and a committer and PNC member on the project. So, Neha, why don’t you quickly give us a… am I missing anything in your bio?
Neha Narkhede: I think you did a wonderful job of covering it. I’m so excited to be here. First of all, thank you for inviting me into what is my favorite event of the year. Thank you.
Angie Chang: Thank you. We had such a good time.
Angie Chang: So our first question for you is what is the most overlooked obstacle for women when it comes to asking for a promotion? So what are the differences in promotions at startups versus medium and larger companies?
Neha Narkhede: Yeah, that’s a great question. You know, something that I’ve thought about at every stage of my career, it doesn’t seem to ever get easier. I’m not sure how overlooked this is anymore, but I think that a significant obstacle for women and minorities alike is the fear of being judged negatively for coming across as being too ambitious. You know, when you get ready to really advocate for yourself. And I think that this fear is actually rooted in some reality as well. In my observation, this obvious bias that normalizes ambition, advocating for yourself, for men, typically white men, and while expecting minorities and women to wait for the term or the right time.
Neha Narkhede: The other obstacle is that men tend to be assessed more on their future potential while women are assessed more in the past experience as has been shared by so many women leaders. And so it really isn’t easy to ask for promotions or advocate for yourself when you know that there are so many factors working against you. And so I just wanted to sort of share my own experience and say that it is okay to feel a little bit out of place. It was okay to feel all this fear because you’re not imagining it. Some of it actually does exist in varying proportions, in different cultures. I think the trick is figuring out how to ask for it, regardless, right? And so what I wanted to share is what has worked for me, other than being okay as being viewed as ambitious has actually been to navigate the communication around it carefully, right?
Neha Narkhede: Ultimately you have to have a productive conversation and actually a series of conversations to make the change happen. So I typically just write down what I want to say ahead of time, and have the best possible clarity. That gives me a chance to really rehearse what kind of objections might come through, what I really want to say, keeping the emotion aside of feeling the bias. Because there is very little opportunity, or very little appetite to hear that out. I also make it okay for myself, I think this is probably the most important thing that I had to train myself to do, is to actually be okay to hear “No” a couple of times before it finally gets to a yes.
Neha Narkhede: So just know that a “No” should follow with clear, actionable feedback that allows you to make progress. If you see a situation where consistently it’s, “No, but we don’t feel that you’re ready.” That actually doesn’t mean much and it’s probably time to move on, however hard it might seem.
Neha Narkhede: The other thing to say is most people, including myself, we didn’t really know how to negotiate. What’s the science and the art behind negotiation? So something practical that I wanted to share here, a book that really helped me learn about the secret of negotiation. It’s called, Never Split the Difference, Negotiating As If Your Life Depends On It. It’s literally written by an FBI negotiator. I find that it has a lot of practical advice on how to navigate this situation and many others. I hope that everyone else finds it helpful as well.
Neha Narkhede: The other question you ask, I think, is a little different. Where the differences in promotions and startups, versus midsize companies, versus large companies. I think it’s very important to realize the back of the field that you’re walking into. Startups are really chaotic. Startups don’t really have a process around much of anything, really. Career growth is just one part of the puzzle. It’s not that people, whether they’re managers, or executives, or founders, they’re not interested in it. It’s just it’s, it’s a matter of survival versus not. You’re really focused on something else. So I think knowing that the reason for not being able to have a structured conversation around this is not so much your own performance, it’s just that it’s a startup and it’s going to be a little bit harder to bring it up.
Neha Narkhede: The secret in startups to grow as what we shared is, to just take ownership of what needs to be fixed. That’s the secret to growth. As the startup grows and it goes through its own sort of teenage years, as I think some of the hyper-growth companies are, including Confluent. There is actually a process, there’s actually plenty of opportunity to have those conversations. It’s not perfect like the large companies, but I think there’s plenty of opportunity. I think the secret there, or the obstacle just is that it’s not evenly across the organization, however much you might like it. So you might find yourself in pockets of the organization where it’s just not ready for the new process that has been instituted, because the company is growing so quickly that no matter how well you tried, every policy is not evenly applied.
Neha Narkhede: There’s another chance to give the benefit of doubt to your leaders, your managers, your teammates, and yourself to actually go at it a couple of times and have a positive conversation. Like I said if at any point in time there’s a repeated lack of clarity, I think maybe it’s a time to reconsider whether it’s the right time in your career to be in that kind of work environment. Larger company is much more stable, a lot of process. Obviously there are trade offs, so more process and more stability also means probably fewer opportunities for step function growth in career.
Neha Narkhede: It’s really more of a balance. It’s so different, I’ve been at really, really tiny startups, I’ve been at hyper-growth companies, at LinkedIn when I wasn’t really a c -founder or anything like that, and large companies. I still think that as long as the company grows, you have plenty of opportunity for growth if you figure out how to navigate the situation and then a lot of persistence to fight it through.
Angie Chang: Absolutely. I agree that it’s a matter of asking and asking again and getting no. Then asking, “What do I have to do to get to that next level?” Then being persistent and then coming back with, “Well, I’ve done these things. Let’s talk about this again.” It’s one of the Girl Geek Dinners, last week that I hosted with a woman who everyone respected, was a director of engineering. She gave this great example of, every job promotion I’ve been given it, wasn’t given. I had to ask for it and show up with my list of the things I’ve done, and asked for it, and asked for it. So you have to be your biggest advocate, so definitely-
Neha Narkhede: Plus one. Always ask for it.
Angie Chang: Absolutely. So we get a lot of questions from the Girl Geek Community about technical interviewing. So I wanted to ask if you have a story that you could share that would resonate with our community, that finds technical interviewing extremely challenging or daunting to think about.
Neha Narkhede: Yeah, I want to start by sharing that earlier in my career when I had to get into this technical interviewing process, it was extremely daunting. It felt like the hardest thing to do, despite knowing how to code and knowing how to do the job. What I did is what I usually do when I’m presented with daunting experiences that I want to navigate anyway is, I over-prepared. I signed up for lead code and back then, that was the thing. Just went ahead and practiced and went ahead and over-prepared.
Neha Narkhede: Unfortunately, that’s what I had to do. So, what I want to share here is that, what I also did is give myself power in the situation. I changed my perspective from feeling like a victim of an obviously unideal situation, to taking control of it. By just realizing that how you’re made to feel in a technical interview process is really a reflection of the team, and the company culture you’re going to sign up for. Ultimately hiring is a two-way decision. I remember picking LinkedIn over another social networking site, and another file sharing company, simply based on the quality of my interview experience, and it worked out.
Neha Narkhede: Realizing that it’s your choice too, it actually just oddly gave me a lot of comfort. I do think that having been on both sides of the table, there are many things that need to change about technical interviewing. So that’s another thing to realize is it’s really not perfect, and it’s not you. It’s a collective effort that we all have to work towards. There many things that we were able to institute at Confluent that I think really worked. I think the first is just realizing and making a decision that it shouldn’t be an adversarial experience. It should feel like a collective brainstorming exercise that you want to do with the future colleague. So interviewers need to adopt a friendlier stance, you need to communicate with empathy, you need to challenge the candidate and vice versa, respectfully.
Neha Narkhede: The other thing we did was to institute a take-home exercise, which is literally the first step in the interview process. Because that gives you the best possible window into thinking, to understanding how a candidate works, as we all do. There’s no one watching over our shoulders when we’re writing code. So it’s kind of silly for that to be our whole entire experience. The other thing that this take home does is, it allows you to prepare for the unique onsite interview that that candidate needs. Because we all need to prepare. It’s not just the candidate that needs to prepare. We need to prepare as interviewers to come in and actually understand their perspective and creatability.
Neha Narkhede: The third is to leave enough time and opportunity for the candidate to ask you questions. I can’t stress that enough is, you actually learn a lot of valuable information about a future colleague by just studying the quality of questions they ask. It’s really not just bombarding the candidate with questions, and trickier questions, and laying down the landmines to kind of win that situation. We found a lot of success that Confluent started instituting these changes for technical interviews. I hope that technical interviews in general, in the whole industry change for the better. It’s really a situation that needs to change collectively. It’s not just what you can do.
Angie Chang: Absolutely. I have one more question and then we’re going to turn it over to the Q&A. For people who are tuned in from home, you can put in your questions in the Q&A feature and then people can upvote it if they like it, and will ask Neha a question from there. My final question is, and Neha, you’re such a good communicator, what are some advice you can share about interpersonal communication, or salary negotiation? What’s the piece of advice you want to leave us with?
Neha Narkhede: First of all, thank you. It did not come naturally to me. I wasn’t into all the inter-school debates and whatnot that train you to just be good speakers. So I want to say that it’s okay to start off as a shy introvert engineer like I was, and find yourself up on the keynote stage.
Neha Narkhede: Take every opportunity, however super uncomfortable it feels to be on that stage and speaking. So a couple of secrets is it’s so different, communication in one-on-ones, and communication in team meetings, and communication on stage is they’re entirely different, the way I found it, because I literally had to learn that on the job.
Neha Narkhede: Communication on the stage, a little secret I did want to share as we do all these sort of… There were many speakers here, and if this was a live event they would all be on stage, is… I’ve had the opportunity to speak to really celebrated speakers, and literally all across the board, the secret is great speakers, practice a talk about more than 10 times. You don’t have to do that, but if you find a speaker that you really like, and you think that they go up on stage and write the talk like three days before, they might’ve done that, but they practiced more than 10 times. That’s sort of the happy number.
Neha Narkhede: A lot of us have speaker notes, and writing the talk prior to giving the talk is the second secret. So you literally imagine what you’re going to say. It does not make you too rehearsed, it just gives you clarity of thought. Believe it or not somehow magically you go up on stage and you say all the right stuff, and you don’t forget, and you’re not nervous because you can see your speaker notes. Because all of us tend to forget something really crucial because you focus on someone who’s looking at you and then you lose your focus. So that those are some things to share about onstage.
Neha Narkhede: About negotiation, other than what I shared, which is I tend to resort to writing to get clarity of thought. I carry those notes with you, and will try to get my notes, and studying how to communicate.
Neha Narkhede: Another book, and I feel bad about just recommending books, but this is definitely widely accepted, this particular book called Crucial Conversations. That is just amazing in terms of having both hard conversations, as well as high stakes conversations, at work. It’s specifically written for at work situations. I just think that there’s a lot of value I found. I don’t think I’m great at applying all the different techniques used in the book, but I think it’s super valuable. A lot of executive and personal coaches do recommend that book. So you might as well get your hands on it without having to hire some fancy coach.
Angie Chang: Great. That’s an excellent recommendation to have notes, to use them, and to read that book. So we have a question, I think we have time for one question before we finish and go to networking. Someone asked that they have a strange case at work. Their company says they don’t have titles and there’s a flat structure. So how do they ask for promotion without sounding like they’re not conforming?
Neha Narkhede: Yeah. This is something that’s somewhat of an emerging culture, especially in engineering. There are pros and cons of this culture. On one hand it allows people to make their case and win arguments without using their title because “Hey, everyone is called software engineer.” So I wouldn’t know it if you’re three levels higher. It allows me and gives me a level ground. But at the same time, it’s hard to see yourself really grow, right? Really what does growth even mean? So sometimes, as companies grow and mature, what they actually end up with is they have internal levels so you know the expectation of every level, and a level really means growth and opportunity and responsibility. That really is the way to look at growth.
Neha Narkhede: It does not satisfy the ego, but you are so capable that when you go and look for your new job, you are ready for a much bigger job. That’s always the safest way to navigate your career is to just be so ready. So I think if there aren’t levels established in a company, despite what the titles say, I think it’s very important to advocate for that. I found a lot of value because when you’re put in that situation, we are thinking of what levels you have to think about, what are the expectations? Why would I say, “Hey, I don’t think you’re quite ready for that staff engineer level five promotion.” It doesn’t allow for those unsaid things to happen. So I like that is like a healthy balance between no titles and career growth.
Neha Narkhede: Having said all that no matter what the culture is in your company, I think it’s very important to ask for specifics. Really good leaders would carve out a roadmap for you to get to the next level. If you don’t have that, it’s going to be much harder. Like I said before, it’s something for you to think about on how long you want to continue in that environment. If this was really something you find value in. There’s no judgment, some people ask for promotions and that’s okay. You’re ambitious and you want to push yourself and you’re going to learn fast.
Angie Chang: Thank you, Neha. That was all really helpful advice and great book recommendations. I’m sure everyone’s writing it down and putting it in Amazon so they can get it shipped so they can read it, so-
Neha Narkhede: Oh, that’s great.
Angie Chang: We are going to be switching over to Elizabeth. Elizabeth is Confluent’s Head of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. She would like to share a few words on Confluent’s commitment to increasing diversity of the workforce. Okay. Oh, hold on a second. I need to unmute. There you go.
Elizabeth Borges: There we go. My first thing to share, piece of advice, if you ever get asked to speak at a Girl Geek event, don’t go last because there is no way that I can match any of the wisdom or the stories of the folks that’ve spoken tonight. So not going to try. Instead, I want to do two things quickly. Yes, we’ll definitely touch on a little bit of what we’re doing at Confluent from a DEI perspective. So first of all, just want to say thank you. Thank you to all of you for being here with us.
Elizabeth Borges: Thank you to our incredible speakers. I got a chance beforehand to hear some of the practices of the talks, but there’s something different about seeing it at the actual event. I definitely had to get some tissues for some of those. Just really appreciate the vulnerability and all of the wisdom that you shared. So happy you’re part of the Confluent Community.
Elizabeth Borges: I also want to thank all of the folks who are on the line today. You are actually helping us kick off our Confluent Kafka Summit, which starts tomorrow. I don’t know if it’s an official or unofficial Confluent Kafka Summit kickoff event. This is the second year in a row that we’ve done a Girl Geek Dinner the night before Kafka Summit. So we’re starting to get into a little tradition here that I hope that we maintain for a bit. I want to thank you all for helping be a part of kicking this off. As we think about our job at Confluent, our mission is to put an event streaming platform at the heart of every organization around the world.
Elizabeth Borges: As we think about being able to do that as a company successfully, we know that that’s going to take a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. We need to, as a company, embrace and reflect the diversity of the global community, if we want to successfully bring that event streaming platform into organizations all around the world. As Angie mentioned, there’s a lot of great work that we’ve been doing over the past year at Confluent to help us get better at being able to realize that mission. You heard a little bit tonight from folks who mentioned employee resource groups, so internal communities of folks that serve people of different backgrounds within the organization. That’s Blackfluent, for example, like what Candace talked about. We’re also doing a lot in terms of training and starting to really talk intentionally about what it means to build an inclusive culture.
Elizabeth Borges: But I also want to point out that we want to connect with communities and folks outside of the company because we know that we can learn from you all as well. So that’s part of why partnerships, like the one that we have with Girl Geek are so important to us and part of why I’m so grateful having all of you be here tonight to help us kick off Kafka Summit. Then also celebrate diversity and inclusion and some of the amazing women from our community. So that’s first thing, very sincere thank you.
Elizabeth Borges: Second is, as Angie mentioned at the start of the event tonight, it is a unique time. I think we can all agree that 2020 is one for the history books. Obviously, we’re in the midst of a global pandemic. That’s why we’re doing this virtually. Those of you who are in California, I woke up this morning, there was smoke. It’s definitely a scary situation for many of us, given the wildfires here. There are natural disasters. I think I saw something about a hurricane coming to another part of the U.S. Then of course we’re experiencing all of this natural disasters, things that are happening out in the external world, on the heels of a very difficult summer. Having a much needed, but difficult, conversation about systemic racism and persistent racial injustice that exists in the U.S. So it’s a lot, there is a lot going on. I think at a time like this, it’s never more important to build a community, and to find people who you can be open and honest and vulnerable with.
Elizabeth Borges: That’s one of the reasons that we love partnering with Girl Geek. I think this is one of the only tech events where you can have somebody speaking honestly, and openly about coming out at work. Or having to run to the bathroom when you’re pregnant, or talking about what it’s like to grow up in Ohio as one of the few black kids at your school, and to be able to do that and be so supported. So as we are in the middle of a very difficult year, I just want to encourage all of you to continue to invest in this community.
Elizabeth Borges: We at Confluent are so excited to support it. Know that you’re also now part of our extended community at Confluent, and we’d love to stay in touch. So encourage you, if you can, to join the icebreaker afterwards. Definitely reach out to any of us who’ve spoken here tonight on LinkedIn. If there’s anything that we can do to further help you, or support you during this time. Thanks so much.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you so much, Elizabeth. That was great. So thank you to Confluent for sponsoring this dinner and making this happen.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: I encourage you all to move to icebreaker. The link is in your confirmation email. I want to give one last thank you to everybody who spoke at this event, and also to all the amazing people behind the event from the Confluent side. If you have any questions about how to get to icebreaker, please comment on the chat. I am hoping to see you all there.
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Transcript of Planet Girl Geek Dinner – Lightning Talks:
Angie Chang: It’s six o’clock and that means it’s time for another Girl Geek Dinner, and this time, however, we are coming to you virtually for the first time!
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Just going virtual opens up our access to you and to you to each other, few people in various time zones, some people who say they’re in London at 2 A.M.
Angie Chang: I’m just super excited to be able to partner with Planet and bring this evening of talks to hundreds of girl geeks.
Adria Giattino-Johnson: So today I’m going to talk about diversity and belonging and the climate that we’re at right now and how it’s not business as usual, and rethinking what diversity is going to looks like in 2020.
Lisa Huang-North: And when you do make that leap into your new role, how long do you want to be there? Is there a stepping stone to another bigger career pivot? For example, if you’re moving to a new industry or is it a way for you to grow and really deepen your expertise, for example, within the industry or within the field?
Sara Safavi: Along the way I’ve had to pick up some new habits, some new practices and ways of working in order to make my staye in remotesville as a remote employee sustainable.
Barbara Vazquez: What I’m going to talk about today about agile development and estimation, because I’m a software engineer and we do agile development at Planet. These are some tips that might be useful on a day to day.
Kelsey Doerksen: Today, I’m going to be talking a little bit about how to handle big data in space and the different machine learning projects I’ve been a part of over the past few years.
Deanna Farago: My name is Deanna Farago and my team and I operate a fleet of satellites that are currently imaging the entire planet every day.
Elena Rodriguez: I chose a topic because this is something that I’m always thinking about it, and now I have the opportunity to talk about it and I’m going to take advantage of this – this is how I ended up here, so I’m going to show you my story.
Sarah Preston: Stories are passed to community and understanding. So think about all the stories that you loved growing up. There were some kind of connection that you made, either to a character, to the author or to the setting that drew you in and made it really memorable.
Brittany Zajic: I’m on the business development team here at Planet. Business development means something different at every company. Here we focus strategic partnerships and the commercialization of new markets.
Nikki Hampton: At Planet we have always been committed to diversity, but we are doubling down on our commitment and particularly so looking with respect to attracting and retaining communities of color. For all of you online, we are looking forward to and eager to work with you to tap into a broader network of talented folks that you might want to consider referring to us or applying and sharing with a who you know. But we’re super excited to have been part of this and are grateful that you all attended!
Angie Chang: It’s six o’clock. And that means it’s time for another Girl Geek Dinner… This time, however, we are coming to you virtually for the first time from our homes in Berkeley, California here. Sukrutha, where are you?
Sukrutha Bhadouria: I’m in San Francisco, California.
Angie Chang: And behind the wings we have Amy, who is coming from … Amy, where are you coming from?
Amy Weicker: Pennsylvania.
Angie Chang: Pennsylvania. Awesome. We have a bunch of people coming in. Can you use the chat below and tell us where you’re coming in from? While everyone does that, Oh my God.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Wow. Orange County, San Jose. [inaudible] India, my hometown. What were you saying, Angie?
Angie Chang: I’m like, normally we get to see you in a beautiful office space. It’s always great to just go to these different companies and go there and meet the people, eat their food, drink some wine — and then hear from their women at the company speaking about what they’re doing at the company. From roles in engineering and product to sales … we’re going to hear from a few sales people tonight .. It’s really great and exciting to hear from many of the women working at the company on what they love to do.
Angie Chang: We learn a bit about the company. I’m just super excited to be able to partner with Planet and bring this evening of talks to hundreds of girl geeks. These videos will be available on YouTube for free later so if you can’t come because you actually had to cook dinner and eat it with your family, you can still watch it later.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: I want to just call out a few people in various time zones. Some people who say they’re in London at 2:00 AM, that’s awesome. India, 6:30 AM. That’s amazing, where in a funny way just going virtual opens up our access to you, and to you to each other 100% across time zones and across a variety of fronts. So that’s awesome.
Angie Chang: Cool. I guess it’s time for introductions. My name’s Angie Chang. I’m the founder of Girl Geek X. I’ve been organizing these Bay Area Girl Geek dinners, as we called them for the first 10 years. Then now we’ve been doing Girl Geek X events. We’ve done over 200 events at companies big and small, at companies you’ve heard of and companies you haven’t. I think it’s really fun to keep doing it all these years because of that. You get to learn about so many companies that you never thought of. You go in there and you hear about all the ways that the company has people working in these different departments that you never knew existed. Suddenly you’re like, “Oh my God, I guess this sounds really cool.” By the end, when they’re like, “And we are hiring,” you’re like, “Yes, I know what you do. I know what team I can join. I heard from people at that company, I know their names. I can now find them on LinkedIn and poke them and send them my resume.” Please do that. They are hiring. Sukrutha?
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Yeah. Hi, I’m Sukrutha. I’m the CTO of Girl Geek X. Angie and I met several years ago when I had just moved to the Bay Area looking for other like-minded women like yourself to connect with. I found out that there was an upcoming event with Girl Geek Dinner and I saw Angie’s name there. I was like, that’s awesome. I should try to go. For whatever reason, I wasn’t able to go that evening, and I instead managed to get the company I was working at to sponsor. Angie and I played phone tag for a little bit, but we ended up meeting and I was like, this is so exciting because that particular event had over 200 women AND men show up — 200 people show up, basically. It was such a great energy in the room. I just couldn’t get enough of it. I wanted to come back.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: That’s where our journey together started. That was dinner number 11. We’ve since had over 200 dinners. I’ve actually lost count. At that point it was one every few months. We ended up having the frequency just go up. We then launched into podcasts. We launched into virtual conferences. So you can see all of that content on our website (girlgeek.io). Just to catch up if you’re new to this, usually what we do in this situation is we survey the room and we ask how many of you are attending this event for the first time. I don’t know how we would do that now, but I’d be really curious to learn from virtually raising your hands. How many of you are attending for the first time? Wow. I can see the numbers, counting now over 40 people are raising their hands as the first time.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Wow. That number’s climbing, Angie. That’s amazing. I’m so happy to see so many first time attendees. Generally, like for us, it has been amazing because we would get so much out of these dinners, the podcast that we do, as well as the conferences, because the energy from just meeting other people specifically like you, you may not have that access in your company. We were getting so much out of it. We would hear from the sponsoring company, how they were getting access to really motivated, smart individuals like yourself, where they ordinarily wouldn’t have the access to. Likewise, the attendees would come to these events and they’d be like, “Oh my gosh, I didn’t realize that were these many people who are just like me.” And then they started to make friendships. Often Angie and I would talk about how important it is to network before you actually need it.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: I myself was super shy and awkward. And honestly, I still am. Who knows with the pandemic and sitting at home how awkward I’m going to be in real life when all of this lifts, but I do force myself. I learned from Angie, actually, how best to get involved in a conversation and approach people that I know I can benefit from that connection and they can benefit from it, as well. We started to build our circle. From that, I learned concepts like build your own personal board of directors, people who advise you in your career and your work life balance and topics like that. Then people who give you honest feedback on how you can improve yourself. So many things like mentorship and sponsorship and how to go about seeking that for yourself and how not to directly just go up to someone and be like, “Just be my mentor,” but then not give them enough context. So how to go about it the right way. There’s usually tips and tricks like that, that we will benefit most from asking other people who’ve had shared experiences like ourselves. What do you think, Angie? What do you think people get out of this?
Angie Chang: I really appreciate going to Girl Geek Dinners and then Girl Geek events, because we reach a wide range of women who are working in tech and engineering and product. Also a lot of startup entrepreneurs and operations and marketing people. And they all intersect. I think in our careers, which are going to stand for decades, we are definitely going to be changing our jobs, and our roles will be different. I remember when I first met Sukrutha, she was a software engineer in test, and now she’s a senior engineering manager and it’s been years and it’s been great watching her change her career and grow and continue to look for … I think people look for people like them.
Angie Chang: If I were an engineer, which I was 15 years ago, I would go to a Girl Geek Dinner and I’d be like, “I want to meet other engineers,” but then you wouldn’t have that happy chance of meeting other people, women who are working in other roles, but then you’d be like, “Oh my God, this is actually really cool.” These weak ties and these relationships are actually really beneficial in the long run. I don’t think I would have asked for it when I was younger, to meet all these different types of people, but now I really see it’s fortuitous and it pays to be a little broader. I like the Girl Geek X umbrella, instead of saying I’m only in product, which I was for a few years, or I’m only an entrepreneur, which I was for a few years.
Angie Chang: Now, it’s just a great place to meet a lot of people. They keep coming back. We actually keep seeing a lot of faces. There’s always a lot of new people and a lot of people that come back time and again, based on who is hosting. We’ll be having different companies host virtual events moving forward monthly. You can look forward to different companies. But tonight we’re really excited to bring you the Girl Geeks of Planet Labs. I am going to be introducing our first speaker from Planet Labs, Adria.
Angie Chang: Here’s a quick bit about her. She joined Planet’s federal division in Washington, DC as a people partner, where she was able to continue her passion for innovation and data with strategic human capital. She earned her master’s degree at Georgetown university with a research focus on diversity, equity and inclusion in tech. She is co-lead to Planet’s belonging taskforce. Welcome, Adria.
Adria Giattino-Johnson: Thank you so much. I’m so excited to be here. This is such a great event, and it’s my first time. Obviously my first time as a panelist, but my first time attending the event. I’m just so excited to have so many people here listening to our talks and just connecting with women in different industries. I’m excited to just attend future events later on. Thanks so much for the introduction.
Adria Giattino-Johnson: Let’s jump into a little bit about Planet. I’m going to share my-
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Adria, would you like to turn on your video so people can see you?
Adria Giattino-Johnson: Oh, I’m so sorry.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: No worries.
Adria Giattino-Johnson: I think we can all relate. I think this has happened to probably all of us. We’re all in a remote workforce right now. Maybe everyone can raise their hand if they’ve forgotten their video once or twice. Thank you. That made me feel a little bit better. Let me share my screen really quickly with everyone. We will jump into a little bit about Planet and then … oops, sorry … I will jump into my presentation.
Adria Giattino-Johnson: About Planet, aerospace know how meet Silicon Valley ingenuity. From our spacecraft to our APIs, we engineer our hardware and software to service the largest fleet of earth imaging satellites in orbit and scale our seven plus petabyte imagery archive, growing daily. Planet designs, builds, and launches satellites faster than any company or government in history by using lean, low cost electronics and design iteration. Our Doves, which make up the world’s largest constellation of earth imaging satellites, line scan the planet to image the entire earth daily, which is really cool. We launch new satellites into orbit every three or four months. Most earth imaging companies don’t build their own satellites, but we’re not like most earth imaging companies. Planet designs and builds its satellites in house, allowing us to iterate often and pack the latest technology into our small satellites.
Adria Giattino-Johnson: Complete vertical integration enables us to respond quickly to customer needs and perpetually evolve our technology. Operating one satellite is a challenge, but operating 200 is completely unprecedented. If you haven’t checked out our Ted Talk on YouTube, I highly, highly suggest you do. Planet’s submission is really cool. I’ll dive into a little bit about why I love working at Planet in a little bit, but it really is unprecedented. Our mission control team uses patented automation software to manage our fleet of satellites, allowing just a handful of people to schedule imaging windows, push software into orbit and download images to 45 ground stations throughout the world. Planet processes and delivers imagery quickly and efficiently. We use the Google Cloud platform and enable custom processing so that customers can tap directly into our data the same way we do. Our data pipeline ensures easy web and API access to Planet’s imagery and archive. We make every scene available as a tile service, composite scenes into mosaics, and build time slice mosaics so you can see change over time. That’s a little bit about us.
Adria Giattino-Johnson: I am the first speaker, so I’m just going to dive into my talk. I hope that was a high level overview of Planet. Every person that works at Planet is super passionate about our mission, what we do. I really can say that every time I’m out on the street and I do tell people that I work for Planet, our mission is just so cool, that we build our own satellites and we have daily earth imaging. It really is unprecedented. It’s a really cool place to work.
Adria Giattino-Johnson: On to my talk. I’m the people partner for Planet Federal. I work out of Washington, DC. Planet Federal, it’s the government arm of Planet. We partner with the government. I function as the people partner, which is basically HR. The people partner does function kind of as an HR business partner. Today I’m going to talk about diversity and belonging and the climate that we’re at right now, and how it’s not business as usual. We’re rethinking what diversity and belonging looks like in 2020.
Adria Giattino-Johnson: A little bit about me. I like to use the group identity wheel anytime I do any type of speaking related to diversity and belonging, because I think this is a really good representation, at least for me, the way I like to represent myself and my different group identities. I am a cis gendered woman. My pronouns are she/her. I’m a US national, identify as agnostic. I am a Black, queer lesbian living with disability. I’m a millennial, upper middle class, and I do hold an advanced degree. This framework is really good for me. I think it’s really good for others, just to kind of show places where I’m marginalized and places where different group identities that I am also dominant.
Adria Giattino-Johnson: Let’s jump in. So why I joined Planet. It was an industry jump for me. I had about seven years in human resources. I started as a generalist. I grew into leadership and then I later expanded into consultancy. I’m really passionate about strategic HR and diversity, equity, and inclusion. I began looking for something in the tech industry. I wanted to feel really connected to the mission of the next place that I landed. I was instantly intrigued by Planet and their core values. Why I love working at Planet, and this is what keeps me passionate, keeps me engaged, it’s why I show up to work every day. I love my team. They’re brilliant. I can actually say this globally, across Planet. We just have a really talented group of individuals that work for our company. If we’re at coffee chats or happy hours or whatever you can just listen to people for hours.
Adria Giattino-Johnson: Everyone is just brilliant at what they do, and everyone is so passionate about how they contribute to Planet’s mission. The work that I do is really great for me. It is what I’m passionate about. I get to do that every day. Planet is dedicated to agility and learning, which is something that’s really important to me, especially being in the people department. I love working on the people team because I really enjoy fostering connection and collaboration between teams.
Adria Giattino-Johnson: Let’s dive into the topic today of what I wanted to talk about for this lightning talk, which is diversity and belonging. This year has been a tough year, and I think we’re all in agreement. We face a global pandemic. We’re facing systematic racism and police brutality, political unrest, and let us not forget the murder hornet scare in May. Just in case you did forget, I put a little slide here. It did terrify me, I think, as well as some others. Wanted to add a little bit of levity there. This was an addition to our plates, I think, that we did not need in May. But so let’s dive into the topic for today. We are a nation that’s currently experiencing trauma. Filmed police brutality and racist interactions have flooded our broadcasts as well as social media. It’s something that we’re seeing every day. Many, from all backgrounds and racial identities, have filled the streets in protest to support Black Lives Matter. In response to this, a number of companies have put out statements in solidarity, and it’s forcing many companies, including Planet, to grapple with internal diversity statistics and consequently rethink diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.
Adria Giattino-Johnson: Let’s talk a little bit about statistics. Statistics show that Black employees are left behind. In 2014, Google released their diversity statistics, which many tech companies followed suit after that. But before that it wasn’t something that companies widely released. Statistics over the past six years have shown that despite diversity efforts by most organizations, Black representation remains extremely low with a net change that is almost nonexistent. Statistics do show a slight increase for women in tech, which shows that some diversity efforts are working, but some marginalized groups are still being left behind, which is super important to look at. Let’s look a little bit at the delta for Black employees and tech. So this is a really good representation to just show you over the past five to six years there really hasn’t been a change, despite companies having large funding towards diversity, having diversity programs in place.
Adria Giattino-Johnson: The numbers still remain extremely low. There has been, as I said, an increase for women in tech. It’s been a small increase. There’s still so much room to go, but there has been some strides made there. So just wanted to show a little bit of visual representation of that data. Let’s talk about why diversity efforts are failing. This is what I mean when I’m talking about diversity, quote, unquote business as usual. This is what companies have been doing for decades. Despite a few new bells and whistles that came about in the ’90s, companies have been essentially doubling down on the same approaches that they’ve been doing since the ’60s, which is diversity training to reduce bias. I think many of us have held trainings like that if you’re in people operations, like I am, or maybe you’ve attended a training like that. Hiring tests and performance ratings that limit bias, and putting grievance systems in place for employees to challenge managers.
Adria Giattino-Johnson: These tools are really designed to preempt lawsuits. I think that framework is even in the wording. When we do attend these trainings, it’s very fear-based, I would say. They don’t dive further than that. They don’t dive further to promote equity and inclusion. Now we’re seeing a shift. Employees are demanding change. Companies can no longer operate business as usual in diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. Employees don’t want a PR statement from the organization, but rather they want to see a clear action plan related to inclusion and anti racist efforts. This really falls in the wheelhouse of the people team.
Adria Giattino-Johnson: It is an organizational wide effort, but it’s something that I’m proud to be involved in. I wanted to talk a little bit about that today. Moving toward belonging and the new landscape for diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. I really, really love this framework and I wanted to make sure I included in this talk. Diversity has no meaning without inclusion and belonging. Diversity is like being invited to the party. Inclusion is being asked to dance and belonging is dancing like no one is watching. Belonging is really being able to show up at work as your true self, and being able to be your authentic self in the workplace. We spend so much time at work that really having this piece where you’re being invited to the party without having these other pieces, it doesn’t mean anything. This is exactly why these diversity efforts are failing.
Adria Giattino-Johnson: I’m not going to dive super into the inclusion framework here, but I did want to include a visual of the sweet spot for inclusion, which is a high level of belongingness and a high value in uniqueness. What that results in is an individual being treated as an insider, and also allowed and encouraged to retain uniqueness within their work group. Let’s talk a little bit about definitions, because a lot of times, I think you can get these trendy words that are happening within diversity or even happening within HR, within people. Belonging can be pegged as a trendy word and it’s really not. I wanted to be explicit about the definitions. Belongingness has to do with whether or not a person is and feels treated as an organizational insider. Uniqueness is measured by the degree to which an individual feels he or she can bring his or her full self to the work without needing to assimilate to cultural norm.
Adria Giattino-Johnson: The degree to which an employee can fully engage, feel safe, and feel connected in the workplace greatly depends on these two categories. And like I said, these can often be left out of diversity programs. So let’s dive a little further into diversity without belonging. Like I said, diversity without belonging inclusion allows marginalized groups into the organization, but then it forces them to fit in to the existing dominant culture. Many Black employees, for example, experience a pass on promotion, noting that they should get to know other managers more, or network more, or connect more. There’s really not explicit definitions in terms of what that really means. For many marginalized groups, Black employees specifically, they report not feeling safe to connect at work and be their authentic self due to cultural difference and fear of bias or repercussions. There’s a real barrier there. Statistics show that attrition rates among Black employees and those of other marginalized groups are much higher. A 2017 report surveyed over 2000 tech employees who left their jobs. It found that many people of color felt that they had unfairly been passed over for promotion, faced stereotyping or bias related to quote unquote fitting in or connecting with others.
Adria Giattino-Johnson: Let’s talk about getting it right. I mean, that’s what I really want to talk about in this talk. When belonging and inclusion are embedded in company culture, it no longer forces employees to fit into the dominant culture, but rather it builds a culture around everyone’s unique identities. Rethinking strategy. Belonging becomes the heartbeat behind an organization’s culture and core values. I’m proud to say that that’s something Planet is working towards and I think that they value. I am the co-lead on the belonging task force. I can really say that that is embedded in Planet’s core values. Without inclusion and belonging, employees do not feel as though they can show up as their authentic self at work, like I said before. This inhibits recruitment, retention, and promotion of marginalized groups, and it also inhibits diverse voices from speaking up and being heard. Let’s talk about creating sustainable change. An internal and external audit is something that must be done.
Adria Giattino-Johnson: Companies, including Planet, must take a long, hard look in the mirror and they must sit with what they see. What are the diversity statistics amongst marginalized groups, specifically Black employees in this climate? What are the attrition rates amongst these groups? How do these systems that organizations have in place contribute to oppression of these groups? Creating a safe space for employees and fostering belonging is also really important. I’m sure a lot of you have heard about employee resource groups, or maybe you’re a member of one.
Adria Giattino-Johnson: They’re a great place to create a safe space for employees to connect. They’ve actually been in effect since 1964, and they were established as a response to anti-black prejudice following the 1964 riots in New York. They’ve continued to be a huge part of the tech community, but companies must really be careful to utilize these groups as a safe space, rather than placing extra burden on them by forcing them to do organizational diversity work and education on top of their jobs. Especially with us being women in tech, sometimes the burden can fall on the marginalized group to do the education, to do the work on top of their jobs. That’s not really the purpose of an employee resource group. It’s to create that safe space, to create belonging, and to create connection. Employers should really watch that and be careful of putting that burden on the employees.
Adria Giattino-Johnson: Looking at the internal and external pipeline of candidates is also really important. Talent and recruitment reform, I think is the biggest part of this. You want to audit your hiring practices, and broadening the schools that you recruit from is really important and including HBCUs, it’s also really important. Recognizing bias against HBCUs and other university programs as being seen as a lower bar is the first step in that. I think that’s something that a lot of tech companies are looking at right now. Also auditing referral programs. So I think referral programs sometimes can fall by the wayside, especially in tech. If a workforce is already homogenous, referrals can further contribute to this as referrals from employees tend to be within their own identity groups.
Adria Giattino-Johnson: I challenge everyone on this video to think about when you’re referring people into your organizations, are you amplifying diverse voices? Who are you referring, or is it homogenous? This is something that even as employees, we can be thinking about when we’re bringing people into our organization.
Adria Giattino-Johnson: Addition of external efforts, and this is something I’m really proud to partner or be involved with Planet. Recognizing the disparity of marginalized groups in tech and committing to investment in community partnerships and education is also huge in creating sustainable change. An example of this is investing money to give black and LatinX students exposure to geospatial and STEM studies and potentially creating an internship pipeline based on such programs.
Adria Giattino-Johnson: The last portion I want to talk about is mentorship programs. I think Angie highlighted, it was either Angie or Amy, highlighted mentorship in the beginning of this. People in senior roles tend to want to mentor and groom people who look like them or remind them of themselves. This is implicit bias. It’s unconscious bias. It’s not on purpose. But this means that people in marginalized groups often do not have someone to advocate for them. Organizations and managers within these organizations, if you’re a people leader on your team, you should be intentional about diversity in mentorship programs rather than leaving it up to senior management.
Adria Giattino-Johnson: The last portion is stamina. This isn’t a checklist. This isn’t a quick fix. This isn’t a measurable ROI. ROI is like always what executives want to hear is if you’re on the operations team or maybe you’re a people leader on your team I’m sure you talk a lot about ROI, building business cases for everything that you want to pass through. But that’s not the case here. This is systemic change that we’re trying to create at the organizational level, which is sustained over years of hard work to see measurable results. Companies must commit to sustainable change over time at every level of the company to value and prioritize diverse and inclusive workforces.
Adria Giattino-Johnson: I’ll end this just by saying, I am so excited to be a part of these efforts at Planet. I look forward so much forward to seeing sustainable change within our company, and I hope that your companies are also working to create sustainable change. I hope that your voices are being heard. This is a really important time for all of our companies, especially within the tech community. I’ll be excited to see what type of change happens within the tech community in years to come. So thank you so much.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Hi. Thank you so much, Adria. That was wonderful. It was really inspiring for sure for me. We’re going to switch over to our next amazing panelist, Lisa Huang-North. I’m going to do a quick introduction and then we can jump into Lisa. Wow, great background, Lisa! Lisa is a product and program lead at Planet. The team is responsible for delivering product solutions that help customers scale their business. Before joining Planet, Lisa worked for over a decade in strategic consulting, finance, digital marketing, and full stack software engineering. In her free time, you can find Lisa building Lego Technic sets, coaxing her sourdough starter, and dreaming of the day when we can all travel to see friends and family again. Oh my gosh, don’t we all? Welcome, Lisa.
Lisa Huang-North: Thank you very much, and thank you for the intro. Let me share my screen. Hopefully, everyone had a great time listening to Adria’s talk. I’m really excited to be following such a fantastic speaker. Can you all see my screen?
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Lisa Huang-North: Hopefully, yes. Okay, wonderful. Yeah. Really today I’m hoping to speak with you around pivoting, and I think especially with 2020, it’s really thrown the spinner. I think a lot of people’s plan, whether that be life plans or career plans and career pivots, there’s never really a good time for it, but it’s even more stressful when there’re uncertainties around that. I’m hoping today I can share three lessons from our satellite operation team and really get you to think around how you can plan for your career pivot.
Lisa Huang-North: To start, let’s see. Here we go. All right. Firstly, about me, I’m currently a product and program lead here at Planet, and I’m also a part of our wonderWomen ERG group that Adria mentioned earlier, [inaudible] taskforce. I call myself a Pivoteur with five career pivots. Prior to COVID shutdown, I loved to travel. Hopefully that’s something that resonate with everyone. And here, I just included a short quote because that was part of what inspired my brief or the talk, was Robert Frost’s poem around traveling or taking the road less traveled.
Lisa Huang-North: The first lesson, what are your areas of interest? A lot of the time for our satellite operation team, the first thing they need to know about tasking on satellite is, where do you want to look, and what do you care about? I will use two use case to try to explain. The first one, perhaps you’re in agriculture. Perhaps you are a farmer, in which case, the area that interests you could be roads. You’re trying to find the roads that will help you travel to your farms versus if you’re a civil government, for example, someone in San Francisco who is doing city planning, the things you care about will probably be buildings or infrastructure, and not so much about the road itself to a farm land area.
Lisa Huang-North: Using these sample lessons similarly for you, when you’re planning your career pivots or career changes, that will be my question to you, what are your areas of interest? That can be an industry, a vertical, perhaps you really tech or you want to try out finance or non-profit. Maybe it’s a skillset that you want to gain along the way, or perhaps it’s really about a national or geographic location, you want to move to the city or you want to be closer to family. So those are interesting points to consider around your area of interest.
Lisa Huang-North: In my case, it was a combination of all of those when I did my first two career pivots, I will say. I started off in Chicago, my career as a mutual fund data analyst. So, that was at Morningstar. And one of the things that I personally felt was really important was a chance to work abroad because I think it’s important to learn about different culture and get a chance to work and live in those places [inaudible 00:39:30] traveler.
Lisa Huang-North: And that’s what brought me to my first opportunity where the company went through a merger and acquisition and I volunteered, interviewed, and ended up moving to Cape Town, South Africa, where I headed up the data operations for our Sub-Saharan African office. And that’s the picture on the left. And after doing that for a couple years, I realized, hey, data analyst is great. I get to learn a lot about data operations and logistics and business analytics, but I really want to do something more creative now. And I love something that’s more customer facing and somewhere where I can work on my marketing or communication skills. So that was my second pivot where I moved and became a food writer. I know, I know a little off course, but it was something fun. I was in my early twenties and for me, it was about the skillset that I wanted to gain and in the immediate format.
Lisa Huang-North: All right, lesson number two, what are your time of interest? A lot of the time for our satellite operation team, they need to know what the targeted time period for our customers, our users will want to see imagery of. Again, going back to the earlier examples, if you’re in agriculture, for example, a farmer. Your time of interest is probably quite seasonal. For example, with this picture, you actually see a lot of the circular fields. That’s what you’ll spot throughout the U.S. And in their case, their time of interest would probably be spring because they’re planning for the growing season and they really need to know what the health of their fields are. However, going back to civil government, if you’re looking at zoning or city planning, or even thinking about where do I want to develop the city, building more infrastructure, building new highways, some of those time of interest could be longer term instead of a season. You’re looking at your own year or even multi-year horizons.
Lisa Huang-North: So think about that when you’re going through a career change or planning for it, what is your time of interest? Are you looking at something that will happen within the next 12 months, two years? And when you do make that leap into your new role, how long do you want to be there? Is there a stepping stone to another bigger career pivot, for example, if you’re moving to a new industry or is it a way for you to grow and really deepen your expertise, for example, within the industry or within the field. And feel free to put your thoughts in the Q and A as well, it’s always fun to make it interactive as you are pondering through these lessons.
Lisa Huang-North: So in my case, I would say while I was becoming a food writer, I fell into digital marketing because a lot of writing and communication are augmented by social media. And from there I discovered one of my passions, which is in public speaking. So for me, my time of interest at the time was really to hone my public speaking skills and communication skills. And one of my capstone projects or goal I set for myself was to speak at the TEDx event. And at the time Cape Town held or organized various TEDx events. There’s ones organized by the university and there’s ones organized by the city itself. And I was able to, again, submit the talk proposal and be selected and really presented. And that was where I had the unique opportunity to meet Archbishop Desmond Tutu, as well. Still one of the highlights in that time of my life.
Lisa Huang-North: And carrying that forward, now my next time of interest was looking at two to three year horizon where I said, “I have my data analytic skills down. I have my creative marketing skills down. What do I want to learn next?” And I really wanted to be able to build a product so that I’m not just talking about it or selling it or analyzing it if I can build the end to end user experience. And that’s where it brought me to my next pivot into a full stack software engineer role. And I went through a coding boot camp where I really learned the full stack where on the backend learning Ruby and on the front end learning JavaScript, using frameworks such as Ember.js and React.js. And that’s the photo you see on the top right. Again, I like to have milestones or capstone project for myself, and for that one, I really wanted to present some fine learnings in the form of a conference talk. And I was able to present at GDG in Madrid, that’s Google Developer Groups, during my travels when I was in Madrid. Think about the time of interest as you pursue your next career change.
Lisa Huang-North: All right, lesson number three, and I think this one is actually one of the most important one. And it’s a reasonable or logical extension coming from area of interest, time of interest, and now what are your success criteria? Using the earlier examples, if we are looking at those as an agricultural farmer. This image on the screen, it’s probably not very successful because I don’t see a lot of farming or agricultural land near San Francisco downtown. Whereas if the photo was of [inaudible] with garlic farming or even of Napa Valley with the wine industry there, that probably makes a lot more sense and that image will be successful, right?
Lisa Huang-North: But again, going back to city, if you are San Francisco government and you’re doing city zoning and infrastructure development, this image is probably perfect for your use case. You’re able to see downtown, you’re able to see Embarcadero. And in fact, you can even see Presidio on the top and the bridge, The Golden Gate Bridge. And even with Karl the Fog, the clouds, we’re always looking up for cloud covers at Planet, even though the cloud obfuscate the left side of the city, you really get to see 90% of the city.
Lisa Huang-North: So this image for civil government will be successful. So link in to that, what are the factors for your success criteria? Is it about the job, the scope of the role, maybe it’s about salary because you’re at the time of your life where you need to provide for your family and financial stability is key. Or perhaps if you’re younger and earlier in your career journey and for you, personal growth and learning is the key factor for your success criteria. So think about that as you’re planning your career change and planning for the next pivot.
Lisa Huang-North: In my case, I would say that through those different career changes, initially the success criterias were pretty immediate. Which are, what skills can I learn? And am I having fun with it? Am I having fun while I’m changing these different jobs or learning new things? And I would say on the top left, this was at a friend’s wedding in Durban, South Africa. And for me at the time, the social aspect was a huge thing, too. I really wanted to meet people. I wanted to experience different cultures and those, my lifestyle choices, were integral pieces to my success criteria beyond professional growth.
Lisa Huang-North: And slowly as I moved back to the U.S., I would say that my success criteria has changed over time. And now, instead of just focusing on perhaps immediate and personal gains, I’m really looking at how I can integrate or how I can be closer to families and what that means for my lifestyle and what I want in the longterm, starting a family, for example, mentoring other women in tech. And that’s how I’ve been involved in Women in Product and Tech Ladies. And in some ways, still trying to get connected with my roots from when I ran the startup by attending startup conferences and just keeping fingers on the pulse about what’s happening in the startup space. So that was really key shift from personal growth lifestyle to professional, family, as well as any mentorship impact.
Lisa Huang-North: And that ultimately was what brought me to Planet. I think, as Adria mentioned, a lot of us here at Planet, we are fully aligned with Planet’s mission. And one of the success criteria for me when I went through the latest round of job search was around impact. I really wanted to join a company where I myself can be contributing to something that is impactful at the global scale. And really, Planet way surpassed that and some more because I would say beyond global, this is really a planetary and specie level. And I think hopefully with the use case I have shared, you can see how it impacts industries at the time. And I’m sure some of the speakers later will share even more interesting story such as forestry or crisis management. And you’ll get to hear a lot more. So take this time in the question Q and A area, if you can think about what your success criteria are, start sharing that with us.
Lisa Huang-North: So finally, savor the journey. I think bringing back the three lessons about area of interest, time of interest, and your success criteria, another thing to remember is that while we are in the midst of career change or any pivot, the uncertainties are probably quite stressful. And you may feel like you don’t really know where you’re going, or if you are going to be able to attain the goals that you have set out for yourself. But as a famous saying go, hindsight is always 20/20. And while you’re in it, you may feel like you’re going through a rough divergence, snaking around from place to place. And it doesn’t feel like a linear path, but looking back, or if you zoom out and take a bird’s eye view, you’ll probably realize that you’ve made something beautiful and you have created this fantastic journey for yourself, where all those different skills and experience you pick up along the way were pieces of the puzzle. And ultimately when you piece all of them together, they look really stunning.
Lisa Huang-North: So I hope that will help to lessen some of the stress, anxiety you’re feeling as you put it through these uncertain times. And to close, obviously, if you have any questions, feel free to reach out and let’s chat. You can connect with me on Twitter, on LinkedIn. I will be here for the networking event later on as well. So definitely reach out and we are hiring. So always happy to chat about Planet. Thank you.
Angie Chang: Thank you, Lisa. We are running a little behind, so we’re going to skip the Q&A but feel free to ask the questions and we will ask Lisa and we will share them later in a blog post with everyone. But right now our next speaker is Sara. And we’ll bring her right up. Hey, Sara.
Sara Safavi: Hey, how’s it going?
Angie Chang: Good. How are you?
Sara Safavi: All right.
Angie Chang: So… you can get your slides…
Sara Safavi: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Angie Chang: Perfect. So Sara, by means of intro and [inaudible]. She leads the developer relations team at Planet Labs. Welcome, Sara.
Sara Safavi: Thank you. All right. So yes, I will get started. Like Angie said, I lead the DevRel team here at Planet Labs. And what I want to talk to you all about today is my experience working remote. I’ve been working remotely, both here at Planet and prior to Planet for about five or six years. So about three years here at Planet and then a couple different companies before. Along the way, I’ve had to pick up some new habits, some new practices and ways of working in order to make my stay in Remotesville as a remote employee sustainable.
Sara Safavi: Tonight, I just wanted to share some of those tips with you and go through them really quick. I want to give you a starting point, not so much teach you everything, but a starting point you can reference if you’re also somewhere at the beginning of this journey. I know a lot of us are, especially in the last couple of months, so it’s a topic that we’ve all been talking about. And this, if you ask somebody for their one tip for working remotely, this one is probably what you’ll hear most of, establish a routine, make sure you have a routine.
Sara Safavi: I’m putting this first because it is so common that you’ll hear it. I have a couple of things I’ll mention after this less common, but I do think that this is important. But something important to notice here is that we’re new because I’m talking about establishing a new routine. You need to develop some new routine that works for you because this isn’t the same as your pre-Remotesville routine. Your life is no longer in the same patterns. You’re not going to get up in the morning and pack a lunch, probably. You’re not going to get into your car, stop at the gas station on the way. You probably not even going to put your shoes on in the morning.
Sara Safavi: So it’s completely different scenario, which means it’s going to take a different routine. But routines are still important because our brains can be stupid. And we want to trick them. A routine helps you trick your brain into understanding that we’re getting ready for work, we’re going to work, we’re no longer sitting at home in bed, it’s not the weekend, it’s still a weekday. So taking that time to get dressed in the morning, do your hair, put on something that makes you feel powerful and professional. It really helps separate that situation in your head between home and work.
Sara Safavi: So build a morning routine that takes care of you. Maybe do some yoga, meditate, go for a run, whatever it takes to establish that new routine. But some other things that people don’t necessarily talk about, a friend of mine shared this concept with me a couple of months ago, and I really love it. So I had to stick it in here. Teach yourself and give yourself permission to put your body first. What I really mean by this is a lot of times when we’re working solo at home, it can become really easy to just stop listening to our body’s needs. If we’re not changing what we’re doing or interacting with other people, if we’re just sitting at our desks for eight hours a day with a cat or a dog sitting under the desk, then you can really start ignoring your own body’s needs.
Sara Safavi: So if you catch yourself feeling out of sorts or not able to get into that workflow like you usually do, or just feeling like something’s wrong, or you keep beating your head against the same bug for 10 minutes, take a minute and check in with yourself. See if there’s some body’s needs that you’ve been ignoring. Did you skip lunch? Have you not stood up from your desk for four hours? Since you don’t have like a water cooler to walk towards, maybe you forgot to get a drink of water, hydration is important. But just take a moment, check in with yourself because a lot of times, the ways that we’re feeling are actually directly related to ignoring what our body’s asking for.
Sara Safavi: And similarly, talking about stepping away from your desk, when you’re working remotely, you really have to make space for scene changes. If you’re in an office, many times a day, you’re going to get up, you’re going to go to a conference room, you’re going to go visit your coworker’s desk, you’re going to go to somebody else’s desk and ask to see what they’re working on. You’ve got all these opportunities to change your scene, but when you’re working at home, you don’t have those opportunities anymore. So you have to deliberately make space for them. Schedule them into your daily routine. Maybe you’re going to take your dog for a walk for a half hour every afternoon. Put that on your work calendar. Or maybe every Monday morning, you water all your plants, put that on your calendar. Put dancing breaks on your calendar, I have friends that do that and I love it. You’re working remotely though, your schedule can be flexible, maybe you can do a yoga class at 1:00 PM. Maybe you have the freedom to do that, but you have to deliberately seek out those opportunities to change your scene.
Sara Safavi: Similarly, you have to seek out connection. You really have to rethink what it means to make connection. If you’re working remotely, like I said, you don’t have those coworkers desks to walk to. You don’t have a water cooler. You don’t have a break room to go make a cup of coffee or grab your lunch and heat it up. You don’t have those natural opportunities for connection. So as a Remotesville citizen, you need to be deliberate and intentional about this. Instead of just telling a coworker on Slack, “Hey, we should get coffee sometime,” you should send them a calendar invite for 2:00 PM on Wednesday and say, “Hey, I’m going to be on Zoom, having coffee. Let’s chat.” Make it an intentional and easy way for them to accept and say, “Yeah, let’s connect.”
Sara Safavi: Find opportunities to network. Find a network of other people working remotely, whether it’s at your current company or friends that you know who are in different companies. And if you don’t have a network already and you can’t find one, maybe that’s a perfect time for you to make your own. Something that’s really great that we overlook in remote work is coworking. It can be really great to just cowork with somebody. And I don’t mean an active Zoom chat, like a coffee break, where you’re talking back and forth, but maybe you just open a video call with a coworker and you guys just sit there in silence doing your own work together. It’s really companionable.
Sara Safavi: So rethinking what we mean when we’re thinking about human connection and then being deliberate and intentional about it, is what’s going to make that remote work environment more sustainable. Something to watch for is to be aware about the creeping attraction of home comforts. So if you’re working in Remotesville, you’ve got a comfy couch, you’ve got a comfy bed, you’ve got all of the comforts of home, but I strongly recommend that you don’t work from your bed.
Sara Safavi: So I know Deanna is going to talk to us later about satellite operations from bed, and I totally fully endorse it. I think that’s awesome. But what I mean when I say don’t work from bed is, don’t make this your normal Monday to Friday, nine to five office space. Like I said, brains are stupid. You need to trick your brain into understanding home versus workspace. You have to use sensory cues to signal that difference. You have to let yourself close an office door at the end of the day. So maybe you don’t actually have an office at your house, but maybe you have to mentally be able to close that door.
Sara Safavi: If you’re working from your bed all day, it’s super comfortable. It’s awesome. Maybe you’re even really productive, but then the problem comes when it’s time to go to bed and you want to sleep, but your brain is like, “Oh, this is where I’ve been working all day.” So you start thinking about work again, and your brain starts turning the last problem you’re working on over in your head. And it’s really difficult to have that isolation. So maybe at home, you don’t have a lot of space, maybe you’re working from your dining table. That was me for the first two years of my remote career. But something you could do is put a lamp on that table and turn that lamp on only when you’re working. And when you’re done working, the lamp’s off. Little stuff like that, those sensory cues can really make a difference in being able to mentally close that office door.
Sara Safavi: I’ve given you a lot of advice and I do want you to remember, these are interesting times where we’re living through right now. This isn’t the normal time that you would be switching to working remote in tech. So give yourself permission to practice a little self compassion and be kind to yourself, but also be honest because compassion doesn’t mean lying to yourself. So if you forget to step away from your desk for eight hours, or maybe you fail to put anything besides coffee and LaCroix in your body since 8:00 AM today, it’s okay. But it’s important to be honest and name that and understand that it happened and then just try again tomorrow. You understand that it’s important to listen to your body, to stay hydrated, to take those opportunities for scene change, and just try again tomorrow.
Sara Safavi: So try to create a routine that works for you. A new routine. You’re not going to make your old routine work here. Take breaks. Remember to move around. Listen to your body and brain’s needs. Intentionally seek out human connection and make invitations to people that are easy to act upon that are not passive. And don’t let comfort creep overtake you. Try not to work from bed all day every day. Don’t ignore your body and your brain’s needs. Don’t skip meals. It’s okay to take a break and step away from your desk, but above all, don’t be too hard on yourself.
Sara Safavi: So I don’t know if we have time for Q?A. I would love to take questions if I can, but otherwise that’s my contact info. I would love to hear from any and all of you.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: That was great. Thank you so much. We’re definitely going to take questions later, like Angie mentioned, but thank you so much. All right, next up… Barb is a software engineering manager and developer on the applications team at Planet. Take it away, Barb. Welcome.
Barbara Vazquez: Thank you. Hey, everybody. My name is Barbara Vasquez. I go by Barb and I’m a software engineering manager and developer, as well, at Planet. A little bit about myself, I was born and raised in Puerto Rico. I have been working in the geospatial industry as a software engineer since 2008, when I moved to the DC area. And I have been living right now, I’m in Maryland, but I’ve been in the DC area since then. I joined planet about three years ago in 2017. And I’m part of the web applications team. We build some of the tools that help people have easier access toward data.
Barbara Vazquez: The main thing that, if you’re familiar with Planet, is an application called Planet Explorer. If not, go check it out, planet.com Explorer. Now what I’m going to talk about today, it’s about Agile Development and estimation. It’s mostly focused because I’m a software engineer and we do Agile Development at Planet. And these are some tips and things that might be useful for people doing Agile. Even if you’re not doing Agile, thinking about estimation and how much something will take you to do is useful on a day to day. But with further ado, if you’ve done Agile Development and you do the daily scrums or the daily meetings, you’ve had these thoughts, what are points?
Barbara Vazquez: Why are people asking me so many questions so many times, when will it be done? Why do I have to give status every day? And it can get tiresome. And you might just want to flip the table and say, this is not what I signed up for. This is not why I want to do software engineering. But through the years, I’ve learned that it can work in your favor. It can actually help you be more organized and communicate better, to have less stress.
Barbara Vazquez: So estimating with points, if you’re not familiar with Agile or Points. Points is a system that tells people, mostly managers, how difficult do you think a thing is and how long it will take you. But in my perspective, yes, that’s one benefit, to tell your manager when things will get done, but it will help you be honest with yourself.
Barbara Vazquez: Can I really do this? Is two weeks enough? Or however long you have to develop something. That doing the mental exercise will get you in a better spot where you might not need to pull all nighters. If you have to work weekends to meet your deliverables, you’re probably signing up for too much. Or you might be underestimating what is being asked from you.
Barbara Vazquez: In Agile, the way it works, you sign up for work and you have X weeks to do something. I’ll use our example. We do two weeks of development. If after those two weeks, every time you’re rolling over things, rolling over means that you did not complete it. That means something is wrong in the process. It’s not necessarily you. It’s a team thing. It’s being underestimated.
Barbara Vazquez: Scope creep happens. You’re midway. You’re almost done. And then somebody is like, did you think about this? What about you do that? And you go on a tangent and you forget about your original goalpost, or the biggest one that nobody wants to admit is you probably don’t have enough information, but how do you tell your manager that you don’t have enough information?
Barbara Vazquez: Shouldn’t you be able to do it on your own? Not really. That’s what the whole point of Agile and team development should be. And points are there to help you communicate that.
Barbara Vazquez: How to start doing better estimates. One thing I do with my team is ignore numbers. Just give me T-shirt sizes, small, medium, large, or extra large. Extra large, can I do this in two weeks? If it’s an extra large, no. It probably needs to be broken apart. You probably need to talk more about it. A large size, will probably take me the two weeks. I’m threading there on borderline not completing it, but let’s give it a shot and let’s see how it goes. Medium, I can get this done. I don’t know how long it will take me. It’s definitely going to be more than a day but I can get it done. And small is I can do this with my eyes closed. It doesn’t matter.
Barbara Vazquez: That’s my rule of thumb. When I go to do estimates, it’s give me a sense, how do you feel this is so that we can have that conversation of how long it will take. As soon as you do this mental exercise, you’ll get in a better habit and you’ll start recognizing better. I don’t have enough information or this is super easy. Why am I even thinking about it? Let’s get it done.
Barbara Vazquez: So once you get the T-shirt sizes down, you can map this to whatever point system your team uses if that’s the preferred methodology. A lot of people use the Fibonacci sequence where it’s one, two, three, five, up to 13, where a 13 is the extra large equivalent.
Barbara Vazquez: So this once you get used to, and you’re like being able to do t-shirt sizes, you can move up to doing the point systems. In any case, even if you don’t do Agile, thinking about your tasks in t-shirt sizes can help you think about difficulty, can help you keep yourself organized and just do that mental exercise of what do you need to get done that week?
Barbara Vazquez: The other point, two points, no pun intended, is keeping your other responsibilities. Add some buffer. You might be able to sign up, just keeping with the example, two medium things, because life happens. Add some buffer, COVID has taught us that life is unpredictable and your normal cadence is not the same anymore. Distractions happen, you might have family at home. Take that into consideration as well when you’re doing these estimates.
Barbara Vazquez: And the other point, the other thing to think about with points is it helps you negotiate. It helps you make sure priorities are clear of what needs to be done first versus what needs to be done later. If your plate is full, whether it’s with actual tasking, if it’s with life, use the points to help you drive conversations. I can only do so many mediums stories. If I sign up for one more, I will definitely roll it over because that’s what I’ve learned.
Barbara Vazquez: And in the end, having slightly more predictable cadence is valuable for everybody. And again, I say slightly because life happens and we cannot be 100% predictable, but we can get there. And that’s all I have. Thank you everybody. I know we don’t have time for Q and A, but that’s my email, barb@planet.com. If you want to reach out or we can talk later.
Angie Chang: Awesome. Thank you, Barb. That was really great. I’m going to find Kelsey. Video, it’s perfect. Great. We can see you. So Kelsey is a space systems engineer at Planet. Welcome, Kelsey.
Kelsey Doerksen: Thank you. Perfect. So good evening, everyone. My name is Kelsey Doerksen and I am a space systems engineer at Planet. I started about four weeks before work from home was an order for the San Francisco office. So I got only a little taste of what it was like to work in the physical San Francisco office, but I’m really happy with my past five months being a part of the team.
Kelsey Doerksen: And today I’m going to be talking a little bit about how to handle big data in space and the different machine learning projects I’ve been a part of over the past few years. And so I’m just going to jump right into it. So first I wanted to start off with what is machine learning and what do I really mean by big data?
Kelsey Doerksen: So big data is really just that, it’s a large volume of data or a lot of data. And we use machine learning with this big data to seek statistical patterns, to enable computers and algorithms to make either a classification, such as differing between pictures of dogs and cats, or prediction about the data.
Kelsey Doerksen: I really like this three step image here that basically breaks down what machine learning is really at a high level, where you start with this big conglomerate of data, you can’t really make sense of it or extract any meaningful information from it. You apply analytics to it. And in this case it would be a machine learning algorithm. And from those analytics, you’re able to make informed decisions about the data in question.
Kelsey Doerksen: I’m going to be talking about three different projects I’ve worked on at a very high level. Don’t be worried if you don’t know anything about machine learning. And I’m going to start off with my first project I worked on, which has to do with machine learning on Mars.
Kelsey Doerksen: For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Mars exploration Rover mission, this was a NASA mission that launched in 2003, and it sent two twin Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, to the surface of Mars. Unfortunately for the Spirit Rover, its wheel actually got stuck in the Martian soil. You can see in that black and white gif image there that is taken from the Spirit Rover itself. And unfortunately the mission was lost in 2010 for the Spirit Rover because its wheel was stuck in the sand and they weren’t able to get it free.
Kelsey Doerksen: How could we have used machine learning in order to prevent this from happening for future Mars Rover missions? As we know, Perseverance is launching, hopefully soon, barring any delays. This is a project I worked on at the NASA jet propulsion lab called the Barefoot Rover project. Essentially what the Barefoot Rover project purpose was, was to use what is physically felt by the Mars Rover wheels, to be able to detect different things about the surface it was rolling across of.
Kelsey Doerksen: My work was specific to making sure the wheels were not slipping or sinking into the different types of sand material we had at the JPL campus. And it was also, I worked on the terrain classification and detecting if there’s any subsurface rocks that could possibly penetrate the wheel and cause damage to the wheels.
Kelsey Doerksen: How this worked from a machine learning perspective at a very high level, essentially what we had was a yellow pressure pad wrapped around the outside of the Mars Rover wheel. And we took those pressure pad readings and trained that in a classifier to be able to detect these things that are on the bottom of the slide there. So we were able to tell the hydration content of the soil, anomaly detection, safety, and stability of the Rover, slip and sinkage, which is what I worked on, terrain classification, rock detection, and other different tear mechanical properties.
Kelsey Doerksen: This is a really cool project I worked on and it’s going to be implemented on future Mars Rover missions. The second project I’ll talk about is machine learning for the sun and for our Earth atmosphere. So this very terrifying image you see on the slide here is a picture of a Coronal Mass Ejection event. What a Coronal Mass Ejection event is, is a huge explosion on the surface of the sun.
Kelsey Doerksen: And essentially what happens is these huge explosions send out high energy particles into space. You can see there, Earth is to scale in terms of the size of a Coronal Mass Ejection and the sun as compared to the size of our Earth. The distance is not to scale, but the size of the two planetary bodies is. So why this is of concern other than the fear that it strikes of course from this image, don’t worry. It’s not going to cause any … The flames will not reach our surface. But what they do do is send these high energy particles to our Earth’s atmosphere that essentially push our satellites around. So from a satellite operator perspective, the satellites can actually be moved off of their orbit path and collide with other objects in space, which is obviously really detrimental to the satellite operators.
Kelsey Doerksen: How can we use machine learning to tackle this sort of problem? Well, we can’t stop these Coronal Mass Ejection events from happening, pictured there is a gif image from the Soho telescope that is showing what a Coronal Mass Ejection looks like. So we can’t stop these huge events from happening, but we can at least try to learn as much as possible about them and how they are affecting our satellite. And this was my master’s thesis work using the satellite accelerometer data to detect these solar storms. So I mentioned before that these solar storms send out huge amounts of high energy particles and they reach our Earth’s atmosphere. The way you can think about this is if you’re walking outside and it’s very, very windy and you’re getting blown back by the wind, that’s kind of is what’s happening to our satellites when these particles reach our atmosphere.
Kelsey Doerksen: And that can be captured in the satellite acceleration data. The two graphs I have pictured on the slide here, the top graph, it shows the acceleration of the satellite when there’s solar storm happening. So you can see the signal is quite erratic and it’s actually doubles and above in the linear acceleration of the satellite itself. Whereas during a period, when there is no sort of solar storm, the satellite is very periodic and the signal isn’t fluctuating at any alarming rates.
Kelsey Doerksen: The last project I worked on and want to introduce is, of course, using Planet data, and this is machine learning for our Earth. So I’m really happy to be a part of the new partnership with the Frontier Development Lab and Planet, which is an eight week research sprint with the NASA and SETI Institute, and Planet is working with the Waters of the United States team, which is using Planet’s daily imagery with machine learning, to assist with drought detection and prediction in small streams in the continental United States.
Kelsey Doerksen: Pictured here is the Seminole reservoir in Wyoming, United States. And the first signs of droughts can be identified in the small streams that branch off of large bodies of water like these. So by comparing pixel values in these streams using Planet’s daily imagery of sites, similar to this, the team of researchers will be able to detect and predict future droughts across America with the aim to scale this work to other areas across the globe.
Kelsey Doerksen: I can’t get to my … There we go. I really hope you were interested and able to follow along with those three different projects I worked on. I think machine learning, it’s such a new and growing field and space is the perfect application for machine learning because we have so much data. And if you have any questions, you can feel free to reach out to me, and thanks very much for your time.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: That was excellent. Kelsey, are you seeing the comments? Awesome, Kelsey [crosstalk].
Kelsey Doerksen: I can’t see them, but thanks a lot.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Someone said I want to be all the speakers. That was just amazing. I learned so much. So moving on to our next speaker, Deanna. Deanna leads the team at Planet responsible for operating and maintaining the over a hundred imaging satellites, or Doves, currently on orbit. Welcome, Deanna.
Deanna Farago: Thank you. I’m so happy to be here. This is my first Girl Geek event. I’m excited also just to hear from other Planeteers because, sadly, it’s a large enough company that you don’t automatically know everyone. I love hearing everyone else’s stories, as well. All right, so I will present. Hopefully everyone can see that okay.
Deanna Farago: All right, as I mentioned, my name is Deanna Farago and my team and I operate a fleet of satellites that are currently imaging the entire planet every day. And, traditionally, satellite operations can be very time and resource intensive. For example, in order to operate one spacecraft, you could have a room full of engineers around the clock, 24/7 monitoring, telemetry and contacts, and just system performance.
Deanna Farago: And our satellites operate in a different paradigm and risk posture. This has allowed us to be able to automate a lot of the operations. Even before COVID, we could operate essentially anywhere as long as we had a good internet connection and our laptop. Before I describe what that looks like, it’s important to understand what the mission is and the scale of our operations.
Deanna Farago: Our company’s mission one is to image the entire planet every day. And you need a lot of satellites in order to do that. And we actually, in addition to operating satellites, we design, build, and test all of our satellites in house. And this is a big advantage for us as operators, because if and when we run into issues on orbit, we can work directly with the engineers that designed the satellite in order to troubleshoot the problems and help come up with on orbit mitigations, as well as design out these bugs/features in the next spacecraft iteration.
Deanna Farago: And then once in space, we use just a little bit of atmosphere that we have to use something called differential drag to space out the satellites over time. And as one satellite images over a strip of land, the one right after it should image this strip of land, just adjacent to it. And this essentially creates alliance scanner. What you’re seeing here is a 24 hour snapshot of what the imaging strips could look like that the satellites are capturing. And we have a distributed team operating our satellites. We have four people in San Francisco, one person in Toronto, and a team of four in Berlin. And we send tasks to the ground stations, which then send the schedules up to the satellites. And just a fun fact for this group that at Planet, we have three satellite operations teams and they’re all managed by women.
Deanna Farago: The concept of operations is actually quite simple for these Doves. We don’t image over the ocean. We only image over the land, but basically anytime they’re overland, they just point down, take pictures. If they’re over ground stations, we downlink those pictures in logs and we communicate with them. And then in the background we’ll just run maintenance activities, essentially thinking of them as like tuneups and checking in on like subsystems and keeping an eye on any degradation that might be happening or running experiments. And, in theory, if the satellites are performing well, they should just be as easy as this man’s rotisserie grill, where we just set it and forget it. We can even run it custom experiments, and we set up the tasks and not have to worry about it.
Deanna Farago: However, things don’t always go smooth. There’s a lot of fires that can happen. And that’s kind of how we know we’ll never really be able to automate ourselves out of a job. These are just some examples of issues that we’ve seen on our satellites. So a satellite suddenly starts spinning up, and we have to figure out why is it spinning up? And we need to de tumble it. We noticed that the satellites have low battery, that’s voltage, and we need to take action before they start browning out and rebooting rapidly. We see that telemetry sensors are reading zero value. Is this a real thing? Or is the sensor it just being faulty? And we have to reset it. Or sometimes satellites just are unresponsive out of the blue and we have to spend time to figure out, did something change, did something break on the satellite?
Deanna Farago: Or can we just set up some automation to keep an eye on it? And all of these actions started out as manual. We would detect these problems and then operators would spend time triaging it and then eventually taking action. And now our teams have automated responses to all of these so that they trigger off of just telemetry on the satellite. As soon our automation sees like the driver readings are reading up. Then we know the … Sorry, the robot just basically sends a task to respond to this, so an operator doesn’t actually have to. And this decreases latency in the system and gets the satellite back into production as quickly as possible. And there’s always going to be unknown unknowns, and we’re constantly trying to find these new problems and automating responses to it.
Deanna Farago: What does a day in the life of an operator? Well, we work nine to five and we have a checklist that we rotate among the team members. This enables our team to be able to have weekend or holiday coverage. Even though we’re working normal office hours, we want to make sure that there’s always going to be satellite operators, eyes on the system every day. And for this number of satellites, we have to aggregate our data. Aggregating our data is key. What that means is we build lots of dashboards based off of our telemetry, and off of our logs from the satellite. And it allows us to be able to easily see if there’s any satellites that are responding and acting out of family. And that will then trigger an operator to say this one’s not behaving the same as its fellow satellites. I’m going to dig in further and try to triage it.
Deanna Farago: We have weekday team standups and we’re supported by amazing other teams in mission control. And those teams also have their own on-call. And so if something does break in the middle of the night, that affects the whole fleet. Those teams help support us. I wanted to show this because it’s one of my favorite things that we’ve taken a picture of at Planet. And it’s actually a series of pictures that we stitched together into a video. And just before a rocket launch, we’re able to opportunistically schedule a Dove to take a series of images of a rocket delivering more Doves to space. Just a real quick cool shot. And that’s shot by one of our satellites. So very cool. And then sadly, we won’t be doing any missed high fives and hugs and mission control in person anytime soon, like our former coworker here Rob Zimmerman. But we can still enjoy having first contacts and commissioning with one another virtually. And this is our, I guess, equivalent version of that from a few years ago when we were able to successfully make contact with 88 satellites right after launch. And with that, that’s all I really wanted to share. I couldn’t go into too much detail, but I’m happy to answer questions. If you’d like to email me. I am at deanna@planet.com. Thank you for having me.
Angie Chang: Thank you, Deanna. That’s really awesome. And you … Let’s see. And now we are going to bring up Elena, who has over two decades of experience in sales and she’ll be telling us her journey.
Elena Rodriguez: Excellent. Good evening, everyone. I’m so happy for this invitation. I just joined Planet three months ago and I really wanted to talk about … sorry, this is my first time, I wanted to talk about the adventure of making a decision, how important it is for our career. But first, let me introduce what I do here at Planet.
Elena Rodriguez: As I said, I joined the company three months ago, I’m this salesperson for Mexico, Central America, Ecuador, and the Caribbean. I have been in the business for more than 20 years, and I am so, so honored to be part of the Planet team. I’m so happy and so proud of working for the company that is offering solutions that are critical to mitigate some of the main challenges that we are facing right now, like climate change, food crisis, fighting poverty, so many applications, and I feel so proud to talk about our business when I go out there and meet my clients and listeners. So I chose a topic because this is something that I’ve been always thinking about it. And now I have the opportunity to talk about it. And I’m going to take advantage of this — is how I ended up here. I want to show you my story.
Elena Rodriguez: Ever since I started back in the 80s, I have all the dreams like I wanted to be a fashion designer, because that’s something that I really enjoy since I was a little girl. And I took … but it was difficult for me because fashion was a very expensive career in Venezuela, and I had a scholarship, and I moved to Seattle from Venezuela to study sales and advertising. I have no choice. So let me tell you that, that was the first time I didn’t make any decisions.
Elena Rodriguez: I had to choose what I thought was available for me that time. So I remember my sales teacher, Mr. Fine, it’s impossible to forget him. That he was always saying that a good sales person is capable of selling anything anything. Selling water to a fish. I wasn’t growing that idea of on my mind, but I was thinking, I don’t know if I’m really right for this career, sales is like — I don’t know — However, I was already thinking like when I was a little girl, I was drawing paper dolls and I was selling those to my friends at school. I was making bracelets with the colorful telephone wires, and I was selling those. I was a sales person already!
Elena Rodriguez: I went back to Venezuela and I graduated, but I was still thinking, I don’t know what I want to do, this is my passion. I want to be a fashion designer. And it took me four years to graduate. It was the beginning of this career in Venezuela. And it was a lot of work. It was very expensive. There were times that I couldn’t sleep, doing all the drawings, the designs, and making all these dresses, this yellow one, and the one along here, I made them. And I was so inspired, because that’s exactly what I wanted to do.
Elena Rodriguez: But then something funny happened during this practice — is that every time my friends called me and asked me for a dress, because they chose the fabrics, I have my [inaudible] they chose what they liked. And I made the dresses. Then when they came home to pick them up, I didn’t want to sell them! I was like no, I keep them. So I decided that’s not for me.
Elena Rodriguez: It took me a while and I was thinking, you know [inaudible] what am I going to do? We are almost through this and I need to make a decision. I needeed to plan because I had a strong pressure from society, my country, and I made a decision — I thought it was time for me to have a family. And that was a decision that really, I thought about it a lot, because I know what it meant for me at the time — that I had to give up some things that were important for some time.
Elena Rodriguez: But those changes, I always ask myself — once I start with passion to adapt to a new reality, because I had that question on my mind. And the answer is definitely no, I was just growing up. And it was time for me to make that decision and get prepared and be responsible for the decision that I have made.
Elena Rodriguez: In 1995, it was a huge revolution in Venezuela because that’s when Internet arrived to our country. It was the time also when my boy was born, he’s 25 right now. And I remember I was taking care of my son and I was hearing all this noise outside — my husband and his friends talking about Internet — let’s go, let’s navigate, let’s check — They were looking for some topics and they were celebrating and I was feeding my baby and I was thinking, Oh my gosh, I think I’m losing something, something’s happening here, and I don’t know, I don’t want to sound selfish, but I had that on my mind. You know, so what am I going to do with technology, but I don’t know if I can even think about that! Would I ever touch a computer again? I had all these questions at that time. [inaudible] years things turn to be kind of difficult in my country. And I had to work. I had to live outside definitely my [inaudible]. And I had to go outside and find a different job, something because I needed to bring money to… because I had a family and things were difficult, and I was ready to get back on track, but I wasn’t ready for the technology. I had missed one year of all these changes! So selling was becoming more challenging, new terminologies, services, a new way of communicating… communication skills.
Elena Rodriguez: The first job I got out there was for selling ads for the magazine called Computerworld with names like Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, IBM, HP, and those that were never familiar to me — it started to be new and that was nice — I was into a completely different world. This job was the one that allowed me to meet the people that helped me, that guided me, that inspired me to be in this field. And to be honest, selling was never had never been so much gratifying for me.
Elena Rodriguez: Five years later, I had to make a very difficult decision that by the way, this week when I was practicing this presentation I found out how, I mean, how your country, your family, your culture really touched you. And I was like, I didn’t realize before, it’s like I was keeping that into myself, but it was a big decision. It wasn’t something that I was prepared for, but that was the time where the political situation in my country was unsustainable and started to be not sustainable even worse. I had a job offer in Mexico and I didn’t think twice. I moved here. And as you can see, the picture was… I think that was my first week here in Mexico. And you can see all the disaster. And remember I was asking if I would ever touch a computer again.
Elena Rodriguez: Well, here is a computer, but I was only able to touch it because it was impossible to carry, so heavy. Everything has been changed as we know, that’s funny. So that’s when I started. It was like, for me, that was my own revolution, geospatial, learning new terminologies. It was such an exciting world. I was working with geographers, engineers, and so many people that I met in the industry. I really was in love with this new market. I was, like, wow. And I’m very proud because I participated in the first high-resolution satellite sale to the Mexican government. And I had all these questions from people. I mean, what is that you do? Are you a spy? What is it and that was very funny. But every time I had more challenges, it was time for me to learn more.
Elena Rodriguez: And that’s really… That was very interesting. I don’t regret. I’ve been doing this for more than 20 years now. I still live in Mexico. I’ve met such interesting people, nice people, being in this environment. And I feel the pride to sell something, that I know that it’s going to go there to help people, to make people make good decisions. And this is something I feel so proud about it. And I’m here. This is what I do now. The geospatial world got me. I’ve been doing this work for, as I said, for more than 20 years, I’ve been in the drones industry, as well. I learned how to fly the drone. I was so proud about it. This picture here — in the mining, it was something very scary because I was in Peru and I had to sleep there. So, many nice adventures. I am so happy that I got… That I decided to stay here. I don’t [inaudible] change from fashion designing to the geospatial world. I can always be creative and I use the fashion designing for myself. So I like clothes. I like that. I mean, that’s inevitable. I can’t leave that behind, but this is, the right decisions brought me here. No regrets how I did it. I don’t know.
Elena Rodriguez: As you see, sometimes we need to do what we need to do. I’ve been humble. I know that I’m not an expert. I’ve been learning and I always learn. It’s very challenging, this work. I rely on those experts that are willing to teach me and I take that very seriously. I understood that there are ways, many interesting ways to explore different options. I learned that we have to capitalize the knowledge because after you invest so much time in learning about something, changing probably is not such a good idea.
Elena Rodriguez: Well, I don’t want to discourage the people that are doing this, but for me, I said, no, this is what I’ve learned, took me a long time. I want to be here. I wanted to be… to decide to be part of the change was very… That’s something that really pushed me as well. So that keeps me investigating and asking. So I’m curious about the technology and especially about the things that I do. Every time I made the decision, of course, I had to ask myself how it was going to benefit or affect my loved ones and understanding that it’s not always about me, that I have to care for my family. The company that I work for, there’s a world outside.
Elena Rodriguez: I have faith in people. Trust me, I believe in people. I think we can always… We are a big team and I have a real engagement for environment. And I don’t know, I take care of my garden, my little dog, and I actually care about that. And, well, that’s it. Thank you. I think we don’t have time for questions. Thank you for listening.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you so much, Elena. That was amazing. We learned so much from you. So our next speaker is Sarah Preston. Sarah is a marketing manager at Planet Labs, exploring how to use space-based imagery to improve life on Earth. Just pulling Sarah up. Hi, Sarah, how’s it going, right in front of the Golden Gate Bridge?
Sarah Preston: Thanks. Out here in San Francisco. You can hear me alright, right?
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Mm-hmm (affirmative), Yeah. So, welcome.
Sarah Preston: Okay. So I’m going to share my screen and… Okay, can you all see that?
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Yep.
Sarah Preston: Okay, great. Thanks. Yeah, my name is Sarah Preston. I’m a product marketing manager at Planet. Now, a product marketing manager… Product marketing can mean a lot of different things in a lot of different organizations. But what I do is I work across our product and our marketing team and our sales teams to really find the right fit for our imagery and to understand what our prospects and what our audiences need out of imagery, even if they don’t know it yet. As you can imagine, narratives are extremely important part of what I do. So, I’m super excited to be here with you all to geek out about data-driven storytelling.
Sarah Preston: Okay. First, why do we tell stories in the first place? Stories are paths to community and understanding. Think about all the stories that you loved growing up. There was some kind of connection that you made, either to a character, to the author, or to the setting that drew you in and made it really memorable. You joined that community that was telling that story. And within that story, whether it’s fact or fiction, there was information, and you got to learn from others in that community and to build an understanding about the world around you.
Sarah Preston: What is a good story? So, “a good story is driven by emotion and balanced by fact.” That’s one of my favorite quotes, actually, that I heard. I can’t claim ownership of it, but, really, when we listen to a great story and we create a connection to a story, we’re really feeling some emotion and emotions can be extremely powerful motivators. I think, in or outside of the workplace even, an emotion can be excitement. It can be fear. It can be confusion. It can be ambition, but also a very human desire to understand the world around us. Emotions, they get us engaged in a story and interested. But facts and data, they keep us grounded.
Sarah Preston: As an example of how you might be able to see this, Planet took this image of Pripyat, Ukraine back in April. Now this was when Pripyat was experiencing massive wildfires and this was right outside of the Chernobyl exclusion zone that you can see in the center there. It was an extremely dangerous time, already a dangerous area. Radiation levels had spiked 16 times more than usual and Ukranian officials were telling the world, basically, that these fires had been controlled, extinguished. Clearly not the case. Now hearing this, when we talk about emotions, hearing this story in the news, you can’t help but feel a sense of fear, maybe helplessness and anxiety, and all these emotions that are driving, maybe not necessarily the international community, but driving officials to understand what is happening. How can we solve it? Well, Planet came in and we captured this image and this image has a lot of data in it to help move these decisions forward, to help these move and capture these emotions.
Sarah Preston: When we look at this image, we can see where the smoke is drifting. That tells us where the wildfire might be spreading to. We can see how far the wildfire has already spread on a grander scale. We can see how close it is to the Chernobyl exclusion zone. How radiation levels might continue to increase. And it tells us a lot about where we can deploy resources and where we can deploy flame retardant and, at the same time, keep all of our first responders safe. We had these emotions that we were feeling at the beginning, and a really good way to think about it is: Emotions, they move us forward. They encourage us to do something, but facts and data, they move us forward in the right direction. They give us an idea or an insight about where to go.
Sarah Preston: How do we craft great stories? Great stories is really about taking our audience or, on a business scale, our prospects, on a journey from ignorance to understanding. Now, there are not three key points to creating a great story. This could be an hour long seminar and I’ve been to them before. It’s such a fascinating subject, but, given the time we have, I narrowed it down to three points that I think are really important.
Sarah Preston: Know your audience. You want to understand what are their motivations? What are their expectations? Maybe what do they feel themselves on a daily basis? What’s their vocabulary? How do they communicate with each other and interact with the rest of the world? You want to really clarify the problem. Every story has its key conflict. You want to understand: what exactly is the conflict of the story you’re building and what is driving it, whether that is the emotions. And then you want to create some insight. What is the data showing us? This is the second half of the storytelling. How do we get past the conflict and use that data to create insight, to move us all forward?
Sarah Preston: And here is an example, also at Planet, of how we recently used those points to create a broader story. We started work with the New Mexico State Land Office and they were looking to monitor permitting activity in the Permian Basin. You can see that on the right side of the screen, the sample image. And there’s a lot of mining activity out there, but they just couldn’t see in the way they wanted to.
Sarah Preston: First, what we did here is we had to know your audience, right? We understood, and came to understand, how exactly the office itself functions, how it fits in with the broader civil government. What exactly is their legal mandate, who is our main point of contact and how to best really work with them in the first place. This is knowing how to communicate with them. Now once we know how to communicate with them, we can clarify the problem. Why is the office really experiencing this challenge? Why did they have very poor visibility into the more remote Permian Basin? Well, aerial photography like they’ve tried, was very slow and resource-intensive as was manned surveys. Sending people out there to actually see what’s going on, it was growing expensive. They were growing frustrated, really, that they didn’t really have a good way to monitor this land.
Sarah Preston: What Planet did was, now that we knew our audience, and we then clarified the problem, we were able to deliver the data to really create a good insight to solve their challenge. This is sample data, again, right here on the right of the screen. We deliver near-daily imagery to them so they can see change and what’s actually happening and activity. And once they see that activity, then they can deploy resources, whether that’s people or anything else to solve that issue.
Sarah Preston: Before I wrap up, I want to put another little plug. If you’re interested in learning more about storytelling at Planet, we actually have a customer conference coming up in October and we’re going to be featuring customers and partners talking about how they used our imagery for their own storytelling and how they’ve been able to build their own paths to understanding and building their own communities. The reason I want to feature this here is because it’s actually completely free this year and online, so very, very accessible. And before I completely close out, my last point, really, is: We are in a hugely data-driven world, and it’s really not so much about just collecting data anymore. It’s about collecting the right data and really understanding how to use it, how we get insights and go from that, go from that ignorance to that understanding to create solutions and to create great stories around our world. I don’t think I have time for questions, but that is my short brief. Again, this is a topic I could talk about at length, but hopefully you captured something out of this.
Angie Chang: Great. Thank you so much for that, Sarah, and we are now going to be bringing up Brittany, who is a natural disaster research scientist turned businesswoman.
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Brittany Zajic: Alright. Thanks, everyone. Hi everyone. Thanks for the opportunity to speak with you all tonight. My name is Brittany Zajic and I’m on the business development team here at Planet. Business development means something different at every company. And here, we focus on strategic partnerships and the commercialization of new markets. I also lead our disaster response operations, which is part of our social impact initiatives, where we provide satellite imagery to first responders and official stakeholders in the event of a large, natural disaster anywhere in the world. And, while not exactly a natural disaster, COVID-19 is very much a global public health crisis reshaping all of our behaviors and our environmental systems. So, today I’m going to talk about how satellite imagery is helping us better understand the impacts of this pandemic.
Brittany Zajic: By capturing a series of places in different points of time, satellite imagery is able to tell an important story. When millions of people began sheltering in place earlier this year, many looked to Planet, asking how we could help. So, how can satellite imagery help during a pandemic? Tonight I am going to showcase a few of the many applications surrounding the economic and environmental impacts of COVID-19.
Brittany Zajic: First, we head to Wuhan, China to see the start of their shelter-in-place. In these first two comparisons, we see a stark difference of traffic patterns and these images taken only two weeks apart, with not a single car in sight starting January 28. And I’ll go back one more time. I know this is quick. We then shift to expand further beyond just the limited car transportation, and, instead, think about the closures of factories, construction sites, and all other industrial activities that had a dramatic impact on the air quality in regions of, and parts of, China. Here is a comparison over a portion of Beijing from the start of the year on the left to March 2020 on the right. We then shift to Italy, the next epicenter of COVID-19. Many media outlets spoke of the now quiet canals and the cleaner waters running through the city, which was largely captured in these series of images here. I’ll run through these one more time. This is October 2019, March 2020, February 2020, and March 15th.
Brittany Zajic: Finally, we have the next epicenter that migrates to the United States, where it continues to remain today. New York was hit hardest and here we can see the construction of a temporary hospital in none other than Central Park, Manhattan, in the heart of New York. The rest of the United States followed suit soon after and shut down as well from the Bay Bridge Toll (that you take from going Oakland to downtown San Francisco) to the decrease in air travel (here’s a Southern California logistics airport — and just to highlight, we can see all the airplanes stacked up, not being in use), to the empty beaches (of Miami, Miami Beach, Florida) and then also the empty parking lots of Disneyworld in Orlando, Florida.
Brittany Zajic: So, it’s pretty incredible for satellites to be able to so clearly capture this pause on life that has been experienced, that we’ve all been experiencing these past couple of months. Now, there is no question that one data set has been able to tell a great story, but Planet imagery combined with multiple other data sets is going to be able to tell us even more. So I’m going to spend the remainder of this talk today, talking about EOdashboard.org, an international collaboration among space agencies that is central to the success of satellite Earth observation and data analysis.
Brittany Zajic: The tri-agency COVID-19 Dashboard is a concentrated effort between the European Space Agency, the Japanese Space Agency, and NASA. The Dashboard combines the resources, technical knowledge and expertise of these three partner organizations to strengthen our global understanding of the environmental and economic impacts of COVID-19. So, if we remember back to my early example in Venice, Italy, we visually saw the difference of boat traffic and water turbidity. Now, with EOS Dashboard, using information from several different satellites and sensor types, we’re able to turn that visualization into a quantitative assessment and observation, which is incredibly valuable when measuring environmental and economic indicators or factors.
Brittany Zajic: A second example of these quantitative metrics is the air quality in Beijing. Again, deriving these insights from an entire suite of different satellites, the ability to analyze these trends from space aids the effort to fight and defeat this pandemic. I leave you all with encouraging you to further explore this Dashboard and learn more about how COVID-19 is impacting people all over the world and explore it through the lens of satellite imagery, because together we can defeat this. Thank you.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Hi, thank you so much. That was great. Next speaker is Nikki Hampton. Nikki is Planet’s VP of People and Talent, and she would like to share a few words on their commitment to diversity and inclusion. Welcome, Nikki.
Nikki Hampton: Thank you. I want to thank all the speakers, even though I know all of these women, I learned so much about them and the work they do and how they got to where they are. So, I’m pretty excited about that. I mostly wanted to say that at Planet, we have always been committed to diversity, but we are doubling down on our commitment and particularly so, looking with respect to attracting and retaining communities of color. And for all of you online, we are looking forward to and eager to work with you, to tap into a broader network of talented folks that you might want to consider referring to us or applying and sharing with whom you know, but we’re super excited to have been part of this and are grateful that you all attended.
Angie Chang: Thank you so much for that, Nikki. Now we’re going to just move into the Q&A. If there are a few questions, I think we have literally like five minutes till 8:00 PM when we kick off networking. So, if you have any questions, please ask them in the Q&A section and we will be sharing them with Planet and you’ll be getting a follow-up email with job links. They are hiring for some positions like senior corporate counsel, systems engineer, software engineer, account executives. So, you can be like Elena. Sales development reps, customer success managers, and more, and the job links are usually in our Girl Geek X Planet emails that you’re receiving. So, just scroll down and click on those links or forward it to a friend who is looking for a new role.
Angie Chang: We will be heading over to our networking hour at 8:00 PM. It is on a platform called icebreaker.video and you will have the link in your email, if you look in your email, or we can put it in this chat and we’ll be doing some facilitated one-on-one networking where you literally meet one-on-one with people in a non-Zoom environment. It’s going to be a little more fun and you actually get to talk to people and see their faces. So, if you can hop-
Sukrutha Bhadouria: And I wanted to call out, thank you so much to everybody speaking and thanks to everybody who has been commenting. I definitely see that it has been super valuable for you all. I wanted to mention, because I’ve also been getting asked, how you can get your company to partner with us to do a virtual Girl Geek Dinner. Definitely reach out to us, through the website, sponsor@girlgeek.io — that’s our email — and if you want to reach out individually to Angie or I, our emails are listed on the website as well. The other thing I wanted to say is, if you do get your company to sponsor, you must sign up to be one of the speakers, own it, use the stage that you are creating for everyone else to promote yourself as well. So, that’s all I had.
Angie Chang: Great. So thank you all for being so good at the chat, and we’ll see you over at icebreaker.video so we can chat one-on-one with everyone. Thank you all and we’ll see you there. We’re going to keep this on so people can see the link and click on it — and hopefully we’ll rejoin and see you over there in a minute. Alright, bye.
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Angie Chang: Hi, welcome back. I’m Angie Chang, founder of Girl Geek X. We’re having to run through some really, really quick housekeeping items. We are recording today and we are getting this question a lot. These videos will be available on YouTube later. So subscribe to us at youtube.com/girlgeekX. And if you’re hosting a watch party, we’ve been enjoying seeing all the watch parties of people and their dogs. So please continue to tweet them at us.
Angie Chang: We love seeing your faces and hearing what you have been enjoying today. And you can also ask questions in the Q and A below. So feel free to ask questions. And our next speaker is Jomayra Herrera, who is an investor at Cowboy Ventures, where she works closely with the early stage founders, applying her expertise, investing in operating early stage growth companies. She will be sharing her ideas on employment, education, child and elder care, and how they intersect and potential areas for innovation… Jomayra.
Jomayra Herrera: Awesome. Okay. Well, thank you so much for spending the next 15 minutes or so with me. Hopefully, what I’m hoping to cover in this session is a little bit around how I think about the future of work, which is honestly a topic that you probably see a lot in the Twitter world. You probably see a lot around media and you see a ton of headlines around. I’m hoping to talk a little bit about my perspective, how I define it. Some of the things that I think fall under it and some of the areas of optimism. So with that, I thought it’d be helpful to maybe talk a little bit about my background and the perspective that I bring into it, because it might be helpful in getting a sense of what colors my perspective and how I think about the future of work and the way that I define it.
Jomayra Herrera: This is a picture of me and my mom when I was younger. My mom unfortunately, did not have the opportunity to finish high school. And I am the first in my family to go to a four year college. Because of that, I’m very lucky that I have the opportunity to be in a job and to be in a career that I think is meaningful and I find fulfilling and that I really love. And that also at the same time generates enough income to cover my expenses. But I know I’m lucky in that regard. And so I have spent the vast majority of my career actually focused on trying to create pathways or thinking through pathways to give folks access to meaningful jobs at scale. And so my background is that I actually went to graduate school for education, then went to work at an edtech startup. And that’s where I started my operating career.
Jomayra Herrera: And then spent three years after that at an organization called Emerson Collective, where I focused on investing in companies that were operating in the education and employment space. I, now, as Angie mentioned, work at Cowboy Ventures, we are a seed stage fund and early stage fund. We’re completely generalists, but I continue to have a passion and a focus around companies that operate in the future of work space, broadly defined as I’ll talk about in the next couple of minutes. Before jumping into how I think about the future of work, I think it’s worth taking a minute or so talking about what we see in the headlines. I think if we go off of, based off the headlines or what we often hear about the future of work, we think it’s very much doom and gloom.
Jomayra Herrera: It’s focused on AI automation. The robots are taking our jobs, or it’s focused on the distributed workforce or remote and collaboration software. All of which is true, none of which is untrue, but the conversation is more focused on the things that we’re going to lose. And it’s more focused on the ways that we can get more productivity and output out of employees and out of workers. And it’s less focused on how do we expect our relationship as workers and as employees, as humans rather, how do we expect our relationship with work to change over the next couple of years, as we start to see some major tectonic shifts around our relationship with work happen over the next decade. And so what I’m hoping to do in this presentation, is just expand how we think about the future of work and expand the way that we have the conversation around the future of work.
Jomayra Herrera: And hopefully talk about a couple of categories that I spend a lot of time thinking about. In this session, I’ll talk specifically about three categories, because I think that this could be a multi hour long presentation all on its own, but I’ll talk about our careers and how we think about career discovery and exploration and some of the areas of innovation that are happening there. I’ll talk about education. Some of the ways that we think about future of job training, both to and through our careers. And then also around the future of care, which unfortunately is very often left out of the future of work conversation, but is actually integral to how we think about work, moving forward. So starting with careers, the way we think about careers today, most of these stats you probably already know. And if you don’t, most of what we know about careers today is that this concept of having a lifelong career or a lifelong job is not really the same anymore.
Jomayra Herrera: You might have the same title for a significant period of time, but the underlying role in terms of what you’re going to do and what you’re expected to do is going to change. It’s going to change considerably faster than ever before moving forward. We know that currently the work activities that we do, so like the atomic unit under the actual job title, over 50% of those work activities can be automated today. We have the technology for it. The question is the pace at which it’s going to happen and the timeframe in which is going to happen. Which is where most of the debate is happening. We know that the half life of a learned skill is about five years. So the skills that we learn are probably going be obsolete in a couple of years, we know that the majority of people report being in bad or mediocre jobs and jobs are harder to predict than ever before. And the pace of change at which they’re changing and evolving is happening faster than ever before.
Jomayra Herrera: All of that is fairly doom and gloom. And I apologize for that, but that’s some of the reality in terms of where or how we think about careers today. Unfortunately, the way that we navigate our careers and explore and figure out and discover what we want to do to our careers is a fairly manual thing. There are quizzes. And if you’ve done any of these quizzes, I’ve gotten librarian, accountant, educator, babysitter, you name it. I’ve never gotten venture capitalist because I don’t think it accounts for your preferences, or I don’t even know if that’s part of the jobs that are in the consideration set, but they’re often not very accurate or very personalized to you. Or the vast majority of us actually just rely on our networks. What did our parents do? What did our family members do, or our cousins, our alumni, our friends, et cetera.
Jomayra Herrera: And you rely on their guidance and not necessarily rely on the guidance of data that’s actually available out there. And so what I’m excited about and where I think there is a ton of opportunity, is actually in the ability to change what I’m describing as in the ways that consumers, we now have more decision and agency and capability as ever before. And you see the rise of the conscious consumer as a result of that, and more intentionality in terms of how we spend our dollars and in terms of the products that we end up choosing and we end up using, I think we’re moving into a world where we’re going to see the rise of what I’m describing as the conscious worker. We’re going to have more optionality than ever before, more data than ever before, more agency than ever before.
Jomayra Herrera: And we’ll actually be able to be a lot more intentional and have a lot more ownership in terms of the careers that we decide to take. And there are a couple of things that enable this to happen. The first is, we’re seeing a rise of new platforms that help with career discovery. We’re seeing platforms that take into account, not only the data of the careers that are going to exist in the future, but also take into account in your preferences. What do you care about? What are you passionate about? What is the way that you want to have a dent in the world? And it gives you, and effectively acts as a guide of how do you actually think about exploring and discovering and finding the right career for you. In alignment with that, and I think it’s just as important as having the data, is we’re starting to see a rise of digital communities and sometimes the digital and in person actually mix, of folks, of communities that help you to achieve your goals, whatever they might be.
Jomayra Herrera: So Career Karma is a good example here. This, they started off by focusing on folks that want to do jobs in software, and they want to go to a coding boot camp in order to get to the end job. And so historically, the way that would work, is you kind of do it alone. And if you’ve tried to retrain alone, it’s really, really hard. Instead, you go on, you create a profile and they create a peer circle of folks that are like you and going through the same journey as you, and that peer circle effectively acts as your community as you go through this journey, which is a hard one in itself. So now we have a rise of platforms that help you to discover new careers, find new careers and find the right fit for you. And then now we have the ability to actually find the community that enables you to reach that end goal and get to that end goal.
Jomayra Herrera: And so we’re seeing, again, this movement towards having the tools and the capabilities to take ownership and have intentionality around your career process. And then the last thing that we’re seeing is actually just flipping this whole model on its head, which is the ability to not even rely on this concept of an employer to even generate your income in the first place. So this goes back to this idea of having more options than ever before. Self-employment isn’t new, but what is new is our platforms that help to enable new types of self-employment. So if you’re a writer, you no longer have to rely on large publishers to monetize your writing. You can use Substack. If you are an educator and you want to teach about art or poetry or creative writing, you can use Outschool and generate either supplemental income, or [inaudible] actually generates a majority of your income and have that optionality on your own.
Jomayra Herrera: So we’re moving into this world where you have more ownership over your career than ever before. And you’re becoming, again with the rise of options, the rise of data, and the rise of having actually access to communities that can help you, this world in which we tend, we have the ability to be this more conscious worker. So hopefully that leaves folks with this optimistic perspective that even though things are going to be automated, we’re actually moving into a world we’ll have more optionality than ever before. I know that was a ton, but just as important as the career aspect, it’s actually the education and the training to and through your career. Right now, just a couple of stats to give some background. We know that the majority of Americans don’t have a college degree. Of those that do, 40% of them are underemployed. They’re effectively in a career that they didn’t need the college degree to begin with.
Jomayra Herrera: Most training paths are outdated and out of touch with what the workplace and labor market needs. Alternative pathways are still fairly small scale. And when I say alternative pathways, I mean like the boot camps that you probably hear a lot about. For context, boot camps graduated about 23,000 graduates last year, compared to the 3 million associates and bachelors degrees that were awarded. So even though they take up a lot of mind space and a lot of Twitter space, they’re still fairly small in scale. Not meaning that they’re not significant or meaningful, but they’re still small compared to traditional institutions. And we know traditional options are expensive. There’s over $1.3 trillion in outstanding student loan debt. And unfortunately, tuition is going up and to the right instead of down, which is what we would hope and expect.
Jomayra Herrera: So education job training today right now is fairly inefficient, fairly manual, and often inaccessible for the vast majority of people. On a more optimistic perspective, I think there were a couple of trends and I’ll talk about three of them that are going to enable us to move into a world in which education is more lifelong, it’s more accessible and it’s more affordable and more linked to work, and what’s actually going to be helpful in the workplace. The first of which, is this idea around alternative and affordable pathways. Bootcamps have been around for a while. So we went through a bootcamp 1.0 phase where a lot of it was focused on software engineering, often required upfront payment and was fairly limited to a particular population. Oftentimes it was the literature major from Yale that realized he couldn’t get a job. And so they decided to be a software engineer and paid 30K upfront to do it.
Jomayra Herrera: We’re now moving into a world in which we’re in bootcamp 2.0, or maybe even 3.0, at this point, where we have more accessible options or online options, part-time options. There are more accessible, more affordable options. So leveraging new types of financial instruments like ISAs. And then what I think is the most important piece, we’re starting to see bootcamps evolve from just software engineering to more creative fields like digital marketing, or sales, or design, or product. Again, showcasing that there is more opportunity to create these alternative pathways that are more accessible and affordable in the vast majority of trades or in a vast majority of careers. We’re also seeing a rise of employers playing a more active role in the learning and development of their employees. A great example, and I’ll caveat this with this is a Cowboy portfolio company, is Guild Education. Guild Education enables employers like Walmart, Lowe’s, Disney, Discover, to give their frontline workers access to education.
Jomayra Herrera: And this is high school degrees, college degrees, and other forms of certifications that are important for their own upskilling and their own reskilling. And they don’t just provide access to the education. They also provide them access to coaches that help them navigate and get to and through their education. And so employers actually taking up the tab for that benefit. In the case of Hone or Strive, it’s focused on investing in managers, making sure that they’re growing as the company grows. And so while employers actually played an active role in learning and development around the seventies, the pendulum swung the other way over the past couple of decades. And now we’re seeing the pendulum swing back in the past few years, with continued investment in the reskilling and the upskilling of employees.
Jomayra Herrera: And then the last piece, and it’s almost an implication of the other two, is this movement towards less of a focus on the credential or the degree or the pedigree, and more focus on what you know, and the skills that you have and what you can do. As you start to see these alternative ways of learning and learning becoming more lifelong, this becomes more important than ever, especially if you’re trying to hire talent and retain talent. We’re still very early on in this shift, and I won’t lie, most applicant tracking systems still screen out the vast majority of resumes that don’t have traditional degrees, but as the labor market continues [inaudible] as those credentials. And as we see a rise of highly effective assessment, especially right now on the technical side, we are starting to see a shift towards [inaudible] skill-based hiring and hiring based off of what you know.
Jomayra Herrera: So there’s a lot to be optimistic about in where we see education and job training going, moving forward. The last thing I’ll talk about, and again, I know this is a ton of information, so I apologize for plowing through it. The last thing I’ll talk about is childcare and elder care, because unfortunately it’s often left out of the conversation. But if we think about the concept of you showing up to work and your loved ones, whether they be a young loved one or an aging loved one, not having access to the care that they need, you’re not going to bring your full self to work. And quite frankly, the pain and the friction of that just doesn’t work and it bears out in the numbers. Parents make sacrifices all the time for their childcare. That actually wraps up in terms of productivity losses, revenue losses, lost earnings, to estimate it over $57 billion a year, just in the US. And we know that over 40 million Americans act as an unpaid caregiver for an aging loved one.
Jomayra Herrera: This is something that actually isn’t sustainable and doesn’t scale over time. And so not only are we seeing a lot of innovation happening in this space, but it actually necessitates happening in this space if we expect to have this future of work in which folks have a more meaningful and healthy relationship with work. And so we’re already seeing a ton of innovation happening in the space around affordability, accessibility, and quality, both on the childcare side, which is the left hand column here. And then the elder care side, which is on the right hand column here, there’s still a lot of work left to be done. And in particular, this is an area where there is a lot of innovation that can happen. And there’s a lot of companies that are left to be made here, but there’s a lot of work that has to be done on the regulatory side and the policy side, to be able to scale any of these solutions and be able to unlock public dollars, to actually be able to give folks access to the care that they need.
Jomayra Herrera: But it’s one that’s incredibly important. And it’s often left out of the conversation, as we think about the future of work moving forward. I know that was a lot of information and I think I’m getting knocked out by Angie here. But I’ll just close by saying if there’s anything that you take from this is that the conversation around the future of work is much broader than just remote collaboration and productivity software. It includes your career. It includes childcare, eldercare. It includes financial security. There’s a lot of things that I didn’t talk about, like financial security and mobility, all of which are equally important. And so hopefully we can expand that conversation and we can be more optimistic about what it looks like.
Angie Chang: Awesome. Thank you so much, Jomayra. That was a fantastic talk. We have to wrap up the session. We have another session coming up in one minute, so thank you so much.
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.
