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Hundreds of girl geeks came to Stitch Fix Girl Geek Dinner for the food, drinks, good company and excellent talks from CTO Cathy Polinsky to Principal Software Engineer Erin Dees.

Speakers:
Cathy Polinsky / CTO / Stitch Fix
Emma Colner / Software Engineer / Stitch Fix
Lila Bowker / Product Manager, Engagement / Stitch Fix
Anna Schneider / Data Science Manager / Stitch Fix
Erin Boyle / Data Scientist / Stitch Fix
Bingrui Tang / Senior UX Designer / Stitch Fix
Erin Dees / Principal Software Engineer / Stitch Fix
Angie Chang / CEO & Founder / Girl Geek X
Gretchen DeKnikker / COO / Girl Geek X
Sukrutha Bhadouria / CTO & Co-Founder / Girl Geek X

Transcript of Stitch Fix Girl Geek Dinner – Lightning Talks:

Angie Chang: Hello! Awesome. Thanks everyone for coming out to Stitch Fix tonight. My name’s Angie Chang, I’m the founder of Girl Geek X. It’s been 11 years of hosting weekly dinners at companies around the Silicon Valley in San Francisco. I want to thank you so much for continuing to come back, and also if it’s your first time, I hope you’ve met some amazing people. I learn something new every time, when I come to another one of these events. This is Stitch Fix’s second time hosting this event, and it’s really great seeing them grow, and I’m really excited to hear them speak again.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Hey, I’m Gretchen. How many of you guys are wearing like your Stitch Fix stuff today? Yes. I made sure that I had on all my stuff, and I feel really cute, and I have to say you guys look extra cute. Like you always look cute at the events, but you look extra cute tonight. I can tell. Okay, so how many people is this your first time? Whoa, a lot. Okay. So we actually do these every single week, so make sure you’re on the mailing list, and the next one’s at Cisco, and there’s a few more in the city, Intuit, like there’s a whole bunch of really awesome ones coming up.

Gretchen DeKnikker: We do have a podcast also, so find that on your favorite station. We just did one on uncommon unconventional career journeys, which is a fun topic. But we do mentorship, imposter syndrome, like all of these, so check it out and give us some feedback. Read it, tell us what you’d like to hear about. Tell us how we can be better. And Sukrutha.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thanks. Hi everyone, I actually did try wear my Stitch Fix pants, but they don’t fit anymore.

Speaker: We have maternity.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: You do, you have maternity? Okay. I did not get that notification. Thank you. No, but, anyway, the clothes are really cute and fun, and the last time when Stitch Fix sponsored, they spoke about how they used data to correctly identify the styles and the sizing that you need, and it just really blew my mind, how you think, “Oh, I’m just getting clothes in the mail.” But there’s so much thought and engineering and data that goes into it that shouldn’t go unnoticed.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Speaking of data, we’re also trying to get a sense, so if it’s your first time, how many of you are going to sign up for our mailing list? That’s-

Gretchen DeKnikker: You can decide later. Like we haven’t proven anything, other than that they can get you good food.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Yeah, but I do want to say it’s really easy to sign up for our mailing list. Go to girlgeek.io, and there’s like one click and you’re in. I do want to say Cathy is my absolute inspiration. We do podcasts, and we also do virtual conferences, and the first time we did a virtual conference she was kind enough to agree to kick it off and do the keynote. And so even that audio and video is available on our website, you can easily access it, and also on our YouTube.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: So enough from me, because there are great talks coming up, and Cathy is going to kick it off. I know Cathy, because she used to be at Salesforce, kicking butt there. And she’s kicking butt here. I’m going to hand it off to you, Cathy. Thank you so much for hosting again.

CTO Cathy Polinsky talks about the company’s product, the people, and partnership at Stitch Fix Girl Geek Dinner.

Cathy Polinsky: Thanks. Thank you guys. Great. Thanks for giving us the opportunity to host. I really appreciate the organization, Geek Girl X, and the mission of really bringing together women from all over the Bay Area to connect, and to network, and to share our experiences. So thank you all for coming here, and especially welcome to people who are coming to their first Geek Girl event.

Cathy Polinsky: How many of you have never used Stitch Fix before? Yay, awesome. Well, you all have gift certificates, and so hopefully you’ll give us a try. But Stitch Fix is an online personal styling service, so we’re disrupting how people can find things that they love, and our mission is to help people feel and look their best. The way that we do this is we pair human stylists with data science to help people discover their looks.

Cathy Polinsky: And so, I mean many of you have tried to buy clothes online, it’s a pretty miserable experience, and what we’re doing is first you fill out a style profile, similar to a dating profile, but about things that you like to wear. We then use dozens of machine learning algorithms to get match scores against all the items in our inventory. We send those match scores to our stylists, and we have over 4,000 stylists who work for us.

Cathy Polinsky: These are employees of ours. We feel really passionate about not replicating the Uber gig economy of contractors, but really these are employees of ours who work from home, and are really passionate about serving our client’s needs. They hand curate a Fix just for you. They pick the clothes, they send it to one of our fulfillment centers. We put it up in a nice box, we send it to your house. You get to try it on at home. You keep what you like, you send back the rest. We pay for shipping both ways.

Cathy Polinsky: The great thing about our model is that we get better and better the more we get to know you, and you share data about what you like, and what you don’t like, and that gets fed back into our model. And so we’re an eight-year-old company, and proud that Fast Company named us one of the most innovative companies last year. Woo! Thank you.

Cathy Polinsky: This is Katrina Lake, our CEO and founder, and I feel really passionate about working for a female led company. She is a really amazing entrepreneur and leader, that I really get so excited every day to get to work with her. It’s a very data driven company, led by a very data driven leader. That really goes into the innovation of what we do.

Cathy Polinsky: We’re eight years old, we’re a newly public company, making over a billion dollars in revenue. We’re profitable. We’ve got business lines for women’s, for men’s, for kids, for plus, maternity. We’re just about to launch our first international company in the UK, so look for the announcement soon. If you know anyone in the UK, let them know once it’s launched and we’d love to have them try out our service.

Cathy Polinsky: I really get excited about our business model, and it’s just very interesting to deal with something that has a tangible product, and a huge operational aspect. I’ve worked at companies like Salesforce and Yahoo and Amazon, and this is just a different aspect of how I’m working with technology, with our tech teams.

Cathy Polinsky: It’s also really amazing what a strong engineering culture we have, and company culture. We have what we call the Stitch Fix OS, it’s our operating system for how our teams work together. And I think it’s really great to be able to work for a company where you can see the values that you have, aligned with how we run ourselves as a company.

Cathy Polinsky: Two things that really stand out to me as a technologist, is one is our value around authenticity. When I started my career as a software engineer all I wanted to do was fit in and look like one of the guys. I didn’t want to stand out as a woman. I wore baggy T-shirts and jeans, and just wanted to be treated as a great software engineer, and to be respected for what I did, rather than stand out as someone who is different.

Cathy Polinsky: There’s a lot of overload that goes in your brain to just try to fit in, to just try to fit in the same box, talk like one of the guys, to play the first person shooter games, or whatever it is that we were doing back then. It is a little exhausting to think about trying to fit in, instead of just getting to work, focus on your work.

Cathy Polinsky: Stitch Fix is a company where we are trying to help people look and feel their best, because we feel like that they can go out and lead more confident lives, and just the feeling you have when you’re wearing that great outfit and being able to be yourself really matters. We also have a mission for our employees to do their best work, and a lot of that comes down to being their authentic self. So not having to feel like they have to double check their email three times, or phrase things to seem less emotional, or more powerful, or whatever codified words that it might mean to kind of fit into that mold.

Cathy Polinsky: And so we have authenticity as one of our Stitch Fix values, of letting everybody be themselves, and thinking about the culture additive that brings to the organization, so that people can focus on their work instead of just trying to fit into the mold.

Cathy Polinsky: Then the other thing that we have a really strong value is around partnership, so it’s a complex business model that we have. First it starts with the merchandise. We own all of the inventory in our system, that we’re selling to our clients, and if we don’t buy the right inventory, and the right quantities, we’ll never serve our client’s needs. Then we’ve got this huge workforce of stylists and making sure that they have all the tools that they need to operate at their job every day.

Cathy Polinsky: Then we have a huge operational aspect of how we get those products to the clients in the right way, and manage all of our inventory and our costs. And then we have this whole business with our website, the style profile, and engaging products that want you to come back to our site every day, so that we can get to know you better and better.

Cathy Polinsky: If you think about all those aspects, there’s … I’m always surprised by how little changes on one side of those have deep impact on other sides. We could make some changes to how many items we send in a Fix, and that could change the inventory allocation that we have available for the next person. And so it is one of the most partnership driven companies that I have worked for, in that you really have to think about not just your own area, but how that could have an impact across the company.

Cathy Polinsky: We thought what’s really interesting about our business is how strong of an EQ we have here at Stitch Fix, and how that has really led to our innovation and success as a company. And that we really strive for that when we’re hiring technologists, so people who can think not just about building something to spec, but really thinking about understanding the business model and how they can work together across different lines. Whether it’s a data scientist working with an engineer, or someone of the design team working with our marketing team.

Cathy Polinsky: And so we’ve got a theme today of partnership that we’d like to share with you. Talking a lot about some of the interesting projects, but really leaning into how you can use that aspect of your skills to really be a big success. I’d say one of the things that I learned about partnership came from a big misstep, I would say, as an early engineering manager. So going back to this feeling of authenticity, you only know what you see, and so being in an organization where I saw mostly male leaders, I tried to emulate a lot of them in my leadership style. It didn’t always feel comfortable, but you just try to do the things that you’ve seen to be successful when you run into tough trouble.

Cathy Polinsky: A few companies ago I was working on a project, and my team was getting pulled in different directions, and I felt like, okay, I’ve seen the way that guys handle this, and they pound on the desk, and they really fight for their teams to make sure that they’re not being jerked around, and that they’re getting the staffing and the support that they need. And so I tried to do the same, and I pounded on the desk, and I yelled in meetings, and I said that this was just really unacceptable for how we could get something done.

Cathy Polinsky: And it didn’t work, and I kind of failed miserably at making the changes that were really needed to work on this project in a way that was getting clarity on the architecture and the designs needed at a large scale. It was like, I don’t understand why this isn’t working, it works for other people, I’ve seen managers do that in the past. But I have to say, I had some self-reflection, it didn’t feel good to yell in meetings. It wasn’t successful and it wasn’t me, and it just made everybody really miserable in the process.

Cathy Polinsky: And so the next time I went to a new company, I was like, okay, never again, I’m not going to try to be someone I’m not, and to try to get through this with anger and yelling. I’d say that I learned a lot in my next role, of really starting to build relationships. So how can I build relationships upfront, build trust, so that when we have difficult situations, instead of it getting to a point of anger it came to a conversation. I found that I really developed my leadership style, because I leaned more into my authentic self and led into building partnerships. Because I think that when you have those partnerships, you can get a lot more done.

Cathy Polinsky: I see that here every day at Stitch Fix and hope you’ll see some great learnings around partnerships that we have here today with some of our speakers. So without further ado, our theme is around technology and partnership, and we’re going to pass it off to Emma. Yeah, Emma, come on up. Where’d she go? There.

Software Engineer Emma Colner gives a talk on “Mind The Gap: How Our Brains Fool Us into Thinking We Understand” at Stitch Fix Girl Geek Dinner.

Emma Colner: I don’t know if you want your wine that’s up here, Cathy. All right. Hi everybody, my name is Emma Colner. I’m an engineer here at Stitch Fix, and I work on expert use systems. That means I build tools for my co-workers that help them do their jobs more efficiently. But in a previous life I was also a former experimental psychologist, so I really enjoy thinking about thinking, and today I’m going to be talking about how experts think, and how that differs from how novices think, and the different implications that can have for when we are collaborating together at work. Oh.

Cathy Polinsky: I stole this.

Emma Colner: Thank you. I only have two hands. So I’m just going to hold this. Okay. Like Cathy was saying, we value partnership a lot at Stitch Fix, and I think it makes a lot of sense to really try and understand how we can bridge this gap between how experts think and how novices think, and what they know. But also it’s a great opportunity for us to harness each individual person’s expertise. In that way we can kind of learn and grow together as a company.

Emma Colner: To start, I’d like you to think about someone that you really admire, someone whose skills and knowledge you really look up to, and someone that you might want to emulate one day. Imagine that this building here on the left is a representation of all that person’s knowledge about a certain topic. Now, if you were to learn how to do what this person does, how would you do it?

Emma Colner: Well, you could try and just copy what you see, but you could also … You’re not even sure of whether the building is going to be structurally sound, so what we don’t see is that this building started out as an idea, and a series of discussions, and lots of back and forth plans before there was even a foundation built. What I’m trying to say is that basically when we look at an expert we don’t see the path that they took to get to where they are.

Emma Colner: We don’t see all of the hypothesis that they tried and tested. You don’t see all the doubt that they experienced, so it’s just important to keep in mind. Part of what makes being a good partner a challenge, is that it’s impossible to truly know the experience of someone else. We can be excellent observers, and we can infer a lot about someone just by looking at them, but we don’t know everything. Part of the difficulty is that as people we naturally just fill in the blanks. When we don’t know something, we infer based on stuff that we already know.

Emma Colner: In some situations this can lead to some false understanding, so to succeed at partnership we need to work hard to bridge that gap between minds. I included this quote here on the right from Domain Driven Design, by Eric Evans, just because I thought it was relevant to what I’m talking about today. I’m not going to be talking much more about it, but I’m still in the middle of reading it, but it was a really good introduction. I recommend it.

Emma Colner: For now, I’m going to be describing three different scenarios that I have experienced in my software engineering career, and what they can teach us about our brain’s natural limitations, so we can become better communicators, problem solvers, and business partners.

Emma Colner: In scenario one I’m a junior software engineer, I’ve just started at Stitch Fix, and I have a mentor who’s a principal engineer. We pair pretty much every day, and half the time I don’t know what he’s talking about. He’s speaking in a different language, and also I don’t even know how to phrase the questions that I’m trying to ask. I don’t know how to phrase the search terms that I want to put in Google to understand what I’m trying to do. So that’s the first scenario.

Emma Colner: Second scenario is, in this scenario I’m the expert. I built something, I built a new feature, I’m trying to get it to work, but there’s a bug that I just can’t figure out. I’ve spent many hours on this, and finally I decide to ask someone for help. But then as soon as I explain the issue to that person, the answer just kind of pops out at me, and the other person didn’t have to say a word.

Emma Colner: And then the third scenario, collaborating with business partners. So let’s say I’m working on a new feature with my business partner. We’ve met and talked about the project several times. We meet each week, seems like we’re all on the same page, but at some point it becomes obvious there’s been some kind of miscommunication, and the project doesn’t end up as we had expected.

Emma Colner: What do all these scenarios have in common? Well, they all demonstrate a gap between what we as experts think we understand and what we actually understand of someone else’s domain. When experiencing cross-functional teams, this difference in expertise can cause friction and lost productivity. I want to advocate for a solution of adopting a beginner’s mindset. So now the neuro scientist is going to come out of me, and I’m going to have a very, very simplified explanation of how learning works in the brain, and how differences in expertise can lead to different outcomes.

Emma Colner: When we learn something for the first time it’s an effortful process that takes a lot of mental resources and attention, so that’s what those red scribbles represent. Over time, as we change from novices to experts, our brains become more efficient as memories consolidate, and unnecessary information is forgotten. The representation of information shifts from the sensory regions to cortical regions of the brain that operate more heuristically and more efficiently. That’s what all the green squiggles are meant to represent.

Emma Colner: So the more knowledge you have on a topic, the more associations you have built up in your mind, and the greater the network of brain areas that are involved while working on a problem. What do I mean about our brains becoming more efficient? I’ll share with you a study called The Development of Expertise in Radiology, and they basically showed that expertise can reduce the complexity of the environment. They did this by showing chest radiographs to novices and expert radiologists and they tracked their eye movements.

Emma Colner: They were told to detect some kind of an anomaly. You can see on the left that … The red represents more time looking at a certain spot, and green is less time. What we see is that novices are just kind of looking all over the place. They don’t know what they’re looking for. They’re spending a lot of time just kind of lost, whereas the experts, it seems that their attention is automatically drawn to the important aspects of the image.

Emma Colner: So that actually, the knowledge that they’ve had over their experience has helped reduce complexity and made the problem easier to deal with. Novices, on the other hand, are using more rudimentary tools. They might take longer, or it might be harder to solve the same problem. Most of the time being an expert works to our advantage, saving us time and energy, but in certain cases, like in the three scenarios I talked about earlier, it can be a handicap.

Emma Colner: Why might that be? Well, the price of expert efficiency is that the scaffolding, or the context surrounding when you first learned something, has been forgotten, probably by the time you’ve become an expert. So just as your brain actively consolidates memories it wants to keep, it forgets most of our daily experience, so over time we only remember the important stuff. Sometimes the only way around a problem is to work through it from the bottom up, starting with basic concepts and building up your understanding, rather than starting from an existing mental model and working down.

Emma Colner: That way we’re forced to think more deliberately, which helps expose weaknesses in our logic, and in other words it helps to just adopt this beginner’s mindset. Circling back to the different scenarios, on the left, that represents my mentor. He was working with a full-fledged Lego set with pieces that all fit together in a sequence that makes sense. And that’s actually like Legos. Whereas I, on the other hand, was working with a bunch of wooden blocks and playing around, trying to stack one idea on top of another, hoping it doesn’t fall down.

Emma Colner: I think what might have happened with my mentor is maybe like he had lost the scaffolding, he had lost the context of when he’d first learned a certain topic that he was trying to explain to me, and so it becomes harder to kind of connect with someone who has such a different skill level.

Emma Colner: And then in scenario two, I was basically describing rubber ducking, which is a debugging method where you basically explain your code to some inanimate object. It doesn’t matter what you explain your code to, but it’s surprisingly helpful in letting you know what it is that you’ve done wrong. The reason it’s so helpful is because you’re forced to approach a problem from a different perspective. You’re building up and filling in the scaffolding that you had lost previously, and that can help us gain some new insights.

Emma Colner: And then in Scenario three, when I describe how I’m working with my business partner, where we didn’t fully connect on our vision, what happened was we both had like a false understanding of the problem and/or the solution. We’d both made some kind of assumption about each other’s work without even thinking about it, because we were both experts in our own domains, and our brains are filling in the details of things that we might not understand fully.

Emma Colner: So, yeah, really, this picture is a joke, but it just demonstrates how easy it is to misinterpret things that might seem really easy. Lastly, I just wanted to return to the skyscraper and reconstruction metaphor for mental models. So while it’s being built up, there’s scaffolding all over the place, allowing workers to place one brick on top of another, but when construction is done, the scaffolding is taken away and all that’s left is a perfect shining tower.

Emma Colner: It can be hard to remember how we arrived at a conclusion once the scaffolding is gone. The next time that you’re collaborating on a project with someone of a different background, remember that you don’t see the path that they took to get to where they are, and it’s often necessary to spend the time to translate, describing one person’s solution in a language the other person understands. Or better yet, coming up with a common language together. Thank you.

Lila Bowker: Thanks Emma. Hi, my name’s Lila, I think I met most of you when trying to sort out the name tag situation up front. I’m just here to make the transitions less awkward, but there’s no guarantee that that’s actually what’s going to happen, so I have notes. Thanks, Emma, for the reminder of how continuous learning and kind of taking a beginner’s mindset is incredibly important as we work with our cross-functional partners.

Lila Bowker: Next up we have Anna Schneider. She’s a manager on our merch algo’s team, and she’s going to talk about how she partners with experts in merchandising to help make our buying better. I’ll give you that. Oh, you have LaCroix. How are you going to switch slides with LaCroix?

Data Science Manager Anna Schneider gives a talk on “Transforming the Way Merchants Find What They Love” at Stitch Fix Girl Geek Dinner.

Anna Schneider: I’m going to put it down, is what I’m going to do. Hi. Yeah, so I’m Anna. As Lila said, I’m a data science manager here. I’m going to talk about a project that I worked on that is very similar to the scenario three that Emma was just talking about, where you’re working with a cross-functional partner, and you think that you’re solving the same problem, and it turns out there’s a whole different kind of problem, and a whole different kind of solution that was needed.

Anna Schneider: So when I say buying better here, I’m not talking about how clients buy better stuff from Stitch Fix, I’m talking about how buyers who work at Stitch Fix buy better stuff to send to clients. So digging in a little bit more, we have a team of people called buyers who are Stitch Fix employees, and their job is to figure out what we should be stocking in the warehouses. That determines the pool of merch that then the stylists can choose from when they’re deciding what to send to a particular client.

Anna Schneider: And upstream from the buyers, the buyers work with vendors to figure out what they should be stocking. So by working with the right vendors and buying the right things from the vendors, the buyers have a huge influence on the end experience that the client’s have, by making sure that we have really good stuff in the warehouses. That’s going to be good no matter who shows up as a client who wants a Fix.

Anna Schneider: If you think about what the buyer’s day would look like, an old school company or at Stitch Fix in the early days, this is what a buyer would do. They would look at a list of things that are on offer from the vendors, and because if you’re lucky to work at a place like Stitch Fix, there’s going to be some performance metrics associated with each one of these items of clothing. And so the buyers would look through a list like this, pick the things near the top of the list, and that’s what we would buy, and that’s what the clients would get sent.

Anna Schneider: This has a number of problems. One of them is that it’s kind of like a standard e-commerce experience for the buyer, so they have to like search through all these lists and hunt and peck, and decide what merch to be carrying. One of the big values of Stitch Fix is that we don’t make our clients go through that experience of doing all the e-commerce shopping themselves, so why are we making our in-house buyers go through that experience?

Anna Schneider: We thought there must be something better. And another more subtle problem with this way of buying, is that by only looking at one single performance metric, you’re only buying for the average client. So let’s dig a little bit into why this problem comes about.

Anna Schneider: Say we have these bunch of clients and we’ve sent them these shirts, and we have some performance metric for each of these. So maybe they all hate the yellow shirt, maybe the gray shirt does really well, and the two green shirts are like, nah, kind of in the middle. If you were a buyer looking at this data, you would think that, oh, the right thing to do is to buy a bunch of the gray shirt, and not buy the others. Seems good. Seems fine.

Anna Schneider: Now, what if we dig into the data and pull out some niche client segment that has different preferences than all the others. The top line shows pretty similar data to before. Those people still like that gray shirt, but the client segment on the bottom likes something else. They like the striped shirt on the end. Now if you’re a buyer looking at this data, the right thing to do is to buy both of these shirts, that way no matter who shows up there’s going to be something that’s really good for them.

Anna Schneider: And this is our mission at Stitch Fix, is to have something that’s going to be good, no matter who shows up. And so it’s really important for us to be enabling the buyers to do the job of buying a really diverse set of merch, that’s going to be really good for a diverse set of clients. So we, on the algorithms team, stepped back and thought about how can we give the buyers this data in order to make better decisions.

Anna Schneider: We thought, well, if giving them one list is bad, what if we give them multiple lists, one for each client segment. So algorithms, and engineering, and merch all collaborated to build a tool that did that. There was multiple lists, so every item of clothing would have how good is it for this client segment, how good is it for this other client segment, and the buyers would go through and choose things from the top of all the lists.

Anna Schneider: This was great. So was it going to be a better experience? We hoped so, but no. It was better at accomplishing the goal of having something that’s good for a lot of different kinds of people, but it made the hunt/peck problem way worse, because they had to dig through a whole separate list for every client segment. They were working harder instead of working smarter to accomplish this goal.

Anna Schneider: And they were like, well, we can do it with a handful of client segments, maybe, but Stitch Fix wants to get to thousands of client segments, millions of client segments, and this was never going to work. Is not a scalable solution. Something really interesting happened as we in Algorithms were talking with the buyers about all of their struggles using this tool. They started seeing some things that should have been obvious, and now that we learned them, it is things that we really care about taking into account.

Anna Schneider: They’re running a real business, and they didn’t give us this feedback in rap battle format, but they almost may as well have. So when they are thinking about what to buy, they have a huge number of other things that they’re keeping in mind, not just this one metric. In addition to having the right diversity across clients, there’s also things like having different price points, having different size and fit preferences.

Anna Schneider: We want to make sure that we really cover all of our bases in those kinds of ways. We’re running a profitable business, as Cathy said. We care about hitting our revenue and margin targets. Buying is something that happens on a seasonal cadence, and so we want to make sure that the stuff we’re buying is going to be good a few months from now. And there’s also other targets around the sort of inventory level management, so are we buying too much and we won’t be able to sell it? Are we buying not enough and there’s going to be missed opportunity?

Anna Schneider: The buyers were thinking about all of these things in their heads while using our tool, and not being able to fully actualize in their role. When we heard all this feedback, we stepped back and thought about, okay, is there a better way that we can be addressing this problem? There’s this performance metric that we want to be maximizing, and there’s all of these constraints that we have on the business. What does that sound like? And we go and like dug around in our algorithms toolbox and said, “Hey, that sounds like constrained optimization.”

Anna Schneider: So we reformulated this as a constrained optimization problem. Our decision variable is the number of units of each item to be buying for each client segment. We choose those units in order to maximize the predicted performance of the whole assortment overall. So we add all that together, as subject to all of those constraints that we talked about on the previous slide. It took a fair bit of work to formulate all of those as equality or inequality constraints, but we were able to get close enough for most of them, through a lot of partnership and talking with merch about like, “Hey, so when you want to meet this margin target what does that really mean?”

Anna Schneider: We were able to get all these formulated. To solve this we’re using a open source Python solver called Pyomo, and it’s been working pretty well for us, even though the documentation is pretty bad. If you’re interested in checking it out yourself, I would recommend googling this blog post by one of our other data scientists who is using Pyomo on a different team within Stitch Fix algorithms. It’s way clearer explanation than like anything else on the Internet.

Anna Schneider: Then in order to make this algorithm available to the buyers, we built a tool that they use to interact with it. So from their perspective, they actually specify values for all of these constraints within the tool, and then press go. And what happens then is that our algorithm, running Pyomo, combines those constraints with a separate algo’s predictions of how well each item is going to perform for each client, and spits back out the recommendations.

Anna Schneider: And so within just a couple of seconds the buyers get the whole assortment recommended returned back to them. This has been a way better experience for everyone involved. So our goal of having something for everyone, this achieves. We’re optimizing over all of the client segments at once. And something that has been really interesting to work on is that it totally changes the contract between the buyers and the algorithms, so the buyers are now responsible for having the right goals for the assortment, entering the right targets, and the algo is responsible for figuring out the best way to achieve those goals.

Anna Schneider: And so it’s almost like the experience of getting a Fix, where as a Stitch Fix client you’ll say like, “Hey, I want a cute dress for a wedding next month,” and the stylist will go off, and the stylist algorithms will go off and figure out the best way to achieve that goal for you. Now, the relationship between the buyers and algorithms is much more like that, instead of the standard old e-commerce experience.

Anna Schneider: Some lessons that I’ve learnt through this that could hopefully be transferable to some other business context, like whatever you’re working on. One is that algorithms are good at tactics, and people are good at strategy. In the old versions of this tool, the people were responsible for the tactics of digging through all the lists, and nothing within the tool was responsible for the strategy. Now we reformulated the tool so that the people are doing the strategy and the algo is doing the tactics, and that’s a much more powerful human-in-the-loop algorithm.

Anna Schneider: One important enabler of allowing people to handle the strategy, is being able to capture that strategy for the tool, and so that’s been the really interesting user experience problem, because sometimes the buyers knew explicitly what their targets were, and sometimes it was all just implicit in their head, and so that’s been a fun partnership experience too, is figuring out a good UX to tease those implicit intentions out of the users, and make them explicit.

Anna Schneider: If we were only working with collect telemetry kind of data, instead of asking like, “Hey, what do you actually want?” it would have taken much longer to figure out what some of these targets were. And last but not least, especially if you’re working in like B2B or enterprise, your users are running a real business, and their jobs are way more complicated than you realize, no matter how much time you spend getting in the weeds with them.

Anna Schneider: So in my experience, at least, it’s really worth getting into the weeds to try to figure out how their processes actually work, and then abstracting it back to something that can achieve their goals even better than they thought and you thought that could be possible. So thanks.

Lila Bowker: Yeah, thanks Anna for explaining how you use data science to make our merch buying process better. I’m going to look at my notes again, sorry. Next up we have a dynamic duo, half of which is already up here. Come on over. All right, so we have product designer, Bing Tang. Oh-oh, there goes my notes. And data scientist, Erin Boyle, and they’re going to explain how we use data to understand client style, and then how we use that to inform stylists to send better Fixes. Take it away, guys.

Data Scientist Erin Boyle and Senior UX Designer Bingrui Tang give a talk on “Partnering on Style” at Stitch Fix Girl Geek Dinner.

Erin Boyle: Thanks, Lila.

Bingrui Tang: Okay, hello everyone. My name is Bing, and I work on the UX design team, [inaudible]. And this is Erin, she works on the data science team and working on AI instruments, and today we’ll be … being the dynamic duo, and talk about communicating style together.

Bingrui Tang: I think Cathy already talk about this a little bit, but at Stitch Fix we really have this human-in-the-loop process. We have algorithm empowering the stylist’s work, where a stylist will actually make the call. And if we actually put our foot into a stylist’s shoes, it is a very challenging work. Imagine you have a client who is there in a 50s Fix, and their profile might haven’t been updated for a while, and their style preference has been changing over time. It is really difficult for a stylist to dig through all the things, and do we really want to empower them to use their creativity to really send a delightful Fix to our clients?

Bingrui Tang: So on the backend side, a lot of our work is really to design for the styling platform, so, as you can see here, on a platform we would combine the client data which has some basic information. Their style preference and their Fix history, as well as how the algorithm is recommending the items of a variety of categories, and decides by going through all the information about a client, they would actually be able to pick the items that they think would fit the client well, which might not always 100% fit with how the algorithm sorted out.

Bingrui Tang: So for us, a big part of our work is to make sure the way we present the client data is really helpful for the stylists, so they can really do their job well. Previously, the way we represent a client’s style is more aesthetic, so for those who have been using Stitch Fix before, when clients sign up they would rate outfits of different styles, and we will translate this summarized data into some different formats, to the platform, so that the stylists will see and be able to understand what the client wants.

Erin Boyle: Okay. Cool, thanks. The data science team that I’m on works on contributing to a broad set of problems, kind of in this category, that rely on having some more nuanced definition of style. So we actually built a new platform to try and support this. Can I ask, has anyone in this room played style Shuffle? Got a few hands. Okay. Style Shuffle is a kind of game-like experience that we released a little over a year ago, where clients can rate items in our inventory, thumbs up or thumbs down.

Erin Boyle: It’s been really fun and engaging for them, people really like giving us data like this. We have more than a billion ratings now. You can imagine that, like Bing said, one way that you can represent someone’s style is with these kind of like limited number of static questions that we used to have in our style profile. But you can imagine that there’s a few limitations to that, like one, it’s just not very much data, so it’s not going to have a lot of nuance, and then like Bing said, it will also get stale over time.

Erin Boyle: So since people can continually play this game, we can keep collecting more information and get kind of richer, and richer, and up-to-date information about our clients. It’ll come as a surprise to no data scientist in this room, that one way you can deal with data of this format is with an algorithm called matrix factorization. If you want to come up with descriptions of a client’s, what we’ll call, latent style preferences, one thing you can do is you can treat the ratings coming out of this system as kind of sparse observations in this user item matrix, where every row is a user, and every column is an item.

Erin Boyle: You can decompose this matrix into a lower rank co-representation that is composed of the product of this lower dimensional user embedding matrix, and lower dimensional item embedding matrix. When you’ve done this, what you have learnt, you’re learning the coefficients in these two matrices on the right. What you’ve learned are what we call latent factors, that describe client preference. So the kind of columns in this user matrix and the rows in this item matrix are going to describe … they’re going to be kind of like hidden underlying variables that describe a big sources of variance in the preferences that we see from our clients.

Erin Boyle: If you want to get a prediction back out for any of these user item pairs that we haven’t actually observed. If you want to get back out a prediction of how well a user might like some particular item, all you need to do in this framing is simply take a dot product of this user and item vector to recover a kind of score for that pair.

Erin Boyle: In reality, we might actually expand on this, and use a more nuanced algorithm, but I think this is a good kind of framing to understand it. What can we do? So one thing you can do once you’ve trained an algorithm like this, is you can simply pull out the top recommendations for any client. Here I’ve sampled five real clients form our clientele, and I’ve also sampled some of the top items, given this prediction task for these clients, and you can see that you really uncover using this algorithm, like a range of different aesthetics. You can see that these people are all of different style.

Erin Boyle: That’s one thing that we can provide to technical and business partners like Bing, to paint a picture of our clients. But we are interested in also providing something else, so just like from the style profile, you have this set of user features that comes out. We’re also interested in whether the user representation, like just this user vector on the left here, was kind of in and of itself useful and interesting, and whether we could use it as a feature that we could communicate through language as well.

Erin Boyle: One way you can do that is to really think about this kind of style space that you’ve created when you run this algorithm. So let’s say we ran this algorithm with just three latent factors like we’ve done here, just three columns in the user matrix, that means that once we’ve learnt coefficients for this user, they have a location in this kind of XYZ space. They have an address. We’re curious, does that address itself kind of convey information?

Erin Boyle: One way you can dig into that and try and come up with a language to describe this user representation from this algorithm, is you can actually look at these axes, and you can see what they represent. We’ve found these latent factors that predict client preference, but what do they mean? Like what’s going on? One thing you can do, an item that is good for this user … Since our prediction task is done by taking a dot product, an item that is good for this user is going to be an item that is near this user in this style space, and an item that is bad for them is going to be far away.

Erin Boyle: One thing you can do, is you can look at how the items change across some particular axis, to come up with what this axis is encoding stylistically. When we do this for this one X axis, you can see that this is sample of items on the left, and they have this kind of boho style to them. And this is a sample of items on the right, and maybe you would call them more preppy.

Erin Boyle: And you can then go through and do this for the major, what we would call, principle components of this style space in order to really explain what this user’s representation means. There’s a couple little technical details if you want to do this in real life. I actually have a blog post on it, if you want to dig into that.

Erin Boyle: But basically what this gets us to, is that our team can kind of partner with people like Bing, to provide these intermediate data products, that they can plug into whatever their domain is within the company. One thing might be actual recommendations. One might be the client’s representation. Maybe on merch they might care about the style’s representation instead. What we try to do is just provide people with whatever products are going to be useful for their application.

Bingrui Tang: Thank you. Thank you, Erin. I know it’s very magical, isn’t it? I remember when I first got on the project, I was like, “Ooh, look at that.” So, yeah, that’s come back to what I was talking about, designing the styling platform. Once I wrapped my head around this project and going through many meetings with our cross-functional partners, there’s two big questions sitting in front of us.

Bingrui Tang: One is, how to make sense of latent style? Because, as Erin just said, it is a very mathematical model. But we want to make sure it is something that somebody who doesn’t really know statistics, or doesn’t really know much about math, could still understand it in some way. And more importantly, we want to make sure that it could stylists actually make decisions, and with confidence.

Bingrui Tang: So for these two questions we actually conducted two different studies and I will just quickly go through them, and share with you guys. The first one, as Erin just said, and she actually showed these two clusters of clothes too, I think most people would see, “Oh, these two are different styles.” But it’s very hard to say why, or how, or what, or exactly, so this is also how we started the study, because, as a human, when we see a bunch of things sitting together with similarities, we just have this natural tendency to give it a name, a label, a theme, or something like that, so that was how we started.

Bingrui Tang: Let’s use this, two extreme maxis as example. The first moment we saw it, we said, “Oh, the left-hand side looks very classic. The right-hand side look trendy.” Yeah, something like that. But because we thought this is coming from the mathematical model, we should really think about it very objectively. So we say, what is the most visible objective factor? Let’s say, the left-hand side is very less skin exposure, it’s much more covered, and the right-hand side looks more skin exposure, what about that?

Bingrui Tang: And then we show it to the stylists and also other people on the team, and then there has been a lot of voice raised, because everybody’s like, “Yeah, there is skin exposure, but the print seems different, there is seasonal implications. The color scheme is different. The fit is different. There is different levels of embellishment. Which one is the most important? How do we kind of …” Then there’s a lot of debate around that.

Bingrui Tang: At that point, the team and everybody, we actually started stepping back a little bit and think about what is style in reality? This is one quote from the movie The Devil Wears Prada–I still remember when that quote come out in a movie–but I think essentially it is talking about what style was really manifested over time, from the cultural and the historical influence. For us, it is really important to recognize and embrace that instead of trying to invent some new way of talking about style overnight.

Bingrui Tang: At the end we actually come back to our original idea, and actually showed it to stylists, and see how they reacted to it. Do they recognize these words as representative of these clusters? And seems like the old way, the classic and trendy, actually worked the best.

Bingrui Tang: For the second study, I think Erin also showed this image before, now that we know we can get a sample set of items that seems to be into the client’s preference, and we can also get a relevant location of the client preference in this spacial model, how can we display the client’s style representation in the styling platform so that the stylist can actually understand it within a short amount of time?

Bingrui Tang: The goal for us is to find the right way to display each client’s style, to help stylists actually style a Fix. So, again, oops, let’s use this image as an example. Imagine this is client 123, that’s her style preference sample. So we tried a few options again. The first one, we said images only, here’s what she likes, and you can interpret it as much as you want. And we were not feeling quite 100% confident with it.

Bingrui Tang: And then the second option is the more mathematical one, we say, “Her style is 53% trendy, and 28% boho.” And we definitely know it is a little bit too extreme, so we also pulled back a little bit, and look at this, the happy medium. So we would say, “Her style is very trendy, and a little bit boho.” And now we have three options later, we actually ran a quick study, and we are surprised.

Bingrui Tang: We compared a bunch of different factors, from how accurate the stylists are able to find what the client likes and figure out what the client dislike, and also how fast they are.

Lila Bowker: Try that.

Bingrui Tang: Okay. Oh, thank you. And also how the stylists feel about using this feature as an experience, and seems like the image only one actually won all of them. And from the result, seems like, at least during the experiment period, we learned that displaying the images only has the best overall outcome.

Bingrui Tang: So when we look back at the long journey, we realized at the beginning we were trying to display as much information as possible and tried to put massive amount of data in front of stylists, and then we pulled back a little bit, and then we realized we can actually let the information speak for itself, instead of we try to add more things on top of it. Which reminds me of a quote from the very famous designer, Dieter Rams. Her work inspired a lot of Apple products, and he once said, “The good design is as little design as possible.”

Bingrui Tang: I think that really speaks … the philosophy’s really representing how we work here.

Erin Boyle: Awesome. So I guess I’ll add to that, is that … Ooh, hold that thought.

Lila Bowker: Keep talking. Keep talking. Just pretend there’s the lady behind the curtain over here. Oh, no.

Erin Boyle: This collaboration was really interesting for me, too, because A, it was really interesting to learn that it’s hard to summarize aesthetics with language, like I think of language as being very rich, also, but in this case it wasn’t quite up to the task. Our brains are really good at processing images, so that was a good thing for us to learn kind of broadly, even outside of your use case.

Erin Boyle: And then also, I still got the benefit of having language that experts had applied to this space for cases where you really need language, like you can’t always show a collection of images for every kind of use case, and so we do still have language that we’ve gotten from a bunch of the work that Bing’s team did. So, this is an example of one of many technical partnerships that we do here, and thank you for listening.

Bingrui Tang: Thank you all. So I believe most of the teams that are representing here are hiring. Lila will speak more about that, but design team is hiring, so we can talk later. Thank you.

Lila Bowker: Thanks, Bing and Erin. How they takes styles, shuffle data, and turn it into better Fixes for clients is one of the reasons that I joined the company. I love it. Next up I wanted to introduce Erin, she’s a principal engineer on our Fix request team, and she’s going to talk about the importance of giving feedback, and some strategies for how you can give feedback more regularly. Go for it.

Erin Dees: Hi, friends. Is it on?

Lila Bowker: Try this one.

Principal Software Engineer Erin Dees gives a talk on “Dossiers of Awesome: One Way to Help Folks Get the Recognition They Deserve” at Stitch Fix Girl Geek Dinner.

Erin Dees: Hi friends, how are you all? One more talk on the theme of partnership before we all get some networking time. The focus here now is going to kind of narrow in on the personal partnership, because as strong women we are told that we need to lift one another up. But how? Now part of the answer lies in helping our peers get the recognition and the visibility that they’ve earned.

Erin Dees: It’s about giving meaningful feedback that lifts them up, and also helps you. So this talk will be … The title, Dossiers of Awesome, is just a way to frame these habits and practices. It is not a complete solution to how to lift one another up. It is not a universal recipe. It’s an idea. What I’m really hoping with sharing it, is I get to hear your ideas afterwards. So let’s talk during networking time.

Erin Dees: My name is Erin. I joined Stitch Fix about two months ago as a principal engineer. These are my goats, it’s the day I brought them home in my Kia.

Lila Bowker: I’m so sorry, we’re having … Try this one. I don’t know, I’ve mixed up which one was the good one.

Erin Dees: Can everybody hear me now? Is this better?

Lila Bowker: Is that better?

Erin Dees: Okay.

Erin Dees: Thank you, friend, sorry about that. All right. You didn’t miss anything. Something, something goats. All right. Okay. I really enjoy working on a big thorny systems engineering problems, the kind where you have to reach out across teams, learn from industry, learn from one another, and then package that learning up and bring it back to your team. That’s my jam, like sharing knowledge like that. That’s why I write programming books. That’s why I coach athletes how to race walk faster. It’s not why I have goats, but they are very good listeners.

Erin Dees: This talk came out of a conversation that I had with a former colleague, Liz Abinante, a few years ago. We were talking about this series of stories we’d read, prominent women leaving their posts in the tech industry because of being passed over for opportunities, and being harassed. I said to Liz, “How do I get better at observing, at noticing? I would hate to think that something like this happened to somebody on my team, and I didn’t even see it. How do I catch this happening?”

Erin Dees: And Liz said, “People aren’t going to harass in front of an audience. Right? They’re not going to harass in front of witnesses. So, that’s not the way. If you want to help your teammates, that’s not really a great way to do it.” And I said, “Well, how do I help my teammates? Half my teammates are women, how do I … I like them, I like working with them, how do I hang onto them?”

Erin Dees: And Liz said, “Help them get the visibility and the recognition that they have earned.” The conversation branched out from there, we brainstormed a lot. But I want to pause here for a second, and say that even though this idea came out of a difficult situation and a tough conversation, it’s going to apply in a lot of different scenarios, and I also am aware that a lot of the people in this room are already doing a lot of emotional labor for their teams. The last thing I want to do is give you all more homework.

Erin Dees: I really want to talk about this in terms that will help you in your careers as well. How many of us are in a job where we are expected to give feedback on our peers regularly? Right. A lot of us, right. How many people kind of dread that time of year when you’ve got to go write a bunch of peer performance reports, right? It’s exhausting. It takes forever to write, and by the time you’ve done your fourth or fifth one, it’s hard to come up with something that is unique that could only apply to that engineer.

Erin Dees: Like, “Well, you’ve built some great products for us, and keep learning more advanced Ruby skills, I guess.” Like I mean, right, that could apply to everybody. So how do we get feedback that helps that specific person get better in their career? And that’s what we’re going to talk about. So in order to achieve this goal, whatever process we adopt should be lightweight, because we’re all busy and we’re just not going to do it if it’s too much of a burden on our time.

Erin Dees: It should be something that we keep up with in little increments throughout the year, instead of having a big deadline dropped on us. And again, it should be actionable, it should give our peers information that they can use to grow their career. One idea had been sitting right in front of me this whole time, which is an engineering journal. Now, I had started keeping this a few months prior, because we had formed a brand new team, and there was so much learning for all of us, that we really had to capture what we’d learned and what we’d done in some way, and my solution was to keep a journal.

Erin Dees: I tried to do it every day, ended up doing about 50% of days, and here’s something like what that looked like. 4:30 p.m. every day right before the end of the workday, a blank window pops up on my desktop, it’s time to write in your journal. And I spent just a few seconds, literally just a few seconds typing in a couple of bullet points. I implemented this feature. I fixed some tests. It’s okay to get snarky, it’s your own journal. Nobody’s going to read it. And the twist here then, was to realize that there’s no reason I couldn’t put anybody else’s accomplishments in here.

Erin Dees: Sometimes my journals talked about stuff I’d done with my teammates, but it was time to get systematic about it, and use hashtags and stuff. And so that’s what I started doing. So in addition to what I’d worked on, I might add a couple of bullet points that a teammate worked on, and tagged them with a hashtag, which comes in handy later. So then if you’re in a culture that does sort of quarterly feedback cycles, when it comes time to do this, I can click on that person’s tag in my journaling software.

Erin Dees: This is totally real data you all. I did not just type a bunch of this stuff at 1:00 a.m. in my hotel room last night. So then you can either copy and paste, or kind of paraphrase, but you start with a blank document, and you can paste all this data in here. And you start to notice as you do this that these items kind of fall into patterns. These few items seem like they’re about incident response. These couple of items here seem like they’re about tech leadership, and so you can group them. You can start moving them around and you can add some headings.

Erin Dees: Now, then what you do with this information depends a lot about your feedback culture. If you’re in a place where you’re expected to write your own review, for starters, a self-review, you can give your peers the ammo, the raw material that they can use to write their self-review. So here’s what that might look like, you can compose an email, and if your manager is someone who’s supportive, write it to them and Cc your friend or your peer. Well, I hope they might be your friend too. And this now tells them a story. If they’ve been waiting for a great opportunity to write a promotion pitch for this engineer, you’ve just given them all this ammo.

Erin Dees: But the audience is also your peer, because if they’re going to be writing their self-review, it’s going to be a bunch of stuff that they may not remember in the moment that they accomplished that quarter. That said, though, do please let the manager know what they’ve done as well, because there’s a lot of cultural pressure on us not to brag, and we should fix that too. But if this is all stuff that happened, this isn’t bragging. It’s data.

Erin Dees: It’s a good idea to share it with … again, if you have the supportive manager, and with your peer. So how to make this feedback actionable, so that somebody can act on it and grow their career? One way to do this is to work these data points into a story, so it’s not just data, it’s a narrative. What this looks like, for example, if you start noticing this person developing or showing an aptitude and interest in tech leadership, is to call that out, and say, “Hey, maybe it’s time to start handing this engineer larger projects and have them run bigger initiatives. They seem to have a knack for it.”

Erin Dees: So I want to pause, just one second, and say that we’re at a women’s conference, and we’re talking through this originally through the lens of a conversation about women in tech, but there are lots of teammates that we have that are dealing with other marginalized identities, some multiple marginalized identities. So I want us to keep in mind all of our teammates who might be marginalized along one or more axes when we think about lifting one another up.

Erin Dees: That is one way that we can have an impact on our careers and our peer’s careers, is lifting them up. But again, this helps us do our jobs better. If we’re expected to give feedback, and we can do something that gives better and high quality feedback more quickly with less overhead, that helps us too. That makes us recognized for giving good feedback that really helps people, and that’s the impact I’m hoping that you all will have, no matter how you all choose to do it.

Erin Dees: So I’m really grateful to Girl Geek and Stitch Fix for putting together this event. Lila, this has been amazing. I love it. I have loved every talk I’ve watched. The other presenters, you all are amazing. I’m really grateful to Liz Abinante for this original conversation, and Lila and Miriam for helping me, appropriately enough, with meaningful actionable feedback about this very presentation.

Erin Dees: As we prepare to head into networking time, I want to come back to that cultural expectation that we don’t brag, and I want to chip away at that just a little bit tonight. I’d like to invite you all, as you’re introducing yourself to other people, to say something that you’re awesome at, work related, non work related, doesn’t matter. Lead off with something you’re skilled at. And if that’s one notch too extroverted for the comfort level tonight, maybe ask the person what they’re awesome at. Just know that they might turn around and ask you, be prepared for that, it’s okay.

Erin Dees: As we were brainstorming for how to lead into networking time, as a group of presenters, Lila brought up these two articles about the importance of owning your awesome, of owning what you’ve built. I really want to embody that spirit tonight, if at all we possibly can. It’s been hugely inspiring to be in this room full of awesome badass women in tech. I’m really grateful to be up here. I hope you all have a great rest of the event, and cheers.

Erin Boyle: Thanks, Erin. That was amazing, thanks, Erin.

Audience Member: I have a question about the buying process, like particularly more like the supply chain issues you might face. How do you, if you end up with an extra load of clothes that don’t fit anybody, how do you steer away from trying to push product on people just to sell it, and what do you do with your unsold inventory?

Anna Schneider: Yeah. There are several algorithms that help with that, unsurprisingly. So, yeah, we have clearance algorithms that figure out, hey, this thing isn’t performing very well, and then sometimes we will get rid of it through donating it, so that’s one common way that low performing stuff will leave our inventory. Although when we’re doing that, we do want to make sure that we’re not getting rid of stuff that’s like bad for a lot of people, but like really good for someone. We do want to keep that niche stuff around.

Anna Schneider: So with the client’s expectation, like I was talking about, like that’s like something that we’re always trying to figure out how to get better at.

Cathy Polinsky: But I think one of the things that I really appreciate about Stitch Fix is that we separate out the merchandising team who buys the product from the stylist team that sends the product to the right people. So we have intentionally created this firewall between the two, so the stylists are never incented to send bad product out to their clients.

Cathy Polinsky: They don’t know, “Hey, we’ve got a lot of those lime-green shoes out there that aren’t selling, can you just send it out to people.” Instead, we really try to make sure that the stylists are incented to really keep their clients happy, and if we buy bad product, we eat the cost ourselves, and learn from it for the next time, to make sure that we don’t make the same mistake over and over again.

Cathy Polinsky: It is this interesting system where sometimes actually getting rid of bad product helps everybody else up, just making sure that that bad product is not inadvertently getting into Fixes. And so we’ve seen these times where we have changed the dynamics in the model, of how often we’ve gotten rid of bad product, and we’ve now learned that it’s not a good idea to hold onto it, but it’s much better for us to get fresh stuff in. Was a good question, though.

Lila Bowker: Nice. All right. I’m getting my cardio in, you guys, hang on. There you go.

Audience Member: Hi, I’ve a question with respect to recommendations. How do you deal with surprise, because you can learn someone’s style, but often when someone really, really likes something, it might be because it’s a little bit outside their comfort zone, and it’s one item. Do you like work that in by humans or algorithms?

Erin Boyle: Yeah. That’s a great question. And I should say that the exact answer to that might change, depending on what context you’re talking about. So, probably you’re asking about in someone’s Fix, and in that case a lot of that would be done by the human stylist. We do have algorithms that try to think about assortment, but we mostly rely on stylists, or … Yeah? Yeah, stylists would definitely be injecting a lot of that.

Erin Boyle: The other thing I’ll say is another place where you might use recommendations, I mean we have recommendations everywhere, but another place you might use them is like in the stylish level itself. Of course there are recommendations that are fed back to the client, and certainly there is some like assortment logic and experiments and stuff that have gone into like injecting surprise into that experience too.

Cathy Polinsky: But we try to get employees to style, as well as the stylist, and so I try to style a couple Fixes a month, and occasionally I’ll get someone that says, “Stop sending me skinny jeans,” and the recommendations only knows that this client buys skinny jeans, and so the stylist has to think of like, “Well, maybe I’ll send her a boyfriend jean, or a boot cut jean.”

Cathy Polinsky: Our algorithms have no idea what they’re going to want next, based on their previous purchases, but we’ll have to use this … we like to call it the blend of humans and machines. The art and science of what we do is sometimes there is this kind of stylistic creativity that goes into generating a Fix. It’s kind of fun.

Erin Boyle: Well said.

Bingrui Tang: I was also going to add on that, because sometimes there will be clients say, “Oh, I really don’t wear dresses,” and then all of a sudden they’ll say, “Oh, I’m going to a wedding, then I need a dress.” So it’s very important for us, when we design the system, we really keep in mind this kind of flexibility, and people’s preference will change, either occasionally or over time, and we really want to recognize that. I think that’s a really good question, and that’s definitely the fun part of the work, is trying to juggle them both. Yeah.

Lila Bowker: All right, let’s start here.

Audience Member: The question is about the buying process in the old traditional way. One of the reason they’re using that method is because probably the cost optimization, the more you buy, the cheaper it is. But buying optimized by diversity using algorithm, how you deal with the cost optimization to the supplier?

Stitch Fix girl geeks: Cathy Polinsky, Erin Boyle, Bingrui Tang, Anna Schneider and Emma Colner answering audience questions at Stitch Fix Girl Geek Dinner.

Anna Schneider: Yeah, so in the constraints that the buyers will put into the problem, one of them is exactly around that. We know how much we’re going to buy it at wholesale, and we know what our margins will be because of that, and often the algorithm will say like, “Hey, this one has really good margin, buy even deeper into it.” So if that’s something that we want to be … Yeah, yeah, it’s something that’s just rolled into all of our other data.

Anna Schneider: That’s something that we … Margin isn’t the only thing we care about by any means, there’s all these other metrics about making the experience really right for the clients, and so that’s what we are … currently it’s formulated, where we’re trying to give the best experience to the clients as possible, constrained by having a profitable business. Yeah. So the client is really first.

Audience Member: Sure. One of the things I’ve always struggled with with these try before you buy services, is that the things I like aesthetically don’t always match the things that look good on me. I’m curious what you guys think about that, and how you are imagining how the Stitch Fix product addresses that challenge?

Erin Boyle: Yeah. I mean that’s a tough question. I think there is kind of a fine line between aesthetic and fit. I mean even in this latent style data, which we think of as being largely a style thing, like people are rating whether they like an item and it’s a very visual thing, they’re not necessarily seeing the size of that item that they would actually buy, or the can’t tell the inseam or whatever.

Erin Boyle: And yet we do see fit preferences coming out of that data, like we can figure out some fit preferences too. Yeah, I mean I think we certainly try to collect information on both style and fit in the style profile, and through other means, and then certainly the client has a conversation ongoing with the stylist, where they give the stylist feedback on the details of what does and doesn’t work for them.

Erin Boyle: And then those kind of like subtler pieces of feedback that really take a human to interpret can be acted on by that stylist.

Cathy Polinsky: Anecdotally, I see this. I have some clients that have an Instagram feed, and I’m like, “Oh, they liked this item, we have it in inventory, I’m going to send it to them, even though the match score is really low for the product.” And I send it to them and they hate it, but I’m like, “You said you wanted it.” But there is this notion of what they like stylistically, versus what is good on them, and so I’m really impressed with how these match scores that we have factor that into the recommendations.

Cathy Polinsky: And it’s not like, “I don’t want that navy blazer, I want a navy blazer that looks good on me.” And so how can we take the style things that people are sending us, and pair that with other factors, like fit, to find the exact right thing for you. It’s a hard problem, and that’s why it’s so much of a pain for people to try to shop online and scroll through lists and lists of jeans, to figure out what’s going to fit them.

Cathy Polinsky: So I think that this is a different model that we can use, that can factor in a lot of those different attributes.

Audience Member: I found it really refreshing to see multiple senior female engineers on this panel, and I was wondering what your approach was to sourcing and retaining female engineers. Sort of like what percentages of your teams are female, with regard to engineering specifically? And did that change as Stitch Fix got larger?

Cathy Polinsky: We are really fortunate for the gender representation that we have at Stitch Fix. It helps that we have a female CEO and founder, Katrina Lake, who has started this company. Half of our leadership team is women, more than half of our board is women, and a huge representation of our stylists are women, so if you look at our employee count, which is predominantly stylists, it’s over 80% women who work at Stitch Fix.

Cathy Polinsky: And then our technology organization is really strongly represented. We’re in the high 30s for representation of women in our tech organization. It’s still not 50/50, and still opportunity for us to grow, but compared to every other tech company that I’ve worked at, we are really leading the pack at having a very strong gender diversity in our teams.

Cathy Polinsky: We hadn’t done it through top down quotas or mandates, but really it was generated by teams and managers who cared about this. Of understanding that diverse teams build better products, that we had primarily women as our clients, and to really understand them and understand the products that we’re building, having those diverse teams helps us to make sure that the things that we’re building are really strong and supporting that client base.

Cathy Polinsky: What was great for me to see, as we were scaling out our organization, it’s hard when you’re hiring fast, to make sure that you’re thinking about diversity and all of the different criteria, but we only got better as we scaled. It really came down to the managers who didn’t have that diversity on their teams, were asking the other managers who were doing well, like, “How did you do that?” And, “How can I do that?”

Cathy Polinsky: It came through inclusive language in our job postings, or thinking about sourcing in a different way. We talked about experiences that we had to make sure that we had diverse panels, and then we also look for really product centric engineers at Stitch Fix, and I think that that helps us generate a more diverse pipeline of what an engineer looks like throughout our organization.

Cathy Polinsky: We’re not done. We still really want to hire more architect level senior individual contributors here at Stitch Fix, that’s an area that we don’t have as much diversity. And then we’re also looking to increase our racial diversity, and think that we are really leading the way on gender diversity, but have some more way to go in other aspects of diversity, like racial diversity.

Cathy Polinsky: But I love that we’re a group that cares about this, and we talk about it, and we celebrate where we are doing well, and also understanding that we’re not done.

Erin Dees: May I jump in for a second?

Cathy Polinsky: Yeah.

Erin Dees: I joined pretty recently, and it was one of the things that drew me to Stitch Fix, was seeing that there were so many women in engineering specifically, and then as you look up, senior leadership, in terms of like management, there’s a lot of women in senior management as well. That was something that really shines through, so one reason I think that Stitch Fix has so many women in engineering, is because we’re drawn here. We see like, this is a good place for me. None of us wants to be the only woman on the team, so it’s been awesome.

Cathy Polinsky: Great. Thank you. Glad to have you.

Lila Bowker: Another question over here.

Audience Member: Hi. I have a question on I guess the outlook on how accurate you think your algorithms are becoming over time? Are they becoming more predictive? Do you think that we’ll get to a point where the algorithm can handle both the strategy and the tactics? And if we are at that point, do you think that Stitch Fix would ever move to a model where maybe there is less reliance on human stylists? If yes, why? If not, why?

Erin Boyle: I’ll let Anna speak to the strategy tactics, because that’s definitely your framing. I will say they’re definitely improving all the time. Obviously we can’t give you any quantification of that, but I’ve actually been here almost four years, and it’s shocking how much better we are. You can see it in so many ways. So, yes, they’re improving all the time. I still expect them to improve more, but I don’t expect it to really change anything about the role that people are playing.

Erin Boyle: I think that the role our stylists play is always going to be critical. It’s a critical part of our business model, they play a critical role, and similarly with our merchandising partners, and so many other people, so yeah, I’ll let Anna speak to the strategy and tactics. But that would be my reaction to that.

Anna Schneider: Yeah, one analogy that we’ve started using for the strategy versus tactics, is are we building a self-driving car, or are we building something like Google Maps? I’m mean for a self-driving car that’s just like all about the tactics. It’s like … can be completely automated. There’s no human in the loop there, whereas something like Google Maps, it doesn’t even make sense to think about what that would mean if it was fully automated, because who’s telling it where to go? You need someone giving the instruction.

Anna Schneider: And so there’s always going to be that company leadership and leadership at levels all throughout the company saying, “Where are we going?” And that’s always going to be a human decision, and so we think of it almost more like a scenario exploration engine, where you can say, “Hey, what if we went in this direction? What if we went in this direction?” And then the humans have the opportunity to choose what of all possible futures we want to be going after, and that’s always going to be a human touch.

Cathy Polinsky: So any chess players in the room? Yeah. Was it Kasparov who was the chess player who lost against Deep Blue? So we look at the sense of … At that time it was like this is the end of chess, and the age of the machine, and machines are going to always be better than humans, and what was it? So that was when the first chess game played against a human and won.

Cathy Polinsky: But what’s interesting is after that point, there was a new emerging game that was this freestyle chess. Have you guys heard of freestyle chess? So the freestyle chess, is this idea that it doesn’t matter whether you’re human, or you’re a computer, or a blend of the two, but anybody can play against anyone.

Cathy Polinsky: So they have this competition every year and there’s a freestyle likeness, and the first year that they did this a novice group of chess players won using computers, and they did it in a very novel way, of using a suite of machines to solve the problem. It was this really interesting thing, it was the blend of humans and machines. Humans that had an interesting approach for how to solve the problem, but they were backed by computers.

Cathy Polinsky: And so we use this likeness of what Stitch Fix does. It’s not computers alone, it’s not stylists alone, but it’s this blend of humans and machines that work together in a novel way, to solve a problem in a unique situation. And so we feel really strongly about this model and how it’s helped us, and sometimes we’ll lean a little bit more on the machine side, sometimes we’ll lean a little bit more on the human side, but regardless of where that line is, we feel like the power of the two together is really a magical thing.

Lila Bowker: Awesome. We do want to leave enough time for folks to chat afterwards and brag about themselves and hear what makes everyone else awesome, so maybe one more question, is that all right with you guys? All right, here you go.

Audience Member: Hi, sorry, one of the last questions. A lot of fashion is traditionally geared for women, so I was wondering if you have seen patterns that are maybe encouraging males to be a little more adventurous in their stylistic choices? Just out of curiosity, you know, I think … I mean, I don’t know, but personally I have brothers, that I would like them to be more adventurous, and it’s hard to get them into the space.

Audience Member: I don’t know if you have encountered patterns or had strategies, or even have some vision for even working with fashion industry to sort of expand, that fashion’s not just for women, but also for people who traditionally are not associated with fashion?

Cathy Polinsky: We started out as a women’s only business, and for the first five and a half years we only had women clients, and then about two, two and a half years ago, we launched our men’s business. It’s been really great to see that business growing and thriving. I’d say, I don’t know if it’s specific to gender or not, but we see some clients that start out and they have a specific sense of what they’re looking for, and as they use a stylist, over time, they get to be more adventuresome. And they might try new things and get some of these serendipitous things in their Fixes that they never would have picked off of a rack before, and try it on.

Cathy Polinsky: You know, we see this with our women clients, but I think we see it a little bit more so with our male clients. And I think that that is just kind of a fun thing about our service, is that something that you might never try on, something that you may see in a Fix, we don’t even show you what’s coming, because we don’t want it to taint your view of the Fix before it arrives at your doorstep. And sometimes there’s something that you never would have like wanted in your Fix, that you try on, and I’ve had this happen to me as well, that I’m like, “Oh, this looks amazing.”

Cathy Polinsky: And so I think that that aspect of discovery is a really amazing part of our service, that it works for those folks that may be stuck in their style, whether you’re guys, stuck in a rut, or even a gal, yourself. And so it’s kind of a fun part of our surprise and delayed-esque model. I hope I answered that.

Lila Bowker: Bing had a client recently that was awesome. Bing, you should tell that story.

Bingrui Tang: Oh, yeah.

Lila Bowker: Remember your client?

Bingrui Tang: Yeah. So I had a client who is probably in his 40s and 50s, and I got his first Fix, and he said, “Oh, yeah, so my style is a little bit conservative, really boring, but I want to make my wife happy, so I really want to stretch it out a little bit.” This is his first Fix, and he such high expectation, so I’m really nervous, and I share it with the team, I say, “Yeah, what do you guys recommend?”

Bingrui Tang: And somebody actually recommended a conversational piece, which is essentially pink flamingo prints. Yeah, and zebra prints, and things like that. So I actually sent a bunch of them to him for the first Fix. He returned all of them. I think I definitely went too far, but he said, “Thank you for all the pieces you sent, I think it’s a little too stretched for me, but I really get idea, and I really want to try it again.”

Bingrui Tang: And he actually immediately scheduled another Fix, and so assigned me as his stylist. So for the second Fix, because now I know where he would be more comfortable with, I actually pulled back a little it, and I think he kept all of the five pieces. Yeah, so I think, back to your point, I really think, yes, I’ve sent many, many pink shirts to male clients, and a lot of them end up keeping them, so I think, yes, the discovery part is really the fun part.

Lila Bowker: Awesome. Well I think we want to open it up so everybody has the time to chat and brag about themselves, and hear what makes everyone else awesome. The quick plug of, of course, we are hiring. If you work at Stitch Fix, can you raise your hand? Everybody who works at Stitch Fix, stand up and raise your hand. Yeah, so if you want to chat more about the roles we have open, aim for one of those human beings that just raised their hands.

Lila Bowker: But I’m excited to get to know more of you better. Enjoy. Yeah, and thanks for coming.

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Our mission-aligned Girl Geek X partners are hiring!

• See open jobs at Stitch Fix and check out open jobs at our trusted partner companies.
• Does your company want to sponsor a Girl Geek Dinner in 2021? Talk to us!

Speakers:
Heidi Williams / CTO & Co-founder / tEQuitable
Angie Chang / CEO & Founder / Girl Geek X

Transcript:

Angie Chang: Can you hear us?

Heidi Williams: I can, yep.

Angie Chang: Wonderful. Well, welcome back to Girl Geek X Elevate. I’m Angie Chang, founder of Girl Geek X, and yes, this is being recorded and the videos will be available later online in about a week. So give us some time. Please tweet and share. The hashtag is #ggxelevate. We’ve been seeing a lot of great comments and pictures of viewing parties, so please tweet them at us and we’ll retweet and share. If you have a question for Heidi, our next speaker, please be sure to put it in the Q&A below and she will answer them after the session.

Angie Chang: So now we are excited to have Heidi Williams, the CTO and co-founder of tEQuitable share with us about intersectionality.

Heidi Williams: Thanks, Angie. I’m going to get my screen sharing here going. I’m in full screen mode. Yeah, super excited to be here and talking with everyone today. So my talk is about how to go beyond diversity 101 and really look at intersectionality and how to evoke systemic culture change. And I love going after Lili. I actually have a ton of quotes from the Tech Leavers study in my talk. So if you’ve been hanging in there through the whole thing, you’ll hear a little bit more.

Heidi Williams: So let me talk for a second about why I’m giving this talk. So I am CTO and co-founder of a company called tEQuitable. So we are building a confidential platform to address bias, discrimination, and harassment in the workplace. And really our mission is how to create work culture that works for everyone. So this is everything that we do.

Heidi Williams: And so in the work that we’ve done and with the customers that we have, we’ve learned a lot about what are the approaches that are actually going to work and how can companies really tackle this problem of culture change. We really believe that the same way that 10 or 15 years ago there was not, security wasn’t a big thing and all of a sudden it became a business imperative and people started hiring CSOS and having a board accountability for whether companies were secure, we believe that good work culture is going to be the next business imperative. It’s the biggest threat to our industry if we don’t fix this. And we really, really hope that companies will start taking a strategic approach to fixing their culture.

Heidi Williams: So let’s step back a second and look at what do I mean by diversity 101? So everybody has sort of seen the formula, the stats that said if you have employee diversity, you’ll see increased financial results. And there’s a ton of statistics around this. So if you have gender diverse executive teams, they are 21% more likely to outperform their peers. And if your executive team is ethnically and culturally diverse, it goes up to 33%. And if you have it on your board, you’re 43% more likely to outperform your peers. So the industry got really excited about this idea of diversity and they said, great, let’s go hire us some diversity so we can have better business outcomes.

Heidi Williams: But the reality is that it hasn’t been working very well. And in fact our numbers haven’t changed much. Part of this is related to what Lili was talking about with the Tech Leavers study. We are seeing that white women are leaving tech in mid career at twice the rate of white men, and it’s even worse for people of color. For black and Latinx people, they’re leaving tech at three and a half times the rate of white men.

Heidi Williams: So what is it that we’re doing wrong? The industry took a step back and they, I’m sorry, from that same Tech Leaver study, they saw that 78% of employees were reporting experiencing some form of unfair behavior or treatment and nearly 40% of those employees said that that played a major role in their decision to leave their company. So now we have some data that it’s the fact that people are not being treated well, they’re not being treated fairly. For the most part I don’t think that employees wake up in the morning and see say gee, I can’t wait to be a jerk today. Boy, this is going to be fun. Really, they have behaviors that are impacting others. And either they don’t know that they have this behavior that’s impacting others, or maybe they’re working in a system that is encouraging these bad behaviors that are impacting others.

Heidi Williams: So something was missing here and the industry said great, well we’ve got diversity, but it’s not sticking. So what we need to focus on is inclusion and belonging. And it’s a good thing. It’s something that we definitely need to do, but there’s something in the culture that is causing these problems. There’s something in the system that is causing these problems. And that’s why we’re focusing on those.

Heidi Williams: But at tEQuitable, we really believe that that order of operations was wrong, that people were starting with diversity, they were getting butts in seats, but they weren’t focusing on the culture. And really you have to start with the culture first. Part of the reason the order of operations was wrong is that companies were treating symptoms. They were counting heads. They were saying well, how many women do we have? How many people of color do we have? How many people with disabilities do we have? Instead of taking an engineering mindset and trying to fix the root cause. So my co-founder and I both have been in the tech industry for 25 years and we really believe that we can use technology to solve seemingly intractable problems. And we really like taking an engineering mindset to do this. I’m encouraging all of you to feel inspired by this talk to do the same thing.

Heidi Williams: So let’s talk a little bit about why this was the wrong approach. So for companies treating symptoms, how many of you have heard well, we’re going to start with gender first and then we’ll solve the other problems later? Gender is just easier. But the problem is as engineers, we all know you don’t start with the easy problem. You’re supposed to start with the hardest problem and solve that first because that’s where you’ve got the most unknowns. So that was sort of the number one problem is that they started with the easiest problem.

Heidi Williams: The second thing is that the lack of women in tech is really only one symptom. They weren’t looking at it with this intersectional lens. And we know that if you’re not looking at all of the symptoms, all of the bugs that are happening, you’re not going to find a complete solution to the problem. So that was problem number two.

Heidi Williams: And then problem number really three is that they weren’t asking why women weren’t being successful, why people of color weren’t being successful and thriving. And the first thing that we know about engineering is that you have to ask the five whys. You have to do root cause analysis to figure out what is it that’s causing this bug. Don’t just patch it on the surface. You have to patch it down in the underpinnings and down in the system. So that’s why we really want to help people take a systemic approach to fixing the underpinnings, the culture in which all of the rest of their company operates in order to make real change here. And the study showed that two thirds of tech leavers said that they would have stayed if their employer had fixed its culture.

Heidi Williams: So let’s talk about the tEQuitable formula, which is starting with the supportive culture. So for number one, the supportive culture, let’s start by defining what culture is. Culture is the self sustaining pattern of behavior that determines how things are done. So some people might think it’s your mission or your vision, or it might even be your code of conduct. It might be your values, which you have in lovely posters all over your office. But it turns out that it’s behavior, it’s how you interact with people and how you get your work done that actually determines what your culture is. And so often, even if companies have culture values defined, what’s really happening is that people are, you’re giving the message do as I do and not as I say. So if you aren’t living your values, if your behavior doesn’t exemplify your values, then your values don’t mean much.

Heidi Williams: The second thing is that I want to talk about supportive culture. So supportive culture provides the social and psychological conditions that optimize employee health, safety, and wellbeing. So what do I mean by that? So basically we refer to this as something called psychological safety and it’s something you can see, it’s a Google study that showed data that psychological safety more than anything else is critical to making a team work.

Heidi Williams: And so what is psychological safety? It’s the shared belief held by members of the team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking. It also means that as an individual you’re confident that your team won’t embarrass you or reject you or punish you for speaking up. There’s interpersonal trust between team members and mutual respect where people are comfortable being themselves.

Heidi Williams: So let’s talk about that for a second. At your company, do you encourage people to have a growth mindset that they might learn that they can take a risk and it’s okay to fail as long as they learn from it? Is there a culture of forgiveness? Do employees feel heard, they feel like they can bring their whole selves to work or do they have to hold something back? How do you develop trust in each other or empathy or understanding? How do you educate employees about cultural norms or learn about things that they haven’t been exposed to before? Do you have a culture of speaking up? If you see something, say something? Do people feel safe that they can speak up without a risk of retaliation? Do you have a culture of ally ship or advocacy or accomplices where people have each other’s backs? Do you encourage employees to bring their whole selves to work? How do you train managers? How do they do career development? How did they do promotions? How do you educate your employees about how to treat each other well? Really the goal here is that you want to build a community of trust and understanding, of empathy, of communication, vulnerability, and a growth mindset. And if you have psychological safety, then you can really tackle any kind of problem.

Heidi Williams: So let’s talk a little bit about debugging destructive behaviors. Psychological safety may sound like it’s all about the emotions or about the mental aspect of the game. But really it’s the way that you encourage and promote behaviors that reinforce trust and respect and mutual empathy and authenticity and discourage behaviors that tear those down. So the key here is don’t measure how people feel, measure how people behave and the impact it has on others.

Heidi Williams: So to talk for a second about, this is exactly where tEQuitable plays. This is our approach, is that we want to help companies measure their culture and it’s a very complex system. And so the way that we do that is that employees have a way to get advice when something happens so that they can talk one on one with people and have those interpersonal conversations in order to undo behavior on the one on one level. But at the same time, we can gather data company wide and help the company see trends in their culture and in their system and take actions so that they can prevent those things from happening again. So it’s really a virtuous cycle where both employees from the ground up are improving the culture and the leadership and the HR teams are improving culture from the top down.

Heidi Williams: So let me give an example of one of the things that we’ve seen and how we identified behaviors and then talked about the possible systems that might’ve been causing those behaviors. And of course, then what actions you can take to improve those systems.

Heidi Williams: So the example we saw at one company was that interactions between teams were being reported as aggressive and bullying. So you could imagine that those people are just mean, but that’s probably not really the case. There’s some reason why they’re being aggressive and bullying. There’s a bunch of different systemic issues that could be the root cause here. Maybe the two different teams don’t have aligned goals. They have goals that they are totally different from each other. They’re not reliant on each other, and they’re both measured on the success of achieving their own goals. And maybe the success metrics don’t include that you have to collaborate and help others achieve their goals. So you’re only measured on whether your team achieves your own goal. Or maybe the peer feedback system is not part of performance reviews. So there’s actually no way to even report this behavior. So maybe this team that’s being aggressive and bullying has no idea the impact of their behavior on others. So only if you look at the data and then ask the five whys and debug it like an engineer will you get at the possible root causes, the systemic issues that could be causing that behavior.

Heidi Williams: So to talk through that, if you’re going to make systemic change about your supportive culture and create a supportive culture, start by examining behaviors to understand your current culture. Then ask the five whys to find the root cause behind the behavior. And then create systems that encourage psychological safety so that you can promote all of these good things around trust and understanding and empathy and communication and don’t tolerate destructive behaviors.

Heidi Williams: Let’s go on to the next step, which is to encourage create an inclusive workplace. So now you’ve got the supportive culture where people can speak up if you see something, say something, they’re in an environment where they feel safe and we actually are working on belonging first. The second thing is this inclusive workspace. We define it as all employees are valued, respected, accepted, and encouraged to participate across the organization at every level. And active work has done to eliminate all forms of bias, discrimination, and inequity.

Heidi Williams: So let me go back to each of the purple words here, which is that all employees. So the idea is that you want a diverse employee population, that they are valued, and that your definition of value is not narrow. It actually is a diverse and broad definition of values, so that all of the people that are accepted for their differences can express their value in different ways. There’s mutual respect in the organization, that people are respected for their differences and appreciated for their differences, and that they’re encouraged to participate and given opportunities across the organization for different projects and also opportunities for advancement at every level.

Heidi Williams: And then the last piece of this is active work, which is that it requires constant re-analysis. We’ve all seen the things about pay equity that you can’t just fix it once. You have to constantly be looking at it. And it’s not the only thing. You always have to be looking for the next behaviors that need to be debugged and figure out what’s causing them.

Heidi Williams: So let me take a second and talk about intersectionality. And Lili brought this up as well, which is awesome. So intersectionality, the definition is that it’s the complex cumulative way in which the effects of multiple forms of discrimination combine, overlap, and intersect, especially in the experiences of marginalized individuals or groups. Now the reason that this is important, and actually let me just give an example. So if you’re a woman, you might be impacted by the stereotypes and biases of being a woman. But if you’re a woman of color, not only do you have the biases and stereotypes around women, but you also have biases and stereotypes around people of color. And so now all of a sudden you have a double or a triple whammy effect because you’re coming from multiple groups that are marginalized.

Heidi Williams: So the reason that this is important is that when you are tackling exclusion, you really need to need to look at things, you need to dig multiple levels of data deep. So as an example, if you do a survey and you look at what women are saying or what men are saying and you sort of make a broad statement about the women, the reality is because the majority sentiment might be one thing, but the reality is because we have more white women in tech than women of color in tech, the majority voice of women is going to be the voice of white women, primarily. So you have to keep looking at the smaller sets of data to go look at the individual experiences of people who have multiple versions of stereotypes and biases that might be working against them.

Heidi Williams: So let me give an example, another example. So at a company we saw, the percentage of women being promoted was lower than men. We could have stopped there, but instead we dug a little bit deeper and saw that the percentage of non white women being promoted was lower than white women. So now you’ve got two problems and if you stopped at just one, you would have an incomplete solution.

Heidi Williams: So the possible systemic issues that perhaps impacting all women regardless of race and ethnicity is that were no good career development practices and those were impacting women more than they were impacting men. The second one is that maybe the rubric around what leadership looks like is racially biased in some way. If we hadn’t dug into the data to look at all of the “edge” cases or the smaller datasets, we might not have seen that there was an issue around how the rubric for advancement was defined.

Heidi Williams: So I want to also take a moment to just talk about there’s two different kinds of behaviors. The one is the system induced behaviors, which I was talking about, which is that maybe your rubric has a narrow definition and when you measure people against the rubric, people who are different get left behind. The other kind of behaviors we see is not necessarily about the system, but it is that you might have behaviors that stem from a lack of education. I just want to remind that if you go back to step number one, the supportive culture, if you’ve created a space that’s psychologically safe where people feel like they can speak up, they actually will feel like they can tackle these hard conversations that make people uncomfortable. And so now when someone says something that’s offensive or has an impact on you in some way, that’s a stereotype or a bias of some kind, if you’re in a psychologically safe environment, you hopefully feel comfortable speaking up and telling that person what the impact of their words were on them. But I think also that growth mindset means that everyone, regardless if someone has to tell you what you did wrong, everyone with the growth mindset should look for opportunities to learn and educate themselves about how they can be a better ally or accomplice or a coworker in all those ways.

Heidi Williams: So if you want to create systemic change and create an inclusive workplace, measure exclusion and exclusive behaviors. And so one of the things I forgot to mention earlier is that a lot of the ways people measure inclusive workplace today is about engagement. Now engagement will tell you that people feel like they’re engaged four out of five or 80%, but the problem is it’s not telling you about the last 20% and what the problem is. Why weren’t they a five out of five? So if you actually focus on measuring exclusion and exclusive behaviors, that’s where you will be able to ask the questions and do the five whys to dig into what’s going on. So slice that data, look at intersectionality, look at all the edge cases, ask those five whys, and really focusing on what’s the exclusive stuff, what’s missing, who’s not represented, what’s not happening that should be happening. So ask those five whys, find the root causes, and then you can create or repair systems that promote equity and fairness.

Heidi Williams: And the last thing is just educate yourselves. Keep a growth mindset. So again, as a white woman, there’s lots that I can learn about being a woman of color or different sexual identity or ageism or having a disability. There’s always things that even from your lived experience, you can’t forget that other people have different lived experiences and there’s lots of opportunities to educate yourself and make sure that you’re not contributing to the problem.

Heidi Williams: So hopefully when you put all of this work in place, you’ve created a supportive culture, you’ve created an inclusive workplace, the last step should come really easily. Who wouldn’t want to work at a company like that? You’ve created a place where people can, if they see something, say something, you’ve created an equitable opportunities for everyone to advance and pretty soon you should see diversity across your organization.

Heidi Williams: So the main thing I want to leave you with is that I would really like companies to not take a diversity strategy, but take a culture strategy and really make it a critical aspect of what they’re doing and how they’re going to succeed. And if you take an engineering mindset, just go through the math a little bit, if behavior is culture then behavior change means culture change. In order to affect behavior change, you can look at the buggy systems that induce those bad behaviors. You can look at the supportive culture that perpetuates those bad behaviors, but if you use an engineering mindset and debug your culture, like an engineer with an intersectional lens, you can really create systemic change in your organization and create a culture where everyone can bring their whole and best selves to work. Thank you.

Angie Chang: Thank you, Heidi. That was a very inspiring talk. I see lots of chatter and questions, but unfortunately we’ve run out of time. So thank you so much. If you can share your slides, I’ve seen a lot of questions about sharing your slides. Are you hiring? Are you going to make these findings public? But we have to get on to our next speaker, so thank you so much and we will be back shortly with our next session.

Heidi Williams: Thank you.

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Atlassian girl geeks: Dominique Ward, Lori Kaplan, Ashley Faus, Ritika Nanda and Aubrey Blanche answer questions about interviewing and ageism from the audience at Atlassian Girl Geek Dinner in San Francisco, California.

Speakers:
Aubrey Blanche / Global Head of Diversity & Belonging / Atlassian
Ritika Nanda / Mobile Developer / Atlassian
Ashley Faus / Senior Manager, Integrated Media / Atlassian
Lori Kaplan / Head of Design, Cloud Migrations / Atlassian
Dominique Ward / Design Operations Lead / Atlassian

Transcript of Atlassian Girl Geek Dinner – Lightning Talks & Panel:

Global Head of Diversity & Belonging Aubrey Blanche gives a talk on “Thank u, next: How “diversity” gets in the way of gender equity” at Atlassian Girl Geek Dinner.

Aubrey Blanche: Welcome everyone to our still semi new space We moved in here in November and let me tell you, these view is better than a warehouse in SOMA. I walk in everyday and I’m like, “Don’t get entitled. Don’t get entitled.” It’s so gorgeous. Our team does such a beautiful job with the offices.

Aubrey Blanche: I am Aubrey, I am Atlassian’s Global Head of Diversity and Belonging. If you’re like my dad and you’re like, “What the hell does that mean?” Basically I think of it as my job to help Atlassian hire the right people and then make sure that they’re treated fairly and that they can thrive while they’re here. That’s what I am here to talk to you about today, is the way that we are thinking about designing a structurally equitable company. Then you will have the absolute pleasure of listening to some amazing panelists who are all at Atlassian building amazing things. You’ll have me for about 20 minutes and then we will hand it over to them.

Aubrey Blanche: First of all as you can tell, I am an Ariana Grande fan. What I am not a fan of is diversity. Everyone’s like, “You can’t say that in 2019.” The answer is actually I can. Fuck diversity, and the reason I say that is because the word is a problem because it, one, doesn’t represent our goals and actually getting in the way of us individually and companies making progress. I’m going to talk about why that is. Before we get into what Atlassian is doing to crush the kyriarchy with capitalism, what I want to talk about is where we are today.

Aubrey Blanche: Every year Atlassian does a globally representative survey called the state of diversity report. We started this a couple of years ago because I couldn’t find good benchmarking data about attitudes and behaviors towards what was then called diversity and inclusion in the tech industry. So what did we do? We collected it. We’re big on open, so we shared it. This is what the 2018 data showed us.

Aubrey Blanche: Oh I’m supposed to tell you about Atlassian first. I’m bad at the sales pitch. At Atlassian, if you’re not aware of what we do, if you’ve played with JIRA, we make that. We also make a wealth of other collaboration productivity software. Things like Trello, Confluence, Bitbucket. Our mission is to unleash the potential in every team. As you can imagine that makes it pretty easy to justify my job, because every team is made up of people from an incredibly broad set of experiences and backgrounds. We want to make sure that we’re building for all of them. Now what does the world look like?

Aubrey Blanche: The 2018 state of diversity report showed that good news, companies are saying that diversity is important. Here’s a fun fact. Retention belonging is not up. People are saying it’s important, but there’s not even movement in a positive direction and sometimes we even see backpedaling. That’s what we see at the corporate level. From 2017 to 2018 we saw a 10 percentage point drop in companies that have formal diversity and inclusion programs.

Aubrey Blanche: I’m here to tell you that saying that you care about something is not the same thing as caring about it. Saying it’s a priority and doing nothing is simply complicity and a mediocrity that the industry has enjoyed for the last couple of decades. What was especially disheartening to me about this was that, individual engagement with diversity and inclusion programs was down in some cases 50% year over year. We dug into the comments and we asked why. It turns out that one of the blockers was the fact that we are using the word diversity. Who here has ever been called a diverse candidate? You were lied to, diversity is a group construct. You cannot be diverse by yourself.

Aubrey Blanche: Most people think that this is my job. That is not my job, this is my job. I build balanced teams. I reject the word diversity because the state of diversity report showed that that word only means something for two groups, white women and black Americans. Literally in Australia, Australians were more likely to say that African Americans were diverse than indigenous Australians. It’s weird. Also, I’m here to tell you that black people aren’t diverse. They are minoritized. They’re under represented. They’re under resourced, but they’re not diverse.

Aubrey Blanche: What we did is we shifted to talking about building balanced teams. Why does this work? It works because, first of all, who is going to die on the hill of building an imbalanced team? Right, no one. The second reason is because it’s taking that word that means something we don’t mean, something too narrow and actually allows people from different types of groups in. What if you’re Latina like me? What if you’re queer like me? What if you have multi disabilities like me? What if you’re over 40 like me eventually? The point is that we were cutting people who were truly marginalized in ways that we were creating no space for. What about that straight, white man who grew up in a trailer park, who is facing many of the same social challenges that people from visible minoritized groups face? They see the programs as pretty hypocritical and frankly that’s fair. Even though they may have experienced structural privilege because of their visible characteristics, they still deserve support and a voice for those things that they need support for.

Aubrey Blanche: What we found is that it also — I think the critique that I get is, this is obscuring the racial challenges that we have in the industry. What I found is the opposite. At Atlassian as we’ve moved to this language that is less charged, we are actually now able as a culture, as a company to have more direct conversations about race and specifically about anti blackness in tech. I think that’s pretty cool. Now I think it’s a reasonable question to say, “Yeah, but how do you do that?” It’s not just a branding thing, this is just not brand repositioning. This is actually about structurally designing the organization to be fair and equitable for everyone.

Aubrey Blanche: I really believe that the entire field needs a makeover if we actually want to make true progress. In this spirit of Ariana, this is not a diss track to my ex, this is a thank you so much for that learning experience, but it is time for something new. We need to move away from diversity, which has a limited meaning and actually is not aligned with the goals that we’re trying to build. We need to build balance in our organizations.

Aubrey Blanche: We also need to move away from inclusion. Inclusion assumes that I can fit like an add-on into a power structure that was built for straight, white men. I have no interest in doing that. I’m not any of those things and I don’t know how to show up that way. I want to actually build belonging. I want to show up in a space where I was considered and where I was thought of. That doesn’t mean — it can be the littlest things that show me that. You’ll see here, research shows that women feel like they belong when there’s more plants in an office. You’ll see that our bathrooms, even the ones that because of building codes have to have gendered words on them, do not actually contain pictures of what a man or a woman looks like. That might not matter to a lot of you, but to folks who are gender nonconforming or non-binary or transgender that has huge meaning. That little subtle clue actually tells their brain that they belong in that space. That’s what we’re trying to build at Atlassian and I think we can all resonate with wanting to feel like we belong.

Aubrey Blanche: I’m really, really over the branded PR version of diversity where it’s like, look, we got intersectional feminism cupcakes. Did nothing else but put a photo on Instagram. It’s not good enough. I’m super pro intersectional feminism cupcakes, for the record, we had for International Women’s Day. We just did other things, too. I think it’s time that we design the organization in a way that is structurally equitable for everyone. We need to stop thinking that women equals diversity and embrace an intersectionality for strategy. How does this look like?

Aubrey Blanche: It’s pretty simple. If I think of someone who has inter-sectionally marginalized identities, let’s say myself. If I as a queer Latina woman can succeed in the organization, any changes that I’ve made are definitely going to benefit straight, white women, too. When we start diversity equals women, we only build programs, processes, and structures that help straight, white economically privileged women succeed. Who certainly face barriers compared to their male counterparts, but we end up further marginalizing anyone who doesn’t fit that bucket. I genuinely, genuinely believe that we can all win together, this does not have to be a competition.

Aubrey Blanche: The last is, we have to stop focusing at the company level. I will give you some data later at the company level because it’s more meaningful to you. At Atlassian we actually look at and report on balance at the team level. You can keep me honest, it’s on the website atlassian.com/belonging. You can even look at our subjective belonging data if you like. The reason for that is because that feeling of belonging and feeling like your value doesn’t happen at the company level. People don’t stay at a company because of the employee resource group. They stay because on their team their expertise is valued and used. We believe that if we give teams the power to create belonging and to see and value and respect people’s opinions, that’s why people will stay. They will stay, they will do great things. Our customers will be thrilled. The stock price will go up, it will be awesome for everyone.

Aubrey Blanche: Now how are we actually doing that? First we just measure everything. Monthly I look at hiring rates and at minimum we ensure that we are hiring at what we call marketing availability. Meaning there is no excuse to be hiring at lower than is available on the market. That’s of course a variety of metrics, gender, race for our US offices. We’re primarily an internationally based company. We look at age and we’re looking at getting a better ability to collect other data like disability and veteran status. We look at promotion velocity, so not just making sure that you’re coming in, but are you actually being promoted at equitable rates to your peers? We look at that by group, by remote versus in office, and also pay equity as it makes sense. Just pay people fairly. It’s a good idea. You don’t get sued and everyone feels valued. Like it’s a bad idea to pay people inequitably.

Aubrey Blanche: Inclusion. Every — annually we measure three things in our engagement survey. I feel like I belong on my team. I can be myself at work. My team has diverse perspectives that influence our decision making. We don’t want people to bring their whole selves to work, because that’s some weird boundary violations I don’t want to get into or you might have some shady opinions that are not welcome here. Right? It’s weird, like your whole self. I don’t bring my whole self, but my authentic self I do. That means I get to pick and choose what I bring in.

Aubrey Blanche: Then we wanted that diverse perspectives question, because it’s not just about feeling good and being in the room. It’s about your opinions actually making it, not just into the room, but being used to influence what’s happening in the company. That tells me whether people’s opinions are valued. The last is nutrition. It’s a lagging indicator, but if there’s a huge gap, if some marginalized or under represented group is running for the hills, like that’s a good sign that something is busted. We look at and we monitor all of that really closely and that’s how I think about where I prioritize for invest.

Aubrey Blanche: What does that look like programmatically? Everyone always asks me for like the silver bullet and I’m like there are none. There’s like 500,000 really tiny ones. You need to basically rip out everything about a company and put it back in. Our recruiting team, just in the last couple of years, has developed sourcing libraries. We literally have lists of hashtags, sororities and fraternities, minority serving institutions, professional organizations. We can find under represented people on the internet. What we’re trying to do is solve for the nonnegotiable trade-off between time and people who are numerically rarer. We also use structured behavioral interviewing, so we don’t ask you questions like how many golf balls fit in a 747 because it turns out that doesn’t tell you anything about a person. We ask the same questions in each interview because it is very helpful to compare skills when you ask the same questions of all candidates. It also gets rid of bias.

Aubrey Blanche: We removed culture fit from our hiring and we talk about values alignment. In that interview we look for specific behaviors and qualities that are both predictive of the culture that we want to build, but completely agnostic to your background. The fact is, you can learn how to make really effective trade-offs whether you’re running a global P&L function or you’re just getting your kids to soccer and dance and getting dinner on the table. I definitely don’t care how you got that skill.

Aubrey Blanche: We also look at the balance of our interview panels. We’re right now actually benchmarking all of that to ensure that by the end of the calendar year no candidate that comes to Atlassian will meet an all all-male panel. We’re looking at women and non-binary focus as our first measure of balance and then we’ll evolve our approach from there. We use the balanced slate approach, so this is a team focused way that we ensure that we have under represented candidates in consideration for our most senior roles. We have strategic partnerships with organizations like Girl Geeks, where we get to meet incredible people hopefully that want to be on the team now or someday. We have events and meetups like this and we also do what I am calling impact brand activations, which is a really good way to say Austin’s awesome ideas.

Aubrey Blanche: A story about this, I didn’t tell you I was going to do this. At Grace Hopper last year we had a swag budget just like everybody does. Austin was like, “I have this idea.” Austin wanted to do something that was a little bit more Atlassian, so we’re big on philanthropy. Our foundation is focused on access to education. Austin actually created a giant JIRA board that said, what is it, “Women Who Code, Code2040, Black Girls Code.” Instead of getting a t-shirt that definitely is not going to make you have a job here, how many have ever taken a job because you got a t-shirt? We actually gave everyone who came to our booth two stickers. One was for them to keep and one was for them to put under the name of the organization that they wanted us to donate their t-shirt budget to.

Aubrey Blanche: Why is that awesome? Well, first of all, it helps us identify who’s actually going to make a great Atlassian, right? If you’re pissed you didn’t get the t-shirt you’re not a values aligned person anyway. We’re so big on philanthropy that it attracted people who were attracted to that culture and we created more access for women in tech. What we did at the end was we counted the stickers and the proportion of stickers we donated the budget. That was just really fun. These are the things that any company can do. No one needs to print t-shirts, it’s not a green thing to do anyway. It’s also important to think about the experience that people have once they get here. A lot of people think that this is a recruiting problem, and I will tell you it’s a culture problem.

Aubrey Blanche: This is an example of how we build gender equitable processes. Last year at Atlassian we completely overhauled the performance assessment process. I know, everyone’s favorite time of year. What we did was we ripped it down to the studs and we said, “What could we do to make this as equitable as possible?” Traditional performance assessment, you’ve probably had one, the question’s basically, how well did you do at your job? Did you hit your goals? It turns out that that doesn’t take into account the way that you show up, the behaviors that you exhibit in the workplace. It certainly doesn’t take into account all of the office housework and emotional labor that we all do all day. What we did was we actually leveraged experimental testing and broke the assessment into three pieces. Now there are three equally weighted pieces of your performance assessment at Atlassian. There is values, which actually has a list of values aligned behaviors. You can get a pass/fail. Then there is role, what did you do? We created a new component called team. The question here because we are the team company was, what have you done to benefit your team?

Aubrey Blanche: This could be, did you volunteer for a balance and belonging initiative? Are you just that person who’s always going the extra mile to help onboard people? Are you the one who’s organizing lunch? All of these things count as team contributions and we wanted to create a way for people who do those things to get credit. I happen to know that underrepresented people do more of that work. The fact is, it should be rewarded in the same way that writing great code should.

Aubrey Blanche: The great thing is that, these things are equally weighted in your assessment. How well do you think the brilliant asshole’s gonna to do in that? Not very well and that was intentional, because we want to create well rounded people. We also found that by rating each component separately it reduced the halo effect. That meant like if you are great at technical role, you would get a bump on values or team. What we have our managers do is actually rate each component separately and then an algorithm gives them the recommended rating. We have a logic for that too. If you get low in any category you get low, for example.

Aubrey Blanche: We also use Text.io to get rid of the gendered language that could creep into the assessment. We know that agentic language is more male gendered and communal language is more female gendered. We remove gender language at all so we’re not building that into the structure of the system. Last, we named our performance levels using a growth mindset framework. What it says is that companies that have growth mindset cultures rely less on stereotypes in evaluating people. Which means that they are less likely to make biased and discriminatory decisions. At Atlassian you can’t get a legendary, you used to be able to. Now you can have an off year, a great year, or you can have an exceptional year. The reason is also because we don’t want to label you as a person, we’re talking about how you’ve done in the last year. Maybe you had an off year because you had a crazy family situation. We’ve all been there, but we believe that you can always improve and that we’re just giving you a check in on your performance.

Aubrey Blanche: All of these things together we combined with a live audit of the system. We actually audit our performance scores before they’re locked to make sure that there’s no gaps, but from a demographic point of view or differences. So that when Atlassians get their scores, they can be confident that we have checked to make sure that there’s not any preventable bias in that.

Aubrey Blanche: Over the last four years we’ve increased by nine percentage points our women in technical roles. Which is pretty phenomenal when you think about the fact that less than 13% of CS degrees in Australia are given to women. That’s our largest engineering center. We’ve also almost quadrupled in size during that time. That’s really exciting because like two weeks ago that number was 8.4 and I had to update my slide this morning. Yes. It’s the best mistake. That is looking at our technical roles, so we’re very R&D heavy company, so that’s probably about 75% of our org. Overall 30% of employees at Atlassian globally identify as women. Now what I bet you’re probably all thinking is, “Yeah, but are they all entry level employees?” That’s usually what happens, right? We don’t see representation at the senior levels in the same way we do at more junior levels. I think the thing that means the most to me is that our senior level representation is actually leading by a little bit. I think that that’s been one of the keys towards growing representational over all is that we’ve hired fantastic underrepresented leaders. Which means that people feel more comfortable coming in because they can see what their career looks like. If you can’t tell I’m generally a perfectionist and never satisfied with anything.

Aubrey Blanche: There’s a lot more work to do. We don’t want to pretend like we’re perfect, but we do make an active effort here and really want to be seen as someone who’s putting a lot of effort and time and thought into it. We know this is an unsolved problem, we won’t know all the answers, but we will share. We hope also that you will take some of this, make it better, and then come back and tell us how to improve. What I’m thinking about right now is building more communities. We don’t have formal ERGs at Atlassian. We actually allow communities to form and then we support them. We are doing a little bit more strategic investment especially looking at our black Atlassians this year, who last year our data showed that they’re having a very different experience. Even than my other underrepresented racial groups in the US so that for us is really important to say, “Nope, that’s not okay. If you’re reporting a problem we’re going to solve it for you.”

Aubrey Blanche: We’re also looking at meetings. We believe that if you can just improve the quality of how people feel valued and brought into meetings that we will meaningfully change their work experience. We’re studying what inclusive practices are happening and figuring out ways to nudge people into more inclusive behaviors. The last is, we’re actually talking about open dialogue. One of the models we use at Atlassian is what I call open source education. We have an internal blog. We encourage everybody to use the blogging confluence, but side by side where individuals write about their own histories, their own experiences, and how that impacts them at work with a specific focus on helping their teammates understand how to better support people like them.

Aubrey Blanche: We had one of our principle developers in Sydney write a blog called, “How not to fuck up with your trans teammate.” She wrote that from the spirit of, there’s a lot of really wonderful people who don’t want to do the wrong thing and so they do nothing. She wrote about her experience and at the end it was like, “Do these five things. Definitely don’t do these.” I wrote a blog a couple of months ago because we have a lot of non-American folks. At the end it was like, what does black mean? Can I say it? The fact is that a lot of people have those questions but are terrified to ask them, and so they just run away from people. What we really focus on is creating a space where it’s okay to ask questions to learn about how to be more inclusive, which I think is powerful, because that doesn’t come from me, that comes from our employees. Again, it’s so much more motivating to have someone on your team, on your team say, “You should do this.”

Aubrey Blanche: I just had an engineering manager this morning find a blog about new ways to share your pronouns because we just rolled out a pronoun field in Slack and how to do it in your email signature. He’s like, “Oh, why didn’t you share this to the whole company?” I was like, “Oh, because people are just sharing it with their teams.” He went and sent it to all of the bucket. I think that’s really powerful because I started seeing all these new things pop up in email signatures, but it wasn’t because I did it. It was because people are motivated and they create the community, so they feel bought in and they did it. Thank you so much for listening to me, but now I want to give you a real treat and invite up our fantastic panel to talk about their experiences. Hi, and that is my dog. He’s very codependent.

Atlassian girl geeks: Lori Kaplan, Ashley Faus, Ritika Nanda and Aubrey Blanche at Atlassian Girl Geek Dinner.

Aubrey Blanche: All right so the panel knows this. We have an incredible group of Atlassians from different groups, from different sort of career experiences. Instead of having me introduce them, which would be far less interesting, I’ll have them introduce themselves, so are the mics on? It’s all good?

Ritika Nanda: It’s good.

Aubrey Blanche: Why don’t you give us your name, maybe your role, your pronouns for us. Then what identities are you carrying with you today?

Ritika Nanda: Okay. Mic check, sounds good. Okay, so I’m Ritika, I’ve been working with Atlassian for about two and a half years. I like to be identified as she or her and I would say very briefly I am a programmer by profession and an animal lover by heart. I guess that’s about it. Yeah, but I would definitely do want to say all what Aubrey said about Atlassian, having values really ingrained in all the employees is absolutely 100% true.

Aubrey Blanche: Yes.

Ashley Faus: Good job marketing as the marketer. I’m Ashley, I’m a marketer, writer, and speaker by day and then a singer, actor, fitness fiend by night. Pronouns are she and her. Here at Atlassian I do a mix of content, social media strategy, and the intersection of where all those meet at various groups at Atlassian.

Lori Kaplan: Hi, I’m Lori. I like she and her. I’m the head of cloud migrations and by our experience design and content here at Atlassian. I’ve been here about 18 months. I don’t know who that was that was a shout out in the back. Oh, it’s on my team. Yay, team.

Lori Kaplan: I know and I’m a native San Franciscan, proud mom of two young adults and a two year old Goldendoodle, who sometimes comes to work with me. An avid hiker and a reader.

Dominique Ward: My name is Dominique Ward. My pronouns are she, her. I’m design operations lead here at Atlassian, which basically means I have the very meta role of helping to enable and unleash the potential of our design team who then in turn design products that help unleash the potential for our customers. I identify as a black gay lady, lady, very specifically. A New Yorker, new San Francisco person, but New Yorker. A systems nerd and all around nerd. A Barbra Streisand and 90s hiphop and R&B devotee. All of those identities and more wrapped up in the identity of being a zen practitioner.

Aubrey Blanche: That’s awesome, that was like the best intersectionality discussion I’ve ever heard. Also want to tell you Spotify made a great throwback Thursdays women of 90s hiphop playlist for me today.

Dominique Ward: Was there Destiny’s Child though?

Aubrey Blanche: No, that was 2000s.

Dominique Ward: That was 2000s?

Aubrey Blanche: Yeah. This is like Eve, it’s great. Thank you, welcome. Thank you for being here. Being successful in your career, as much as I hate taking the negative, is — often involves overcoming some kind of a challenge to get to the level that you’re at. I’m curious if any of you can tell me about a time when you ran into a roadblock or ran into something and what you actually did to weave around it.

Ritika Nanda: Okay. All right, I can start. Okay this reminds me of one thing, I’ve been lucky I’ve worked with really good people all my life. It does remind me of one thing. I did my undergrad as a mechanical engineer, all right that already hints towards a few things. I was probably amongst the two girls in the entire class, fine, I had a lot of fun. Finished my four years of undergrad, but then wanted to have a job. I tried to look for a job, but then at every single company I sat, I tried to get a job, they either didn’t want to entertain female candidates. Or it was a subtle non-written rule that, fine, you can come and sit, but we’ll probably are going to just hire male candidates. I really wanted to get a job. I’ve got to earn money do something in my life.

Ritika Nanda: Then I thought, “What should I do?” Then as I said, I studied mechanical engineering, so there were a few courses which taught me how to write a few programs, run a few CNC machines. Then I thought, all right that sounds cool, that was fun, I enjoyed it. I learned a few programming languages and since then I’ve been coding. I guess I think that you should never think you cannot do a certain thing. That’s the job of the rest of the world, let them think that you cannot do a certain thing. You can always do whatever you want to do. I guess that was a good example I could think of in my life up to now. Yeah.

Ashley Faus: Mine was thinking about how to choose among, I was really fortunate to have a couple of job offers in my previous round of interviewing. I basically looked at ,okay, what do I want to do in the next 10 years and where does my skill set map to that over the next 10 years? I basically realized that I had a gap in my skill set.

Ashley Faus: One of the job offers on the table would fill that gap. It was going to be a really stretch role for me. I was probably going to fail when I walked in because it was a huge gap in my skill set. Then the other job was something where it’s like, oh I can hit the ground running. I’m going to knock this out of the park. I’m going to come in and six months later they’re going to be like, “Oh my gosh, I’m so glad we hired this person because she knows what’s up.”

Senior Manager of Integrated Media Ashley Faus shares her career journey at Atlassian Girl Geek Dinner.

Ashley Faus: As I was weighing those like it’s really tempting to go toward the comfortable job and it’s really tempting to go to the place where you’re going to be most successful. But if you look down the road and you say, I want to be a VP or I want to be a CMO or I want to be a manager or a dev lead, whatever it is, where are the gaps in your skillset and take an honest inventory. Be honest with yourself to say, “I kind of suck at this one thing and this person is kind enough to give me a paid learning opportunity and knows that I’m probably going to fail. They’re willing to walk with me to teach me how to do this because they think I have potential.” Go toward the thing that’s going to stretch yourself.

Ashley Faus: I ended up taking that job and it’s interesting because my manager and I had several one on ones where both of us were identifying that I was like veering toward the place where I was most comfortable. We both had to work really hard to keep me focused on the skillset that I needed work on. That would be my thing, is just encourage you to take the job that helps you build the skill gap. Take an honest look at where those gaps are for where you want to go in the future.

Aubrey Blanche: Lori, I know you weren’t always in design right?

Lori Kaplan: I know.

Aubrey Blanche: You eventually made a switch.

Lori Kaplan: That’s a philosophical debate, but [crosstalk].

Aubrey Blanche: I mean we can do that, I have space for it.

Lori Kaplan: What?

Aubrey Blanche: I said we can do that, I’ll hold space for that.

Lori Kaplan: Thank you. My first tech role was — my title was technical writer. I did that for a long time and many of the jobs involved design of some sort or another, but I was kind of pigeon-holed into a certain thing doing guidelines at a really cool company. I had hit a wall in my career growth and I thought, “You know what I’m I going to do about this? I’m only getting the same kind of opportunities here.” I wanted to do something that challenged myself, grew my skills, and move into an area I was really passionate about which was interaction design at the time. Now we call it UX or product design or design whatever we call it.

Lori Kaplan: I put together a little portfolio and I started talking in my company about what other opportunities might there be and was there openness to my shifting roles? It turned out that there were. I did have to go through the same interview process as the other candidates coming in from the outside. I ended up getting an offer there, but at the same time, all my friends were going to a new cool company called Netscape. I don’t know who’s here is old enough to remember that. I thought, “Oh man, that looks really awesome.” That’s a really a growth opportunity, so I interviewed there and got a role there. That started me on this path of being a designer.

Dominique Ward: I had a similar experience, well multiple. I feel like over the course of my career it’s been the periods where I can either go this way or I can go into a completely new direction. There have been many moments where I have that — I think the first one that comes to mind is me kind of being an analyst at heart. I got a job that I wasn’t supposed to get to begin with, didn’t even apply for. Then that took me to a design consultancy where I was very purely an analyst on a program management team.

Dominique Ward: There was a shift in the org and someone asked me, “Would you be interested in shifting teams?” I said, “Sure.” I have no idea what I’m doing, but this is the opportunity that ended up propelling me into a new role. I got a bird’s eye view of what it took to actually build and design products that were going into the market and how that ended up impacting a global organization. That was something that I had no idea that I wanted to do. All I wanted to do was work in museums or maybe be a philosopher and now I’m here.

Aubrey Blanche: That’s great. I have multiple degrees in political science. Very useful. A lot of what we’ve talked now is about your individual choices, but I think most of us who’ve been in the workforce know that how important the role of your manager is and what that relationship looks like. Lori, obviously your team is giant fans of you. I mean for good reason. I would love for, if you could talk a little bit, maybe you can speak to as a little bit of a transition how you realized that you wanted to have a management role. I think sometimes people don’t realize that senior level ICs is also a great path. Then maybe how do you think about what your role is in relation to your team?

Lori Kaplan: Okay. The first management job I had was when I was in college, but that was a really long time ago and it was in a retail setting. I learned from that that it was really hard to manage other people to performance. I was, I think, probably too young. Anyway, fast forward a few years in tech and I went to another really cool company called Netflix and my boss was taking a leave, a personal leave of absence. She and her boss decided that I should do the job temporarily. I said, “No, I’m really having fun.” They said, “Please.” Anyway, it went back and forth and I said no a lot. Then they begged and I said, “Okay, but only until Nancy comes back, promise?” They said, “Yes.”

Lori Kaplan: Well it turns out that once I was in the role I discovered I really loved it. I was pretty good at it, although I did have a lot of growth and a lot of gap in my skill, so I’ve gotten a lot of coaching along the way. I think this is pretty typical of mid career people of bouncing back and forth between people management and IC, because I did miss the craft. I think that’s really hard when you’re in a craft role. Then in the last probably 10, 15 years I’ve been only a people manager.

Lori Kaplan: How I think about my role is, I am there to be the servant leader of my team and really in service of them doing their best work. Helping them understand where their strengths are, where their opportunities are, where their challenges are. Identifying how we can focus on an area they need growth and how we can align their work with their growth needs. Leverage all of the opportunities and support that we have especially here at Atlassian. I make that a regular part of one on ones with my team. We also do growth plans here. It’s a regular part — we’re held accountable for are we having those conversations; we get gentle nudges from our people team. As part of our evaluations we’re held responsible for our teams — at least my boss does, “Is my team growing?”

Aubrey Blanche: Yeah, and I think you have such a great story and most people don’t realize they know that they can go to their manager for a career conversations and things like that. One of the challenges I see is that people don’t know that they can go to their manager just to get some support or to bounce ideas off of to help with collaboration situations. I think you have such a great story around how that shows up.

Ritika Nanda: Sure. I can share a story and I think a couple of folks in the room might be able to relate to that. Being a programmer in Silicon Valley, it’s not a very uncommon situation when you are the only lady in the room and everybody else is a man or is a male. I feel that’s great at least to diversity or it leads to more balance in the team I would want to say that [crosstalk].

Aubrey Blanche: We’re making it happen like fetch.

Ritika Nanda: As soon as I said diversity I looked at her, balance team, I guess.

Aubrey Blanche: I’ll keep you no matter what.

Ritika Nanda: Yeah, thank you for that. What that leads to is just generally a difference in the way you express your thoughts. Since you are a minority section in the team it might be different than the rest of the team. It’s after all managers and everybody is just a human being. It might be possible that since it was different they didn’t recognize it. I have been in such a situation. I’m sure a lot of other folks in the room must have been in that situation. My really self [inaudible] advice is that, talking really helps. If you go talk to your manager and tell him or her that this is, “Hey this is what is happening and maybe I am getting overshadowed in this area, just because my way of expression is different than the rest of the team,” so that really helps. It worked great for me and I would really recommend and suggest everybody to do that if you’re ever in that situation. That’s a high level of my story.

Aubrey Blanche: Yeah, and I think — because we like to keep it real here — is, sometimes there’s also where I think we’ve obviously great managers who show up. Sometimes managers aren’t the right support structure for you and I think it’s also okay to advocate for yourself in that situation. I don’t know if you want to share — pass the mic all the way down — about what that might look like.

Design Operations Lead Dominique Ward gives career advice at Atlassian Girl Geek Dinner: “Choosing yourself can be an empowering thing. If there is a situation that’s not serving you, then it’s also okay to respectfully say, ‘Thank you, next.”

Dominique Ward: I have been very fortunate to have really great managers, mentors and, advocates over the course of my career and have seen the positive impact that’s had to my career development and my career trajectory. When I was in the position of actually having an issue with the way that I interacted with my manager and their lack of interest in my career development, I then had to make the decision of — do I go above them?

Dominique Ward: I went to HR and also had a very direct conversation with my manager. After a few months nothing changed and so then I had to make the decision, is this a place where I want to stay? Then start to harbor distaste for the company that I’m in, the role that I’m in and both that I love? Or do I move forward and try to make a fresh start? I decided to leave and that was really difficult for me, but ultimately it was the right decision to make.

Aubrey Blanche: Yeah, I mean I think that choosing yourself, right, can be an empowering thing. If there is a situation that’s not serving you, then it’s also okay to respectfully say, “Thank you, next.”

Dominique Ward: Next.

Aubrey Blanche: I want to leave a little bit of time for Q&A for folks here who would want to ask this brilliant panel questions. If we could go and I will start with Dominique since you already have the mic, your quick tip. If there was one thing that you could tell people that they should do, not just to be successful in their careers, but to be successful in their careers as who they are, what would you tell them?

Dominique Ward: I would say advocate for others and find people who can advocate for you. That doesn’t mean necessarily someone who’s above you or more senior to you. It could also be your peers, someone more junior, someone who you can bring their name into a room when they’re not there and say, “Actually, you should talk to that person,” and then other people will do the same for you.

Head of Design for Cloud Migrations Lori Kaplan shares advice at Atlassian Girl Geek Dinner: “Be crystal clear on the unique thing that you bring to the table. Don’t get slotted into a box that you didn’t choose.”

Lori Kaplan: I’m going to borrow from one of my favorite authors Anne Lamott who talks about radical self care. Look it up, it’s very important, but the baseline is, we give so much. We do the extra emotional labor. We show up in so many ways in all the identities we have. If you don’t refill your tank and take care of yourself, you can’t continue to do that with the same level of vitality and impact.

Ashley Faus: I would say mine is to be crystal clear on the unique thing that you bring to the table. Don’t get slotted into a box that you didn’t choose. Choose your own box and be very clear on why you chose it, how you chose it, what you want to do once you get there. Just be very clear about that anytime you’re dealing with career progression, interviews, those kinds of things.

Mobile Developer Ritika Nanda shares a mantra which has worked for her at Atlassian Girl Geek Dinner: “Don’t be scared, it’s fine. If you see something is a stretch, go for it. Somehow you’ll make yourself adjust and reach that goal. That has worked well so far for me. I hope it keeps going that way.”

Ritika Nanda: Gosh, it’s hard, after so many good suggestions I don’t know if I have that great insight for the suggestions. I’ll try. I think the mantra which has worked for me is that, don’t be scared, it’s fine. If you see something is a stretch, go for it. Somehow you’ll make yourself adjust and reach that goal. That has worked well so far for me. I hope it keeps going that way.

Aubrey Blanche: I mean I would say so. My advice is find your squad. I am the DNB team here at Atlassian. I think one of the things that makes me so happy is not only that I have my squad here, right, folks who help me do the work, but also will be like, “I need a walk.” We’ve all had that day at work and I try to solve structural racism, so as you can imagine that’s easy.

Aubrey Blanche: I also have a community outside of work. We have what we call empathy wine, with a H in parenthesis. I think that’s important to have both of those, is your squad at work who’s going to get your contexts and be able to help you move whatever your goals are forward. Also knowing that having your squad outside of work is incredibly important. I think that is part of radical self care, is making sure that there is always people that you can reach out to. That you actually do it. Please do that. Do as I say not as I do. Yeah, know that your squad is there and pick people who show up when you need them.

Aubrey Blanche: Yeah, all right. We have about 10 minutes left technically and I did not plan who is going to run the mic around. We have wonderful Atlassians here. If anyone has questions.

Shauna: We need a mic.

Aubrey Blanche: Yeah, do we have another one, another mic?

Shauna: I need an actual mic.

Aubrey Blanche: It’s cool, it’s a team effort, we’ll just share.

Emily: Hi, I’m Emily. I have a question about how you bring your authentic self to work, so maybe just discuss about what you do choose to bring to work. You don’t have to tell us what you don’t. I think like what’s something that makes you feel like you are you even at the office?

Ashley Faus: Dominique’s pointing at me for some reason. I’m a lot, I straight up told Aubrey I was like, “Just be aware I’m going to try to tone it down.” I’m extremely extroverted. I walk really fast, I talk really fast. One thing that I try to do is to match the energy with the people that I’m working with. I’ve had situations where — and it’s not like a woman thing that it’s like, “Oh you’re aggressive.” It’s like, “No, you’re just a lot for everyone.”

Ashley Faus: I also do musical theater in as I said singer, actor, fitness fiend. Just the amount of expression and talking with my hands and loud voice that comes across, sometimes that can be intimidating to people. I try really hard to make sure, particularly if I’m managing a team with direct reports, like smile, swing by their desk, talk to them so that every time I come by they’re not like, “Oh my gosh, something is wrong.” I do try to intentionally walk slower and smile at people so that they aren’t just like, “Oh, she is on a mission and we are not to speak to her.” It’s like, no, no, you can speak to me, this is how I walk. Recognizing those things about myself and trying to mitigate them, not because they’re bad, just because I don’t want people to feel like they can’t approach me. That’s my story of that [inaudible].

Dominique Ward: I just wanted to hear you speak more.

Aubrey Blanche: I would say I’ve got a weird answer. If you googled a photo of me from like two years ago I would have looked like a McKenzie consultant, no offense to the McKenzie folks in the room. I think something for me — it was actually started — when I started at Atlassian I thought I had to look older, because I looked five. I said, “They’ve got to take me seriously, I’m like 26 and have three months of HR experience, who is drunk and gave me a job offer?” I like “corporated up,” is the only way I can describe it. It was like a brown bob and like sleeveless silk blouses and no leopard print heels. That was because I thought I had to be a thing.

Aubrey Blanche: Something I did over the last year was actually started very slowly incorporating the way that I would dress myself outside of work. I ended up with weird hair and visible tattoos and leopard print. It was like I started wearing bright colors and then I was like, “It’s fine, I’ll just dye my hair all pink.” I’m the head weirdo, it’s my job. Then I got the very visible tattoo that I’ve been thinking about and that was something that was really important for me. I found that I became more authentic in my behavior to people because I allowed little pieces of myself in first. That’s what I would offer if it’s something where you’re not sure you’re not confident about it yet, is to give yourself space to do little bits at a time so that you feel safe and comfortable to show up.

Aubrey Blanche: Like I said, you don’t have to bring your whole self. You get to keep whatever you’d like to private or out of the workplace. My hope for everyone is that you bring in what you would find meaningful and important to bring in.

Audience Member: Hi, thank you for all your talk, I really enjoyed it. More than a question, maybe I’m looking of a little women’s support here. I’m looking to change my job so I’ve been out applying and giving interviews. I’m a very optimistic positive person, so I don’t want to sound negative. I’ve been to at least five, six onsites. I’m feeling a little bit of a high expectations because I’m a woman. I never realized this, but maybe because I’m in the more higher range in the age.

Audience Member: When I go for interview it’s only the 20s and the 30s and I love you all because I was there. They’re interviewing me and I don’t know what they’re looking for, because I feel I’m doing really well. Then they come up with some reasoning which doesn’t make sense to me. I know I’m not perfect, I’m an average hardworking person. I’m not a genius, but I’m at a place where I want to look for a change because I want to. I changed. I come from a history background and it was in my 30s I decided to get into IT. Then everybody told me, “You can’t do it,” and I got a couple of some certifications, I did Java. Now I’m a front end developer, but I feel that I don’t know what I’m missing. Am I missing the buzz words or am I not quick enough to do all those classes how they want me to do? I can still do it, because every job if you ask any of my manager they’ll be like, “Wow. You can do the work.” It’s a question or advice or whatever I’m looking for.

Audience Member: How do I go about it because I still have, I still get calls and I know I’ll go for more onsites. I just need some guidance I guess.

Ritika Nanda: Did you want to take …?

Audience Member: I just need to say [inaudible].

Ritika Nanda: Oh okay.

Aubrey Blanche: Let’s do it.

Audience Member: Hi, I work at Twitch, which is about as a young a company as you can imagine. I’m in my 50s. What I found when I went into my interview was I owned my age. They said, “What’s your favorite video game?” I said, “Well I’m actually older than that. My favorite computer game is Zork.” I expected the reaction might be, “Oh my God, she’s so old,” but what I got was, “That’s really cool.” The best suggestion I can have for you is just own your age and make that something about you that’s cool and fun and interesting rather than something to be worried about.

Ritika Nanda: I don’t think I would have been able to give a better answer, that’s for sure. Yeah, I definitely think that one thing, like this is Silicon Valley, so I think since you’re in IT and I’ve also been working in IT, you might have more experience and actually I could seek advice from you. Just in my experience what I’ve seen is that Silicon Valley, giving interviews, getting rejected, going for the next one is a pretty common trend. I think the most important part is not to let it get onto you and just keep trying until you find the one you like and they like you. It will just be fine, I guess. It’s just like a regular thing it’ll go on and it’ll be over. Like that’s what I think.

Aubrey Blanche: I was going to ask the panel a somewhat interesting question that is related to this, which is, tell me something that would go on your resume of failures in job acquisition. I will start and give you an example. When I tried to get into tech I applied for 127 jobs and got three call backs. 127 jobs and got three call backs. Thinking about five or six onsites, that’s actually a pretty good hit rate.

Ashley Faus: I graduated into the 2008 recession, it was terrible. Then I also moved out here. I’m in marketing, which is really hard to prove that you know what the heck you’re talking about till you’ve been in there for now a decade. I worked at Starbucks and the CEO of the failed startup that I was at actually came in to my Starbucks. It was pretty much the most embarrassing moment of my life to have to like serve coffee to this person. To be fair he failed at a startup, but like as a 23 year old I was like, “This is my thing.”

Aubrey Blanche: Any other resume failures?

Lori Kaplan: How long do we have?

Aubrey Blanche: Lori, pick your favorite.

Lori Kaplan: I know. I have had many. I’ve been laid off four times, which is common in Silicon Valley, but it feels disruptive and diminishing each time. Each time I’ve landed way better and into a role where I was welcomed and learned more and had a better opportunity. I say keep at it and ageism is real, but let your star shine out. That’s the thing. Like if you show up as yourself and you know — who was it that said, know what you’re good at and don’t be in a box? Show up with your expertise and your experience and let it shine and you will find the right fit.

Aubrey Blanche: Atlassian.com/careers. I’m contractually obligated.

Shauna: Can I jump in from a recruiter perspective?

Aubrey Blanche: Yes, we have a recruiter here.

Shauna: Hi, I’m Shauna. I work here. It’s pretty cool. Potentially controversial opinion, ask us what the onsite’s going to be about. Recruiters know who’s interviewing you, what they’re supposed to be talking about. If they’re good at their jobs, they know what questions they’re going to ask you. If we have the time, we do what we can to prep the candidates. We don’t always have the time, we’ve got 15 roles and 30 candidates for each role. If the candidate asks me to prep them for their onsite, I’m floored. I tell the hiring manager that that’s happening, that they’ve asked for it, and they’ve asked for the extra time. I’ll take the time if I can. Doesn’t mean that everybody can, but if you ask for it, you’ll walk into that onsite way better prepared than you would otherwise.

Audience Member: I have a comment and a question. Thank you.

Aubrey Blanche: Sorry, I don’t do rules.

Audience Member: That’s okay. My comment for the lady who’s interviewing is… I have an age problem. I’m on the older side, I’ve been in tech for…

Aubrey Blanche: It’s an age advantage.

Audience Member: Advantage yes, see I guess it is an advantage because I’ve been in tech for over 20 years. Yeah. I would have to say that I’m working with some folks out of college and I’ve learned so much from them about job hunting, so talk the people that are just coming in. They have different tactics than when I went got a job when I was in my 20s, one of the guys I work with, he contacts people over LinkedIn. He contact and call and gets on phone calls with them. My question is to you guys is and the recruiter, is that normal? I was flabbergasted when I heard that, but is that acceptable? Do people get on the calls and have info sessions before they interview? Thank you.

Ritika Nanda: I would like to share like I have had so many people who are especially fresh grads, they’ve contacted me through LinkedIn. As she mentioned I don’t always have the time, but if I have the time I’d be more than happy to help anybody and guide them. If I’ve been lucky I’d be more than happy to share my knowledge and steps. The struggles which I went through — if I can help somebody with that I’d be more than happy. I’m pretty sure a lot of people would think that way and if somebody you contact through LinkedIn — I have also tried to contact a few people and get some mentorship. I think there are people out there who do help you and LinkedIn is a good source. This is really true and does happen, so to answer that question.

Aubrey Blanche: Yeah, the advice I would give is do not ask someone to pick their brain. That’s just so nonspecific because it’s like, if you’re busy, this people do this to me a lot. If someone was like, “Here is my question,” it’s like even if I can’t make the time to meet with you, I might be able to like type out an answer and help you. Asking someone for a specific thing they can help you with increases the likelihood that you’ll get something helpful out of it.

Ritika Nanda: Right, sorry. One last thing which I wanted to add was, that when somebody contacts me, if somebody puts in a little extra effort and say, “Hey I’ve tried this, this is not working. This is what I’m interested in,” that then that genuinely shows me that he or she is really interested and I can spare a minute of my life to help him or her. Most cases I do that, so I think a lot of people will do that. Yeah.

Lori Kaplan: Yes to do it and sometimes it’s the mom network that puts them up to it. Having young adult kids and trying to help them land a lot of times, I’ll just talk to my friends and say, “My child is interested — my young adult — is interested in thus and such. Would you be willing to talk to them about this and that?” Then I make them make the contact. Just in the last two weeks I’ve had coffee with two different people that I peripherally know who are interested in Atlassian. They said, “Oh, you’re at Atlassian. Would you help me prepare for my interview or can you tell me what it’s really like to be there about this and that thing?”

Aubrey Blanche: Dominique. What about you?

Dominique Ward: In my past life I have had many new grads or “I need an internship” reach out to me for roles that I have no like connection with. A really just kind of like trying to get in the door and have a connection because they know that you’re more likely to get an interview or get your foot in the door and get your resume seen if you are a referral. Young kids are very savvy.

Aubrey Blanche: That’s true. We’ll do one more question because I want to be mindful of everybody’s time. Yes.

Claudia: Awesome, hi everyone I’m Claudia. I have a question for Aubrey. When you think of building balanced teams and this whole idea, a lot of conversations I’ve had with people in this field, they always say, “It starts from the top.” I work for a company that is very white male at the top. I was just curious if you agree with that it starts with them and if so how do you go about getting them on board with all that you’re doing.

Aubrey Blanche: At first I was like, oh you work at a tech company? It’s true right, who gets funded 20 years ago is who’s running companies now. I think it does start at the top, but I also think, what I’m seeing candidates do a lot right now is they simply just look at the representation of the executive team. Then decide whether the company cares about D&I. I think that’s actually not a complete heuristic. I don’t think you should use that as the only signal, because if you’ve ever tried to build an engineering center in Sydney Australia, well just try that. Then try to have a balanced executive team, because of the historical legacy of that. I think it’s so useful here as what’s more important is actually asking what the executives are doing to help build balance.

Aubrey Blanche: I don’t think he’ll get mad at me for sharing this. For example, about a year ago I [inaudible] — we have two CEOs and they’re Australian. I basically flagged to him, I was like, “Hey.” We’ve had a lot of conversations about him being a straight, white guy. I was like, “Hey, our black employees, they’re not having the same experience as other people. It’s showing up on our data, Latinx folks, we’re all happy.” I said, “One of the things that’s coming out in the comments is that they don’t feel like leadership is advocating for them.” We had a really frank conversation and he was like, “Oh, fuck.” He was like, “No, but I do care, I just don’t know what to say.” I was like, “All right, oh why don’t we give them voice.” He literally sat down for an hour and every one of our black employees was invited to call in and just talk to him. He was awkward and he got rules about what he was allowed to ask versus not. He was perfect. He walked, he’s like, “I have heard that you don’t feel like I’m advocating for you and I’m nervous and I don’t know how, but I’m trying to understand and hopefully you’ll help me figure it out. Please believe I’m trying to do well and tell me when I’m not.”

Aubrey Blanche: We had a really raw, uncomfortable, honest conversation and now — so that happened last year. Then he and I were preparing to give a keynote in Europe. I promise this has a point. In Europe, like the word race is very different than here. If you use the term race in English it’s like very Nazi-adjacent. A lot of our European kind of started feeling uncomfortable saying the word race for that reason. I never say things like people of color when I’m giving a talk in Europe. This is for our user summit. I’m in like a private rehearsal with some VPs and Mike, he’s like, and I listed a bunch of under represented groups. He’s like, “Why don’t you say people of color?” I was like, “Well because it’s Europe and the market doesn’t get it.” He’s like, “Yeah, but our employees are going to hear it, you have to put it back in.” I think that that’s the stuff that’s important, because the fact is our CEOs are straight, white men who are billionaires, but they back me up in the room when I’m not there. Or they are like, Mike is like, “No, our black employees are going to hear that we didn’t say that and that’s not acceptable.”

Aubrey Blanche: I think that those are the things you should ask about and that’s what you should do as a candidate. Right, don’t ask like, “Does your company not care about diversity?” Yes, of course we do. Don’t be like, “What programs do you have?” Your average hiring manager won’t know. What you can ask is something like, “What have you done to help people have more of a voice? How do you try to include people?” Like that’s something that anyone should be able to answer, so that’s what I’d say. I also don’t think starting at the top is enough.

Aubrey Blanche: At Atlassian, the reason we’ve been successful is because our leadership gets it. I do not justify my job here. We talk about how, but also because our culture and grassroots support it. There’s so many things that have been built in this office that were just built by Atlassians. I had nothing to do with it and that’s the mark of success is when I’m useless. I think it’s that, it has to be top down, it has to be bottom up. I wish I had a more helpful answer, but that’s it. Yeah.

Dominique Ward: Can I say one thing?

Aubrey Blanche: Please.

Dominique Ward: I just started two months ago and Aubrey did my onboarding. Before we even started she gathered the new people and we were going upstairs. Before we even went in the direction of the stairs she said, “Are stairs okay for everyone?”

Aubrey Blanche: Did I do that?

Dominique Ward: Yes.

Aubrey Blanche: I mean sounds like a thing I would do, but I’m thrilled I did that.

Dominique Ward: As someone who like disability rights and accessibility’s really important to me, that was a very subtle thing that she could have done that just like, I was like, “Okay, I’m in the right space.” Even though I accepted the job and heard about the values, I’m like, “Is that really what it is?”

Aubrey Blanche: I’m like a little teary right now. Anyone on my team will tell you I cry all the time. Oh that makes me so happy. I feel like I want to end on that note, but it’s a little weird and self serving. What the note that we probably should end on is an enormous thank you for the absolutely fantastic brilliant panel that you have in front of you. Also claps for all of you who showed up tonight and for all the things that you’re doing because the fact is that you’re really the future of tech and I’m so grateful that you’re all here.

Thanks to everyone for coming out to Atlassian Girl Geek Dinner!

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

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Okta girl geeks: Jade Feng, Angie Song, Helen Chen, Mindy Lieberman, Sara Daqiq and Maggie Law at Okta Girl Geek Dinner in San Francisco, California.

Speakers:
Mindy Lieberman / VP of Enterprise System / Okta
Maggie Law / Senior Director of Product Design / Okta
Helen Chen / Software Engineer / Okta
Angie Song / Staff Software Engineer / Okta
Jade Feng / Product Manager / Okta
Sara Daqiq / Developer Support Engineer / Okta
Angie Chang / CEO & Founder / Girl Geek X
Gretchen DeKnikker / COO / Girl Geek X

Transcript of Okta Girl Geek Dinner – Lightning Talks & Panel:

Angie Chang: Hi, my name is Angie Chang and I’m the founder of Girl Geek X. I want to thank you all for coming out to Okta tonight. How many of you here it’s your first Girl Geek dinner? Oh wow. How many of you here have been to more than five Girl Geek dinners? Six? Seven, eight, nine. Okay. Ten. Oh wow, we have a few. Okay. I was going to say, the last one standing will get a pair of socks. But, how do we pick this?

Gretchen DeKnikker: Why did you play that game? Say 11.

Angie Chang: 11? All right. I’m going to have to find you and email you, mail you a pair of socks. Really? Oh my God. Thanks for coming. Find me afterwards.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Or we can just come up with two pairs of socks.

Angie Chang: I want to tell a story about why these dinners are important to have week after week at various companies up and down the San Francisco Bay Area. So, for example, I’m really thrilled when I hear about successes as someone got a job from a Girl Geek dinner. And I’m going to be having lunch next week at Stripe with a girl who’s working as a data scientist there, and she said, “I got my job here because of a Girl Geek dinner a year ago.” And I was like, “Wow.” And she’s like, “Yeah. So I went to the dinner because I had just finished a coding bootcamp, and then I talked to one of the speakers, because she inspired me, and then we grabbed coffee. And then we were grabbing coffee back at the office, and I asked her for an internship, and she said, ‘Let me ask this guy right here since he runs the data science team.’ So he said, ‘I don’t have internships. I have jobs. Send me a resume.'” So now she works there.

Angie Chang: So the things that will happen when you talk to people. So I encourage you to make friends, make connections, talk to recruiters, and make the most of this night. Thank you for coming.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Hey. I’m Gretchen. Definitely, if you have got a job through a Girl Geek dinner, come tell us because we love to promote those. If you come and tell us it helps people who are trying to organize a dinner at their own company like walk in with a little more like heft of like, “I have all of the stats, and you must do this because it will be amazing.” And obviously it will be, right? Like look what a nice job. Do you guys love this office?

Audience: Yeah.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Like I want to come work just to be and have that awesome view. This is amazing. Yeah. So, we do have a couple other things going on right now. We just launched a podcast like, I don’t know, two months ago. Maybe. And like episode six just came out and it’s on becoming a manager. So they’re every two weeks and the next one is on bias in hiring, which is my favorite one that we’ve done so far. And I think a really awesome one. So definitely subscribe, check it out, tell us what you think, because we’ve never done a podcast before. So it might suck. And it would just be cool to know that sooner rather than later. So we can make it better!

Gretchen DeKnikker: All right. And then soon we’re going to have a monthly webcast. So I don’t know if you guys got to come to our International Women’s Day Elevate event last week, or a week before? Week before. We had like 2,500 people sign up and 1,000 came. And we had these amazing speakers. We’ll put out the videos soon. So, keep an eye out. There’s like lots more content and lots more ways to engage with us other than coming here. But please come to these because we love meeting you all in person. All right, so I’m going to hand it over to Mindy. Thank you guys so much.

VP of Enterprise System Mindy Lieberman welcomes sold-out crowd to Okta Girl Geek Dinner.

Mindy Lieberman: Welcome everybody. I am Mindy Lieberman. I am the vice president of business systems here at Okta. And I am here to welcome you as your emcee to tonight’s Girl Geek dinner. I cannot believe the turnout. This is so amazing to see. And we have a fantastic event lined up for you. We’ve got lightning talks from women from Okta for some fabulous women representing customer … Excuse me. Developer support from product management, from engineering, and from the usability team. My role here tonight is to ease you in gently. I’m going to talk a little bit about Okta, about Okta’s product, about Okta’s culture. I’ll share a little of my own story. Because the great thing about these Girl Geek dinners is they’re not just about learning something new, but they’re about meeting each other, networking, and feeling that Girl Geek power.

Mindy Lieberman: I cannot believe this room is standing room only. That is just like such a fabulous thing to see. So, let’s start with learning about Okta. Just show of hands, how many of you have used Okta or use it now. Whoo!

Audience: Whoo!

Mindy Lieberman: Well, you are in good company. Because millions of people use Okta every day. Okta is the leader in identity, and that means that we securely connect customers to the apps and the technology that they use every single day. We have a workforce branch, and what that means is that we’re connecting companies. We are their front door to the apps and technology that they use. So for example, if you’re from Nordstrom, you come in in the morning and you are using Okta to get to your own apps and stuff. And when we say workforce, we’re not just talking about employees. Because we know that increasingly it’s a complicated fabric and network of people who support a company. So it’s partners, it’s contractors, it’s the whole shebang. And that is true not only for Nordstrom but for all of the logos around that circle.

Mindy Lieberman: The Okta experience is you sign in, you authenticate securely, and then it is available through any device, through any browser. And of course we’ve got some really, really rich APIs.

Mindy Lieberman: But wait, there’s more. We also do customer identity. And what that means is we securely authenticate our customers’ customers. So, example, how many of you maybe JetBlue, are in their loyalty program? Okay. Well, if you’re authenticating into JetBlue, guess what’s powering you underneath the covers? Okta. If you have booked a doctor’s appointment on Dignity Health, Okta. If you are logging into the Adobe Creative Cloud, Okta. Right. So we are all about identity.

Mindy Lieberman: And this is a really interesting time. As an IT leader, I mean my role is business systems where we enable internal users with technology to support marketing, customer success, et cetera. So identity really does enable modern IT. Especially now in this era where we’re going wall to wall SaaS. But as well, identity defines the customer experience, because it has to be personalized. And in the middle, of course, is security. And Okta is the vector to enable all of these things.

Mindy Lieberman: But what makes Okta great for me is not just the product, it’s the culture. It is just a fantastic place to work. And one of the things that make Okta so great is our commitment to diversity, inclusion, and belonging. I just want to recognize Madhavi Bhasin. Can you raise your hand in here. Where are you Madhavi? Okay. She’s someplace.

Female: She’s trying to get one last person in here.

Mindy Lieberman: She’s trying to get one last person in here. Okay. So Madhavi is our program manager of Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging, who recently joined us. And she’s–and her team have a vision about creating this culture of diversity and inclusion. She’s got initiatives to support it, including growth paths for everybody. But I just want to focus for a second on the Okta-spin on this. Because there are lots of companies who are committed to diversity and improving the stats. But the whole notion of belonging, when I first heard that it felt very personal to me. You know, belonging is making sure that no matter who you are you can bring your full identity to work. You can be the same person at the office that you are in your living room, and you can bring with you your gender identity, your ethnicity, your heritage, you know, whatever axis you fall on, you are that whole person, and you come to work and you belong here. It is your family.

Mindy Lieberman: And that is what makes Okta unique. Not only are we committed to diversity and inclusion by hiring the program manager. There’s one more piece of evidence. We have representation here tonight from a whole bunch of our executive staff, who may not be listening at this moment. But I’m going to … Could you please raise your hands. I want to … Ryan Carlson, CMO, in the back, an Okta supporter. Rick-Jean Vecchio, Okta supporter. Krista Copperman. Head of Customer First. Right? Our executives could be anywhere tonight, but they are here supporting the women of Okta with our event. So, special place, I’ve been here for two years. Thank you. Thank you. Because it’s not just talking the talk. It’s walking the walk, and showing up is one of the ways you do that. So, if this all sounds good, which is a really great product at a really great time in the technology history, and a really great culture, well, we want to talk to you. A lot of the women you’re about to see have openings in their group. Okta is growing like gangbusters. We have a recruiting table with schwag over on the side. And the schwag is pretty good. And we’d love to hear more from you. If you’ve got any interest you can find us.

Mindy Lieberman: After the talks we will be mingling, and we’re happy to answer any questions. Before I get to the talks, though, I just want to mention that you should be thinking not only about who these women are, but whether you want to see them as colleagues. Because lots of our women have openings in their own groups. So not only can you maybe picture yourself doing what they’re doing, but you might be able to picture yourself at the desk next door. Okay. Tonight is not just about information, entertainment, technology. It’s also about women, networking, and sharing stories. So to that end I thought I would tell you a little bit about my own. This is one PowerPoint slide of how I got here. And I got to say, like if you look at it in one slide in retrospect it looks like it’s a career journey that kind of makes sense. But it’s only in retrospect. As I stood on every lily pad and jumped to every other lily pad, I promise I was terrified and I did not feel like I knew what I was doing.

Mindy Lieberman: But I do want to share with you one story between Cisco and Salesforce, because I think there’s some lessons that I learned. It was a surprising thing, and I could share that with you guys as well. So Cisco is a place where I spent nine years and change. I came in as an engineer in IT, writing code, and in the course of my nine years just to like keep it interesting I cycled through every single job in IT. I wrote code, I managed people who wrote code, I did architecture, I managed people who did architecture, I did business architecture, I did project management, program management. And I did it across departments.

Mindy Lieberman: So after nine years of sort of going through the circuit I realized I wanted to get back to my engineering roots. And so, resume in hand, I got a 30-minute meeting with my old boss’s boss, who is the ex-CIO of Cisco, who had left Cisco to join a venture capital firm. And I went in there, you know, very sheepish, and I put my resume in front of him and said, “What would it take for you to take me seriously as the VP of engineering?” And I was expecting that he was going to give me, “Well, you need that, this, that, and the other thing, blah, blah, blah, blah.” But to my surprise, and I’m still gobsmacked today, he said, “You know, I’d take you seriously right now. I actually don’t have anything, but I got this friend Bob down the hall and he just opened a new fund and he’s got a Series A company that needs somebody. I think you guys should talk.”

Mindy Lieberman: And so like the story earlier, right place, right time, but also asking the question. I had psyched myself out before that meeting thinking that no was going to be the answer, because I didn’t hit all the criteria. But Pete knew me. And he knew that I had grit and I was smart and I worked hard. And no wasn’t the answer. But it was not the answer partially because I asked the question. So my call to action here to you all tonight, is don’t assume it’s a no. Ask the question. The worst you can hear is not now, or later. But you, also, it could be a yes.

Mindy Lieberman: I heard some statistic once that women won’t apply for a job unless they feel like they meet 80% of the must-have criteria. Men, not so much. So, maybe we can take a page out of that book. So, that’s about me, and about Okta. And now it’s time for the main event, which is our Okta lightning talks. Now, how we’re going to roll tonight is going to bring up our speakers, who will give their talks in succession. After that we will all come back for a panel Q&A. And following that we will be mingling. So we will answer any question, either about the talks or whatever you want to talk about. Career stuff, good places for lunch around here, what do we think of that view, how creepy is it to look across and see everybody like in the Salesforce building. Whatever it is that you feel like talking about we’re down for that plan, okay?

Mindy Lieberman: So thank you so much for showing up. Thank you so much for being Girl Geek X. You are our people. And with that, I will hand it over to Maggie Law.

Senior Director of Product Design Maggie Law gives a talk on “If It’s Not Usable, It’s Not Secure” at Okta Girl Geek Dinner.

Maggie Law: Thank you, Mindy. Let’s see here. You’re going to have to remind me to remove that at the end of this, because I’m going to forget. Hmm, wrong direction. Hi. I’m Maggie Law. I’m director of product design here at Okta. And I’m the colleague that you want at the desk next to you. So, I’m going to talk about usability and security tonight. But I thought first I’d give you a sort of meandering tour through my career. I started out in college as a word nerd. I was a classics major. That’s Greek and Latin. And I also took classes in Egyptian hieroglyphics and American sign language. Which prepared me really well for a series of meaningful, sorry, menial jobs in offices for a number of years after that. So to keep it interesting I joined a rock band and I dreamed every day that I could just quit this job and go on tour. But after a few years that didn’t happen.

Maggie Law: So I kind of accepted, all right, I have to get a real job. And around that time actually the web was ubiquitous. It was mainstream. And I started picking up HTML and CSS, a little bit of JavaScript. I started taking some classes in databases, and object-oriented programming. Got really interested. So I went back to school. And since I got my masters degree I’ve put it into practice at companies that largely focus on enterprise-scale problems. And in recent years it’s been more focused in the security domain. And that’s what I do here today at Okta, and as Mindy said, our recruiters are over there. And we are hiring on the design team, so I’m happy to talk to folks.

Maggie Law: There’s one more chapter I’d like to share about my career journey, and I think it will connect with this audience and the Girl Geek X community in general. I volunteer for a local non-profit called the Women’s Audio Mission, WAM for short. So I mentioned earlier that music played a big role in my career in my early days. And now I have a career in technology. And WAM kind of taps into both of those for me. So that’s very exciting. I’m probably preaching to the choir here when I say that it’s really important to expose women to technology and opportunities in technology, to recruit them into tech jobs, to support them and retain them throughout their long careers.

Maggie Law: But how many of you know that there’s been a 70% decline in young women entering college STEM programs? Science, technology, engineering and math. And I’m not talking 70% decline since like the 60s or the 70s. Actually just since 2000. And even more alarming, within the audio industry less than 5% of all the people who hold technical jobs, like audio producers and sound engineers and mixers, are women. These are the people who shape and define how we hear and what we hear in media every day. So WAM exists to solve that problem, training 2,000 women and girls every year in the only two audio recording studios in the world that have been entirely built and are run by women.

Maggie Law: For the women who go through the WAM program, they’re directly going into pipeline for audio professions, and working on that less than 5% statistic. But for the girls who go through the program, these are middle school and high-school-aged girls, mostly girls of color, most from families that are low or very low income. And WAM has a broader plan for them. It’s not necessarily that anyone expects them to grow up and be audio engineers, although that would be great. But it’s really about using music and creativity to expose them to engineering concepts, to STEM principles. And as you can see from this quote they get pretty cocky. And it’s awesome to see, especially at this formative age where they’re sort of deciding whether this is something that’s available to them. So it’s about opening doors for them.

Maggie Law: I’m currently the president of the board of Women’s Audio Mission. So if anyone’s interested in learning about being on the board, come talk to me. So that’s who I am. But how did I get interested in design and user experience specifically? Well, what hooked me in was human-computer interaction. So, the way I think about this is it’s this magical, mysterious, sometimes very awkward zone in which people and computers stare face-to-face and have a conversation. So, the thing is that computers and people are extremely capable. But we’re fundamentally wired differently. So there’s some things that we’re good at that computers are bad at and vice versa. People are emotional, judgemental, rational. We have empathy. And computers are excellent at crunching numbers and regurgitating really complex long strings of characters.

Maggie Law: So that kind of gives you a sense of how that human-computer interaction conversation can be awkward. And so it really federal into my thinking about what usability means. Because it’s when that conversation goes smoothly. So for me as a user, as I’m using something on a computer it’s easy to learn … Oops. I always do this. It’s easy to learn. It’s familiar, and it supports my efforts in performing my tasks.

Maggie Law: Okay. So let me pause for a second and share with you a story that goes back 15 years. It’s something that was really formative for me as a designer. I’ve tried to keep it with me throughout my career. And I think it has an important lesson. So it’s about my aunt Mary. She’s my design muse. She’s my father’s sister. She’s a professional potter. And she’s one of the smartest people I know. And about 15 years ago … Oh. She also wears the label Luddite like a badge of honor. She’s not an early adopter at all. But she will use technology when she has to. We probably all know someone like this.

Maggie Law: So about 15 years ago I helped set her up with a new computer. It was actually an old computer. It was my old computer, a hand-me-down that I sold to her for pottery credit. And I set it up on her desk. We were sitting side by side. And I booted it up. And what she said as it booted up really surprised me. She said, “Wow. Just look at that pretty blue.” And I’d seen that pretty blue however many millions of times in the years that I had this computer. But it never really occurred to me that this was a moment of delight. For her it really was.

Maggie Law: Also, I’d forgotten to take some of the files off of the computer. And one of them was a picture of cows I guess that I took with a digital camera called cows.jpg. And she saw that and she said, “Cows jumping!” And she also saw some web files, probably from my website at the time. And she saw HTML. And she said, “Hate mail?” So this was actually a really important moment for me. It was an aha moment, because it made me realize that here we are sitting in front of the same computer having an interaction with it, but we’re bringing completely different perspectives, expectations, levels of computer literacy, and mental models to this UI. And there’s a team of experts who put together a UI that needs to talk to both of us and however many millions of other people.

Maggie Law: So that was important, and it really drove home for me how challenging usability can be. So I’ve talked about usability. Let’s talk about security, and how it’s actually really tightly intertwined with usability. Okay, so first, a security primer. There are three basic concepts that you should know about security: identification, who you are. Authentication, a confirmation that you are in fact who you say you are. And then authorization, what level of access that you’ve been granted.

Maggie Law: So, put in another way, if you think about this as that conversation, it’s as though I could sit in front of a computer and I can say, “Hi, I’m Maggie Law.” And it says, “Oh. Are you? Okay Maggie Law. Prove it.” “Sure, here’s my proof.” I might type in my password or maybe put my finger on a scanner. Yup. Checks out. “I’ll unlock the orange door for you. You can go on.” So this is how we walk through the front door of all kinds of systems, multiple times throughout the day. And it paints our impression of that experience. And these front doors are so prevalent, actually, that a famous UX researcher named Jared Spool once observed that probably the most common Agile user story is: “as a user I want to log in.”

Maggie Law: And so I thought, “That’s really interesting.” I went to Google just to kind of check that. And I typed in, “As a user I want to,” and sure enough it auto-prompted two user stories that were exactly that. And he also added a really helpful, important truth here, which is that no user actually wants to log in. It’s really tedious. It’s friction. And it’s annoying. So, let’s talk about these front doors. Because these front doors are everywhere, as I said. And oftentimes when we think about these front doors the first thing we think about is username and password, right?

Maggie Law: So this is an interesting table. This table shows you the most common passwords eight-years running, right? So remember what I said earlier about how there’s certain things that humans are really bad at, and one of those is regurgitating really long, complicated strings. And it’s why password managers are really important. It’s why Okta’s really important. I see something like this and I think, “This is people desperately trying to make security usable.” And in doing that they’re compromising their security. So it doesn’t help also when you get these convoluted rules that try to force you to make your password more complicated. This is actually taken from a real example. Probably two weeks ago I had to change my password on a local utilities website. And I could not for the life of me figure out why this password was breaking that requirement. At least one of the following. It’s like, it’s got a plus and it’s got a little up caret.

Maggie Law: And I called the technical support. I spent 10 minutes. The two of us took that much time realizing, okay, it’s that hyphen. But nowhere … That rule does not say you can’t use a hyphen. Nowhere does it say you can’t use a hyphen, so.

Maggie Law: This sucks. So, needless to say there’s an enormous cost to when security is not usable. So for example in e-commerce. Oftentimes today, it’s kind of normal that you’ll see guest checkouts. That’s because they’ve learned that if they put all this friction in front of your shopping experience they’re going to lose a customer. Costly tech support. See earlier memo about my experience, 10 minutes on the call. In fact, there was a survey done in 2014 that estimated the cost to businesses for password problems only, just password troubleshooting, was 420 dollars per employee per year. Just passwords.

Maggie Law: And then it gets even worse if the UIs that admins who configure these policies that define how end users get in through these front doors, is not usable because they might make a policy that’s weak, or broken.

Maggie Law: So, I’ll just end by saying is anyone surprised? And this is the sort of thing that Okta focuses on every single day. We are making it easier to get through these front doors, but not compromising on security by taking the burden off of users. So thank you so much. I appreciate it.

Maggie Law: Okay. So next in line. The next lightning talk, Helen Chen and Angie Song.

Maggie Law: [inaudible]. I’m remembering to take my …

Software Engineer Helen Chen gives a talk on “Engineering Balance: Security, Usability, and Building Multi-Factor Authentication” at Okta Girl Geek Dinner.

Helen Chen: All right. Well, let’s get started. Hi, I’m Helen Chen.

Angie Song: And I’m Angie Song.

Helen Chen: And before we get started on our talk just a little bit … Oh. I pressed the back button. I just want to start by giving a little bit of an intro on us. So for me I had a little bit of an unconventional path to being an engineer. Oh, wait, first. I’m a software engineer here at Okta. I have an unconventional path of coming to here as an engineer. So I actually started off as an inventory planner. I was an inventory planner for a women’s dresses and outerwear at Old Navy and then women’s accessories. And it was while there that I had to do this very time consuming and repetitive task. Hold on one second. Hmm, that was interesting. Oh, [inaudible].

Helen Chen: Something’s telling me my Old Navy experience was kind of sad. Anyways, just kidding. No. I had a great time there. No, I actually really really start heart Old Navy. I’m wearing Old Navy jeans right now. But I had to do this very time consuming and repetitive task. And my manager was fine with me taking time to do it. But I wasn’t. I was like, “I can automate this,” right. “I’m better than just doing a repetitive task.” So I decide to learn enough Visual Basic to be able to automate some of the data cleanup I had to do. And I had so much fun writing code that I quit my job. And went back to school to get my second degree in computer science. And then I came here as an engineer working on our Okta Verify product, which is our version of the Google Authenticator, is a multifactor authentication app on iOS and Android.

Angie Song: Oh. [inaudible]. Hi. My name is Angie and …

Helen Chen: Maybe you can use mine.

Angie Song: All right.

Helen Chen: There we go.

Staff Software Engineer Angie Song gives a talk on “Engineering Balance: Security, Usability, and Building Multi-Factor Authentication” at Okta Girl Geek Dinner.

Angie Song: Hi. My name is Angie, and I’m a software engineer here at Okta as part of the sync team, which builds and develops and maintains the infrastructure that’s used to provision and synchronize the data between Okta and other third-party services behind the scenes. I initially got interested in coding when I was in junior high school, because I wanted to make my Myspace profile pretty. I was entirely driven by my vanity. That’s how I started learning HTML, CSS. And I also picked up a little bit of JavaScript, because I wanted to make those little sparkles right on my profile page. Yeah.

Angie Song: I eventually went to Berkeley, but not as a computer science major. I started with chemical biology but I decided that I did not want to wait around for four-hour lab classes and compilers run much faster. So I eventually switched over to computer science, graduated with a computer science degree, and I have been an engineer since, and I really like where I am right now.

Angie Song: So today I am going to talk about the principles of creating a secure system and give you some examples. Then I’m going to hand off this talk to Helen who is going to talk about how we balance usability and security at Okta in the context of MFA, or multifactor authentication.

Angie Song: So, the first principle of creating a secure system is that security is like a chain. It is only as strong as your weakest link, so that is where you should focus all of your attention on. Though techers will always follow the path of least resistance. If it is easy to get around they will get around it. So there is absolutely no point in installing top-of-the-line deadbolts on a screen door. Because why would I bother picking the lock when I can just bust through the door. Or maybe just punch through a wall.

Angie Song: In this example, which is my favorite from my college computer security class. A ring of California art thieves completely bypassed the security system that’s installed on doors and windows by taking a chainsaw to the wall. And they just walked right through. And this is not an uncommon attack. I found at least two other examples, one in Chicago and another in Tokyo, where the thieves don’t even bother with the locks and just go straight for the wall. And they just steal everything. So there is absolutely no point in installing a steel fireproof door if your walls are made of brittle plaster.

Angie Song: Which brings us to our next security principal, design security in from the start. At Okta we always ask questions about security in the beginning stages of development, and this is because it is much more difficult to retrofit security into an existing system. A great example of this is actually the internet. In the early days of the internet the only people who had access to internet were researchers from trusted organizations like government organizations or universities. Because of this a lot of the networking protocols that were designed during this era were built on an assumption that everyone on the internet was trustworthy and cooperative. Now that we have four billion users on the internet of varying characters we are now suffering from the consequences of this early naivety. Spam is a very good example. Due to the fact that early mail server architecture was based on open relay model, which meant it required all the servers to accept email from anyone from anywhere.

Angie Song: DNS spoofing is also a very good example, if you’re familiar with it. You go to Facebook.com but you land here instead. It is as if you looked for the Okta office’s address on Google Maps or Yelp, but it just gives you the address to an abandoned warehouse that’s across the town.

Angie Song: It might be because you maybe accidentally opened the wrong map thinking it was Maps, but it was something else. Or maybe the listing, like Yelp listing, was actually compromised at one point. But either way, you go, because you’re the product of early internet era, you have too much trust. Even though the possibility of a map being wrong never occurs to you … Also, since you have never been to Okta’s office, you cannot verify whether this is the right address. So you happily waltz into the abandoned warehouse and it’s not a good day.

Angie Song: And this is exactly why Okta is pushing zero trust. Never trust, always verify, and enforce least privilege. Do not trust someone just because they are inside the building past the security gate. This guy, this 19-year-old, squatted in the AOL office for two months before he got caught. He initially came into the campus for an incubator program that was hosted by AOL. But then he realized his badge still continued to work even after the program ended. So he decided to stay around for the free food and the internet.

Angie Song: In order to avoid getting caught he worked until everybody had left the office. He slept in couches that were outside of the patrol area. And he went to the gym at 7:00 a.m. every morning. Everybody thought that he was an intern with a great work ethic. Never trust. Always verify. And enforce least privilege.

Angie Song: Least privilege isn’t bulletproof, but it does dampen the effects in case of a security breach. But it doesn’t matter how secure your system is if your users are not using it, or even worse, if they’re like using it improperly. So let’s say your company decides to be secure and they decide to start using Okta. But at the same time, they also decide to implement this password policy. Your password needs to be a automatically-generated 17-character-long password with uppercase, lowercase all of the numbers and hyphen and everything. And it needs to be changed every month. What is going to happen is people are going to start writing down their passwords on Post-it notes and then start sticking it out on their monitors because they can’t remember it.

Angie Song: So, you need to make sure that this example illustrates the importance of psychological acceptability. In order to make sure that your secure system is effective you have to make sure it is accepted by your users. Another example that this highlights is that human factors matter. And security systems must be usable by non-technical ordinary people, because it will be used by ordinary people. An average person is not going to remember a 17-character-long password with uppercase, lowercase, numbers, hyphens, everything that changes every month. So when you’re building a security system you have to take into account the roles that humans will play when they are interacting with your secure system.

Angie Song: So. Oh, whoops. So just to recap, security is like a chain. You have to design security in from the start. Enforce zero trust. Never trust. Always verify. Enforce least privilege. Make sure you are thinking about psychological acceptability and human factors, because human factors and usability matter. And with these principles in mind I will now hand off this talk to Helen.

Helen Chen: Thank you. Thank you. Okay, so … Can you guys hear? Yeah. So with zero trust where we never trust and we always verify, it’s crucial that during the verification process we get a very strong assurance that the user’s identity is actually who she says she is, right? And so username and password alone oftentimes can’t give us that strong assurance. What would be ideal is if this user can present multiple different pieces of information to verify her identity. And that is what multi-factor authentication, or MFA for short, is all about.

Helen Chen: So, I log in by giving my username and password. Then I need to give a one-time password that I can get from my SMS message or from Okta Verify, that generates the code. And that is an excellent security practice because in case of compromised credentials your protected resources cannot be assessed by an attacker unless they also steal your second factor. So, it’s a great security practice but only if your human factors actually use it.

Helen Chen: In a 2017 survey only 28% of the participants reported that they use MFA. 2% percent reported that they don’t use it, but they used to use it. Now, over 50% of the participants said that they’ve never heard of MFA, which is why they don’t use it. But that means over 15% of your users have heard of MFA and are saying no to it. All right? So, well, it’s not a secure practice if people aren’t using it. Why?

Helen Chen: The problem is users can think of MFA as friction, right. I already gave you my username and password. What more do you want from me? This is really annoying. In fact, someone was so annoyed by the Apple’s MFA experience that he’s suing Apple over it. I am not kidding. So usability really matters, right? MFA is only going to be a good secure process if your human users use it. It needs to be usable. And if you look at his description of the MFA process from Apple you can tell that he … It doesn’t matter if this is actually the experience. He saw it this way. He found it not usable. So, we need to make sure when we design an MFA experience it needs to be smooth.

Helen Chen: Okay. Let’s say we took care of that. We have a really good MFA process and no one’s going to sue you over it and they like it. But you still have this problem that if you don’t have to factor you can’t use it. So let’s say your company enforces MFA and you have chosen to use Okta Verify as your second factor. So you go to work and you realize, “Oh, I left my phone at home. And now I can’t log in. I’m going to have to tell my managers [inaudible].” It’s okay. You can go home and get your phone.

Helen Chen: But what if you lost your phone, or it got stolen, or no, you didn’t lose your phone but you bought a new phone. But you already traded in your old phone? Now you can’t log in. You can’t even go in and reset your factor. You’re going to have to call your IT admin. That is the opposite of frictionless. And it’s costly for the company. So that is definitely a big problem with MFA.

Helen Chen: Now, people might say, “Look, if you had used SMS as a factor this last case of no longer having your phone is not going to be a problem because you can port your number to a new phone and you’re good to go.” Problem is SMS is actually not a very secure factor. It is susceptible to social engineering and SIM hijacking. An attacker can pretend to be you, call AT&T, and port your number to their phone. Now you’re pretty much hosed. But SMS is easy to use because you can see in the same survey, of all the people who use MFA, 86% use SMS as a factor.

Helen Chen: So here’s the problem with MFA, right. It is a good secure practice, but only if your human users use it, and that means it needs to be usable. But it can’t be so usable that it’s no longer secure. So we have to delicately balance usability and security with multi factor authentication. So, what are some ways we approach this problem here at Okta?

Helen Chen: So, first of all, MFA is better than no MFA, right? It’s still that extra step that you have to take to log in and to verify your identity. So, with that in mind, we do offer all the factors, even if they’re not all created equal, right. The idea is if you get your users used to MFA, even if it’s SMS, right, once they are used to this concept of MFA they are more likely to accept a more secure factor such as not just a authenticator app, but also a U2F key. And we do see promising data here.

Helen Chen: So this is from our businesses at work report, where we aggregate all the usage data of Okta customers. And we do see that for our customers who start off implementing less secure factors, like SMS, within three years over 70% of them have started implementing the more secure factors. So that’s good news, right? So start them off and then ease them in.

Helen Chen: And one other way we help with that easing in is we do have grace period of factor enrollment. So, again, we can slowly ease people into different types of factors, get them to adopt other forms and more secure forms. So you sign up for SMS, and your admin can set a policy that gets you to enroll in another factor. But you’re not forced to right away. Like your user can actually defer it, and when they’re ready they can … Like within the grace period they can sign up for like a U2F key or Okta Verify.

Helen Chen: And the other added benefit of a grace period in encouraging people in enrolling like not just one or two, but two or three factors, is you’re less likely to be locked out. If you got a new phone but you have your U2F key then you’re okay, because you can log in with your username, password, give the U2F key, and now that you’re logged in you can reset your factor and now install Okta Verify on your new phone. So no friction there.

Helen Chen: But one caveat is by having multiple factors, your weakest link will be your weakest factor. And also, having a grace period mean you also allow users to enroll in your factor when it’s a good time. Like for example, if I’m a student who needs to log in to turn in my assignment, which is due in one minute, and all of a sudden a popup comes up saying, “You need to enroll in a factor,” I am probably going to be a very unhappy student. So having a grace period will allow the student to log in, turn in homework, and then will prompt them again to sign up for a factor.

Helen Chen: But, let’s also think about the necessity of providing a second factor, right? What if there are certain situations where we deem it is less risky, and we can actually just be okay with username, password. It all depends on context. So, we do want to match the amount of authentication we have to do based on your risk profile. So let’s say you’re a known user, you’re logging in from a device that we’ve seen before. It’s in a location that … You know, because you’re at work it’s the same location. Everything looks checked out. Then maybe we are okay with just username, password, because it’s a low risk.

Helen Chen: But let’s say it is still you, it’s still on the same device, but it’s not a location like your work. Like maybe you went to a coffee shop to work or something. So it’s a new IP. And you’re also accessing, I didn’t mention this earlier, but before you were accessing like let’s say your email, 0365. But now you’re accessing like AWSS3 so it’s a little bit more sensitive app.

Helen Chen: So now we’re going to challenge you with Okta Verify with Push. Because it’s a slightly higher risk situation. But, this is possibly a sign that someone is actually trying to compromise your account, because there’s like a lot of login, a lot of repeated logins from a new device. All these signals are showing high risk. In that case we’re going to challenge you for two factors, right. Not just username, password. You got to do Okta Verify, and then you got to do your [YubiKey 00:48:26].

Helen Chen: So, that’s MFA in a nutshell, and also how we approach it. I hope the takeaway from my talk is you will all use MFA, even if it’s painful. But it definitely will protect your account. And with that, I’d like to pass it off to Jade.

Product Manager Jade Feng gives a talk on “Accessibility and You: What Is It, and Why Does It Matter?” at Okta Girl Geek Dinner.

Jade Feng: Thank you. Hey, good day. How are you guys going? I realize you guys have been sitting around listening to people talk. But hopefully this is something that might be interesting. So, good day. I’m Jade. I’m from the product management team at Okta. And my team actually owns end user experience. So all of you folk who put your hand up earlier, if you have complaints on the product or suggestions, like please come to us afterwards, but not really. I’m kidding. I’m kidding. I’m kidding.

Jade Feng: No, no. But to be real, we’re doing a lot of usability tests. So if you’d like to give out your feedback please come to me afterwards, or Maggie. And we’d love to chat to you.

Jade Feng: So, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. Let’s talk about accessibility and this new hot topic on design or product that keeps going around. But like what is it? Like who knows what inclusive design is? Cool. So about 70% of you didn’t put your hand up. And that’s okay because I was in your shoes a year ago. So I would like kind of give a one-on-one on what accessibility is, why it matters, and things that you can take away today, after this 10-minute conversation, tomorrow. Or tonight if you’re feeling really ambitious.

Jade Feng: So, a bit about me. I’m Jade. Hi. I’m Australian, hence my strange accent. From Sydney specifically. And when I was in college I actually had no clue what I wanted to do as I guess most of us feel. So I tried all sorts of things from like investment banking to actuarial consulting to market to … Yeah, so on so forth. So I was like, “Oh, what’s this tech thing?” Mind you, I’m from Australia, okay? So the whole, the kind of like prevalence of tech was really not there. So I ended up starting a couple of startups. Not all of them were fabulously successful like Okta is. And I kind of realized that to build a really well-changing, like world-influential company, I have to come to the Valley.

Jade Feng: So I came out to San Francisco. I became a product manager for an API product in a consumer tech startup. And now I’ve been at Okta, and I love it. So if any of you are looking for product management careers we’re hiring. Please come talk to me afterwards. It’s awesome. Cool.

Jade Feng: So, let’s start with this. What do Beyonce and Harvard have in common? So, some suggestions out there. But they were both sued for non-accessibility compliance. Yeah. No way you guys were expecting were you? So, yeah. Yeah. So accessibility, not to stand on this kind of foot, but it’s really important for our businesses, right. So it’s not just about the sexy new design buzzword that’s going around. It’s really critical. It’s really critical for our customers and our users, and also for not getting sued. So let’s look at these three people. We’ve got Stephen Hawking with ALS, this nice-looking kid with a broken arm, and Naomi Watts walking out from Whole Foods with a month … Like maybe like two days worth of groceries.

Jade Feng: So out of these three, which one do you think has limited mobility? So who thinks it’s Stephen? Who thinks it’s the kid? Or who thinks it’s Naomi?

Audience Member: It’s all.

Jade Feng: Or who thinks it’s all of … Brilliant. Awesome. I wish I had more prizes to go around. I’ll come up something later. So yeah, exactly. So like our relationship with disability is more deeper than just like, “Oh, she has a broken arm,” or, “Oh, you were in unfortunate circumstance.” All of us can benefit from the products that we use to think about these moments of need. So, the cool thing, if you guys take one thing away from this talk, is that the idea of disability is more deeper than just what we thought about on ramps or elevators. The idea of web accessibility is that people with disabilities, both permanent and temporary, can use the web equally.

Jade Feng: And when we actually think about it in terms of numbers, if you want to look at that: 15% of the world’s population has some form of disability. Now, think about your users. For 100 users, 100 users that you have, 15% of them, 15 of them, need you to think about this for them, right? To be successful with your product.

Jade Feng: So, why is it important if you have to show about numbers. Well, if you are in enterprise or government or governance or education-based industries, or financial as well actually, this is kind of critical for you to even be considered for those deals, or even be considered by your customers. And you’ll also [inaudible] for lowering your support cost, or in our case our customers’ support cost.

Jade Feng: It’s important for your brand image and doing the right thing as society and as people in our positions who are building products in service of other people. And of course, avoiding lawsuits. So to give you an idea of scale, there were over 8,000 lawsuits on ADA, accessibility compliance, just last year alone. And that has grown significantly year on year. So cool.

Jade Feng: So, again, the one thing, the really one thing about inclusive design that if you want to have a conversation or coffee with your colleague tomorrow, is that the idea is that everyone, everyone will have a better experience with thoughtful design, with thoughtful layout, and thoughtful consideration of other use case and users’ needs. That it’s not just about those with disabilities or those kind of circumstances.

Jade Feng: So, cool. But about those people, how do they currently like get around and use the products that you build today? So, if they have a visual disability they can use things like screen readers, which can be built into the device or purchased on top. Zoom capabilities to make the text more readable, or physical magnifiers. If they have hearing disabilities then they can use hearing aids or implants, or things like closed captions and subtitles. And people with mobility disabilities, then they can use things like track pads, special keyboards, hand-free interactions like things that track your eyes, or head and mouth pointers.

Jade Feng: But here’s the thing, right. Here’s the thing. These don’t just benefit people with disabilities. When’s the last time you’ve seen like, I don’t know, a news document that had really small fonts so you like zoomed up the page, right? When’s the last time that you were maybe watching Netflix at 4:00 a.m. in the morning and you didn’t want to annoy your roommates so you may have turned on the captions? I don’t know. Who does that? So yeah, closed captions as also like something that we all benefit from. Or things like who uses Slack at work and like uses all the little keyboard shortcuts and scrolls through to like quickly access and chat to your designer because you need help and don’t know where to go, so please help me. So you like try and like use keyboards or little shortcuts that you know to work faster.

Jade Feng: So, cool, cool, cool. So now we talked about why it matters and how it not just benefits people who need your help, but also the majority of your users. So then what are the standards? What does it actually even mean to be accessibly compliant? Like what does that mean, right? So the great thing is that there’s a lot of people who have kind of done that work for us actually. And around the world there are all these different laws which sometimes you have to practice, or like sell in these countries you need to think about these laws. But the great thing is that they’re all kind of based on the same guidelines, which is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines or WCAG 2.0, upgraded from 1.0.

Jade Feng: And this was a set of guidelines built by the World Wide Web Consortium, which is a great breakdown on like what are the things that you need to think about. And the kind of like … And I’ll kind of talk through some of them later. But it’s a great framework to look through on like really basic things that kind of make sense to you once you read them.

Jade Feng: But the core pillars of them are around these four key principles on perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. So, those are nice words. What does that mean? So perceivable means that it’s something that a user can see or listen, or listen on the product that you provide. Operable means that they can interact with it. So things like the keyboard shortcuts, things like being able to work with voiceovers and so on and so forth. Understandable. So, things like if they see it can they comprehend what the intent of this product is meant to do, right? And finally robust. So it has to be able to work with multiple devices and multiple platforms, right?

Jade Feng: So these are the core things that like when they think about these standards that we want to think about. And I think anyone who builds products or cares about delivering things for your users, the protocols are just general design principles of building good things, right? So, again, good accessibility is an extension of good user experience. It’s not a extra cost on top. It’s an extension of building the right thing and building good products.

Jade Feng: So, cool. Now what? Great, great, great, great, great. Inspire. Let’s do this. There are some things you can just take away from this. Like, one, if any of you are front end engineers, if you guys are using basic semantic website architecture, keep it up, great work. I know it also makes your life easier, so just keep it up. And the reason is because like this is kind of how things like voiceovers actually are able to like read your page, or read your product really quickly and hop through it.

Jade Feng: Other things which was new for me, actually, was think about using accessible colors and contrast. So there’s a thing when you think about the background color and the text color, there are a lot of great tools online which like help calculate the contrast ratio. And if someone who has other colorblindness, which is like 8% of the population, will make their life so much easier. And also just makes it more readable, right. Because not everyone’s screen is LED perfect. So, yeah. Which kind of on the same thread, try not to use color alone to make critical information understandable.

Jade Feng: So when you’re making spreadsheets, when you’re making charts, right, color alone is actually really hard. And I’ll kind of show you why. So here you can see someone, like the normal sign-in form and somewhere like, oh, you screwed up your password or something. Or your email. For someone who’s red-green colorblind, where do you even start there, right? So for the few things like text for error messages, or like dive-ins for the user to be able to figure out, oh, like this is where I should go fix it, don’t just depend on color to convey that message.

Jade Feng: And then on that thread of like just using color, like you can see between these two charts, if you’re colorblind it’s kind of really, really hard to do your budget there. So not exactly sure what’s going on. So, yeah. Another quick win is something like using alternative text for images and non-text content. And it’s easy. You just like add an area label or a tag to the HTML doc just saying, “This is a horse that eats hay.” Or, “This is my avocado toast.” And all that does is it get rid of our screen reader. But also people who are in places with low bandwidth, or if hypothetically I’m on the BART home and I’m in a place with low wifi and everything’s not swirling fast enough, the text gets released, which means that I can still see and interact with that content without needed the high connection.

Jade Feng: And things like typography. So even basic things like basing on serif and sans serif fonts really helps with people understanding legibility and the content, without having to think about it. And there’s no great guideline on font sizes, but just aim for like 16 pixels plus. It’s just a good framework to go. And lean towards leveraging line heights. It just helps with comprehendability and quick reading. So it will help you get your message across more clearly. And also design with focus [inaudible]. So when a user is tabbing through a product, like let them know where they’re tabbing. Let them know they’ve used a keyboard and how we can get them through. And make it keyboard navigable. So, yeah. Cool.

Jade Feng: So, again, building an accessible product really benefits everyone. And what can I do now about it? So there’s some really great, if you guys use Chrome, there’s some really great plugins that you can just like download really, really … well, for free really. And you can just like use that on your own websites, or the websites that you like to use. And just see how you go. And that’s kind of how I actually got started with my own journey with accessibility. Just seeing what’s out there, and seeing how are our products doing, and what could we do better. And going from there.

Jade Feng: So the journey, if there’s one thing I would like, one more thing to conclude, the journey towards accessibility is a journey, right. You’re not going to be compliant from day one. And even for us at Okta, it’s really hard. Like there’s things that we miss all the time, and there’s considerations that we learn along the way with our users. But the one thing is that if you’re mindful of it and you understand at least the problem, and you kind of consider it, at least, that’s one step along the way. And the rest of it will just follow. So, thank you. Hope you learned something from that. And I’d like to pass on to Sara.

Developer Support Engineer Sara Daqiq gives a talk on “Starting with Secure Access: OpenID Connect 101” at Okta Girl Geek Dinner.

Sara Daqiq: Thank you. Hi everyone. My name is Sara, and my last name is Daqiq, and I’m a developer support engineer in here in Okta. What that means is that if you’re a developer and you guys are using our API or any of our platform product, you guys have question [inaudible] and say, “Hey, Okta. I found out that you have a bug in your STK.” I’m like, “Oh, do we?” And then I look at it and see, “Okay. We have a bug in our STK.” And then I communicate it to our product manager, or vice versa. I’m from Afghanistan, hence my strange accent. I’m going to talk to you guys about what we do when we talk about identity, and how we securely transfer identity between platforms. That’s what Okta does, right? Most of you use Okta. When you log in through Okta there’s a chiclet. You click in that chiclet and it goes to whatever app that you want to go. So in the backend there is some communication that’s happening. That’s why we say, “Never built OAuth. We will build OAuth for you,” right? What that means? What do we do in the backend?

Sara Daqiq: And this is just one way of us doing it. There are other ways as well. But we are going to just cover one of those. So the problem that we are trying to solve is that in today’s increasingly SaaS space society, we need to transfer identity information or any information securely between sites. How do we do that? How do we transfer that data? And from UI perspective, how do you, when you click on a chiclet in your Okta dashboard, how does it go to a different app?

Sara Daqiq: So by the end of this talk I’m hoping that I can convey what an OAuth is, what is an OIDC, and what is JWT. You will know hopefully by the end of this talk. So, around 2007–this is Yelp. Yelp is trying to get you to get to your friends. They want your friends to convince your friends to sign up with Yelp. And they’re asking you for your email address and explicitly for your Gmail password. What could go wrong with that? Can you guys guess? Right? Yeah. So I guess everybody got that.

Sara Daqiq: So they were asking … The problem with this is some of the problem that I can, just off the top of my head, is that they can even revoke your access by just changing your password. Year can store your password in plain text, and you cannot revoke their access unless you change your password.

Sara Daqiq: So people came up with different solution, different ideas. Different companies had their own solution. And then at the end they … So fast forward to OAuth1. OAuth1 we don’t care about it because we are not using it anymore. So what is OAuth2, right? OAuth2 is transfer dependent, and like OAuth1 it’s much easier to work with. And it supports native app. Who can tell me how many apps were in App Store around 2007? Zero. Because smartphone came out around 2007 and for a while they had their own apps only in the App Store. So there was a new problem to solve and that was native applications, right?

Sara Daqiq: And so OAuth2 stuff solved all of it. The cool thing about OAuth2 is … Hmm. I fixed this font. I don’t know why it didn’t get fixed. So the cool thing about the OAuth2 is that it’s transfer dependent. That means that it relies unto https to securely exchange data. And it’s good as a foundation. So on top of that you can use JWT or JSON web token. On top of that you can use OpenID Connect or an identity layer on top of OAuth. And on top of that you can use native applications. Please excuse my formatting here. Okay.

Sara Daqiq: So, let’s look at what that means, right. So let’s, in real scenario I’m a hotel manager. I delegate access to a handyman who can get an access key from the hotel receptionist to go clean the house, or my hotel room. So how does it look in an app form is that I’m a user. I delegate access to Yelp so Yelp can go get my token or information, my key, from Google, so Yelp can change content in my Google calendar. So imagine I’m subscribing to an event. Yelp can now create an event or block an event in my Google calendar.

Sara Daqiq: So in the UI it looks like this. You guys have always seen this right? Sign up with Google. Sign up with Facebook. When you click on that it’s basic, what you are saying is that I trust Gmail. Gmail has my data. And I want Gmail to send my data that he has to Yelp in this scenario. Okay, so what happens in the backend when you click on connect with Google, or sign up with Google, right. Let’s say in this scenario we’re asking this Google to just give us the profile information and the contact information of a person. You can limit it to however much you want. However access you want for a person, right? Either read or write or whatever.

Sara Daqiq: And then it redirects you to a Google page. Google says, “Okay. Put your username and password so I know you’re the right person.” And Google says, “Okay. Are you …” When you put your username and password Google is going to ask you, “Are you sure to give your data to Yelp?” And I’m going to say yes. And then it gives me a key. And then I can use that key to go to Google and get the contacts from that Google, the Google profile, right. Or Google API.

Sara Daqiq: So the key is given in this scenario. So it’s basically a redirect URL, so when you’re trying to code it it’s just a redirect URL that you need to configure. And you will have a Google URL. You will have a client ID which is an app ID in Google. You will have a redirect URL. That means that when you get the key or the token where do you want to send? Where does Google want to send that information? And then you will have the scope. You can limit it. You can say, “Okay, this person can have read scope. That person can have write scope only.” And then you’re going to say response type. Do you want just the token? Do you want ID token? Things like that.

Sara Daqiq: So before we see what the response to this will look like we need to know what JWT is. Because the response to this is going to be in a JWT or JSON web token. And [inaudible]. So what is JWT? JWT is just a JSON object. It’s digitally signed and it can be encrypted. So the format looks like this. There is a header and then you have the payload, which gives you the data information that you have. And then there is a signature.

Sara Daqiq: Okay. So there is a header, payload, then signature. There is supposed to be an encrypted string here. Okay. So when you decrypt that string though, this looks like this. You have the user information and you have the key and just a JSON object, right? In reality it’s like your ID or a driver license. You have the name, you have the expiration, you have the header and the signature that proves that you are the right person. So that’s JSON object, right.

Sara Daqiq: The token life is [inaudible] cable. So, just so I am clear, if you go here this is the response to that URL that we created earlier, the URL that we created with the redirect and everything, right? So it’s just an ID token in form of … Or an ID in form of tokens.

Sara Daqiq: The cool thing about this token is that you can revoke it anytime. If you don’t like it, tomorrow you change your mind about giving somebody access, you can revoke it. You can extend it if you like. We can extend our token unlimited time. And you can separate the rows. So you can do read access, you can do write access, or all access if you would like.

Sara Daqiq: So answer to our question is, what is OAuth? OAuth is how you delegate authentication to another site. What is OIDC? OIDC is information about the person that you get. So it’s the identity layer on top of OAuth. And then JWT is just the way that the two formats communicates. It’s a JSON object which is encrypted.

Sara Daqiq: These are the information that you can learn more about, about these authentication methods. And we are also hiring in my team. My manager’s promising a lot of money for referrals. So please do me a favor and talk to me so I can refer you guys. All right. Thanks.

Mindy Lieberman: So I want to thank all our speakers. Were they not fantastic? Yay! And come on up here for Q&A. Okay. We’ve got one right here.

Maggie Law: Jade might be outside.

Mindy Lieberman: Like this. Okay.

Audience Member: So, kind of as like security experts, OAuth experts, all of that, I wanted to ask for advice. I find myself trying to kind of try to balance these days between having a set of passwords that I know and can remember and follow a pattern that I can keep track of, versus just kind of delegating everything to password managers. Both scenarios make me feel vaguely uncomfortable and seem vaguely insecure. So like what’s your advice, just as consumers for balancing those security-like approaches, or any other suggestions you have.

Mindy Lieberman: Who wants in? Oh.

Jade Feng: Yeah. Absolutely relate. Like totally relate. There’s a few things on the thread of password managers that there’s some password managers which have some protections built in that help protect your data from even getting breached in the first place. So like one passwords for example where they allow a device level … What’s it called? Zero. Not zero trust. Awkward. Sorry. Look at the password managers that you use, and what are their security policies. And how like [inaudible] all white papers out there can talk about that. But this will only solve your problem of like how do you manage it. I can say that all of us kind of have our own patterns. And there’s a lot of suggestions online on how you can do that. The iterations of like tier mentally, like the kind of accounts that you have and kind of use and customize the password according to that and things that you can remember. Something else is about how we think about it at Okta is that we’re actually trying to move away from passwords, right. Our vision for user experience and security is like passwords, again–It’s something that you know, and something that someone can steal. So we’re trying to find solutions in the market and in the product to like help you and also other companies be able to find better ways to authenticate you and move away from that altogether.

Angie Song: I’m just going to add to that, if you’re particularly concerned about your own security, there’s this website called haveibeenpwned.com. It’s by a security researcher called Troy Hunt. So you can subscribe for alerts there and see if any of your accounts have been compromised. So, first of all you should not be reusing your passwords. But it’s a good idea to subscribe to, I would suggest in case like one of your accounts become compromised then you can just go ahead and change the password.

Jade Feng: Sorry. The thing I was talking about, check out something called Trust No One. That’s a thing that a lot of password managers like follow, which is the idea that if they even get broken into your passwords will be safe. So at that point, yeah. So that won’t be compromised.

Helen Chen: I mean, just to go back kind of what we present. Remember like the weakest link, right. So if you choose your password manager, don’t just choose any of them. Make sure you research them, right? Because that is going to be your weakest link. If they have something that is … If you have a password manager solution that is device specific … Because anything that goes to a Cloud, that is your weakest link, right? So I know my husband has like his password on like his own USB key that is also requires like encryption to get in. Like that’s going to be safe. I mean, you better not lose that key, but that’s safe. But also, because I’m an MFA girl, have MFA, right? Seriously, have MFA. Let’s say you’re lazy and you just use the same password for certain things, and it got hacked. But you feel better if it’s like your banking account and you have MFA on it. You should be good to go. So use MFA.

Mindy Lieberman: Okay. One more in the front.

Audience Member: So, I’m not a huge fan of MFA because we have so many devices that are linked to the phones, to the iPads, to the Apple computers. I’ve lost my phone but still been able to use my devices because I’m receiving all my messages on my phone or my iPad. So my question is is like, even though I’m using MFA and I can receive texts, are you using any kind of AI or machine learning to detect security penetrations once you’re already in whatever system you’re logged into?

Jade Feng: I feel like that’s a roadmap conversation. Yes. Absolutely. So something that we’ve been … Developed from the perspective of Okta or is it something like the industry in general? Because I think I’m … Okay. So there’s a lot of things all companies can do, which is like device-based trust. So there’s things about the device sort of ID or characteristics on where you’re logging in, the device you’re logging in, what is the behavior logging in, that can like determine whether or not you should even get prompted for MFA. And also something about MFA is that it’s not the push side of things or tech side of things. Only one way in which you can MFA. There’s other things like a YubiKey, which is this token-based device that is also becoming a lot more popular, where if you have this thing plugged into your computer, seamless, you don’t even notice it. It just knows that it’s you. Or things like biometrics, right. So on your phone, Touch ID, exactly, Face ID. That’s enough. That’s all we need to be able to verify that it’s you. And that’s kind of what Maggie was saying about the layers of verification. We just want to know that it’s definitely you, and not just someone who stole your password from a Post-it note you left on the door. So yeah.

Mindy Lieberman: One more.

Audience Member: Thank you.

Mindy Lieberman: Okay.

Audience Member: One thing about accessibility that occurs to me is we think about how to make sure a differently-abled person can use a website, but as regards security. Have people thought about how to help a differently-abled person prevent being scammed, prevent being like when they open an email maybe the email is reading them the URL. Like, “Oh, your account’s compromised. Click here.” Is that something that’s been thought about for accessibility issues?

Jade Feng: I want Maggie to answer that. As I’ll be [inaudible].

Maggie Law: Thanks for the promotion. I actually, I haven’t really explored that topic. It’s an interesting one to think that there might be some way to spoof that maybe from a screen reader’s perspective there’s a different message than the one that you see. So, yeah, it sounds like a fascinating topic. It sounds like it’s absolutely something worth looking into. Thank you for raising it. I have nothing of substance to add, except that that’s a really-

Audience Member: It’s one more thing to think [inaudible].

Maggie Law: Yeah. It’s one more thing. And it’s actually … I mean, it kind of underscores the sort of black swan problem, which is like you have to constantly be trying to think of things that never occurred to us. What are the things that we haven’t yet anticipated. It’s an impossible thing to do but we can’t stop doing that, so thank you for asking the question.

Mindy Lieberman: Last question.

Speaker 14: So, I have a question, but before I ask the question I wanted to say that I really … This is my first Girl Geek dinner, and I really appreciated the fact that you guys told your personal stories before you told the rest of the story. But the question that I had is, I did a very short project on disability adaption and … Adoption. And one of the things that we had to go through was make sure that it passed the test. Like there was a third-party vendor that kind of did the test. So did Okta also do the test, and like … Oh yeah. Is that like a standard that’s set? I mean, at the time when I was doing the project I wasn’t sure of it, but is that like a worldwide standard or is it like a U.S. standard?

Mindy Lieberman: Do you want to answer that? [inaudible]. Thanks.

Jade Feng: So, there are … You know the slide with all the full flags on the screen? So, a lot of countries have different standards around ADA. But they’re all kind of based on these core standard, which is called WCAG, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, which if you just Google, it comes up with this PDF document. So those are the standards that have been set by the World Wide Web Consortium, which just comes up with like best practices on what you should do. So when things about accessibility and how we build into it, also answering your question earlier around security versus accessibility. Yup. There’s no good answer. But I think what we try and do is that we actually … I mean, because we’re a bit bigger and we’re a security company, we do have a security team. So we work with the security team to estimate like some of these things, like if … I’ll give you an example. So there’s a feature that we’ve released called Show Password Toggle, which like shows the password. Shocking. So like if the user entered their password you can fat finger, right? And then you like, with this button you would be able to see it briefly.

Jade Feng: And this went through a very quick security review. And kind of what the balance between security and usability is is that there’s like a seesaw. Because the risk of someone … Like where do most compromises come from? It’s actually from like when someone like hacks you from a different account, and then like uses it on your work email because they found they found out your email through like LinkedIn, right? And then like uses that to try and penetrate you. So it’s not really like people like watching you over your shoulder or while you’re like typing in your password at work.

Jade Feng: So at that point, like that’s kind of what you can do. Like think about what is really the biggest point of risk in my product. What’s the biggest point of risk for compromising my data, my users. And think of like how much of this particular feature really solves for that, if at all. And in that case, it’s more of a usability benefit that a lot of our people can make their lives a little bit easier.

Mindy Lieberman: And with that thanks to Girl Geek X. This is our Okta-style version of Girl Geek X dinner. Thank you so much for joining us tonight. And let the mingling begin.

Our mission-aligned Girl Geek X partners are hiring!

• See open jobs at Okta and check out open jobs at our trusted partner companies.
• Find more Okta Girl Geek Dinner photos from the event – please tag yourselves!
• Does your company want to sponsor a Girl Geek Dinner in 2021? Talk to us!

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

• See open jobs at Blend and check out open jobs at our trusted partner companies.
• Does your company want to sponsor a Girl Geek Dinner in 2021? Talk to us!

Speakers:
Laney Erokan / Internal Communications Lead / Blend
Priya Nakra / Product Manager / Blend
Ashley McIntyre / Manager, Sales Engineering / Blend
Eunice Noh / Product Design Lead / Blend
Crystal Sumner / Head of Legal & Compliance / Blend
Angie Chang / CEO & Founder / Girl Geek X
Gretchen DeKnikker / COO / Girl Geek X

Transcript of Blend Girl Geek Dinner – Lightning Talks & Panel:

Angie Chang: Hi, I’m Angie, founder of Girl Geek X and welcome to Girl Geek Dinner at Blend. I’m really excited to be here. I’ve always walked by on Kearny and wondered what Blend was so I’m really excited to be in this space and hear from the amazing women here at Blend.

Gretchen DeKnikker: All right. I’m Gretchen. How many of you guys, this is your first Girl Geek Dinner? Oh, good amount, so we do these every single week at a different company obviously. We’re also doing on Friday, which is International Women’s Day. If you haven’t figured out a way to make your company buy you lunch, you have less than 48 hours to make that happen. We’re going to do an all day virtual conference. It’s going to be awesome, like amazing topics, technical talks, things on intersectionality, and systemic change, building high performance teams. All the stuff that you love from the Girl Geek dinners that will be personally curated. It’s like a Girl Geek dinner on steroids. You definitely want to come, and there’ll be video later. We also just released episode 5 of the new podcast, which is on … No, just like every channel.

Gretchen DeKnikker: It’s on mentoring or imposter syndrome or something. Anyway. There’s five of them now and so, check them out because we take stuff from the dinners and then, we add our opinions, of which we have many, onto them. They’re fun and give us feedback too because we’ve never done a podcast and they might totally suck. It’d be really cool if we learn that fast. All right, so we started doing this new thing. This will be the second week and who won last week cannot do it again. Okay, so if you’ve been to five Girl Geek dinners, raise your hand. Six, seven, eight, you can’t win again, nine. All right, you win. You get Girl Geek socks. Hold on. I have them right here. Oh, shit.

Gretchen DeKnikker: All right. We’ll get the other one. We have more socks but don’t kill Angie on the way out for them. Okay, so we’re excited for this especially the food, the dumplings were amazing. We ate them all. Thank you for coming and enjoy.

Internal Communications Lead Laney Erokan welcomes the sold-out crowd to Blend Girl Geek Dinner in San Francisco, California.

Laney Erokan: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Clicker. Hi, everyone. How you doing? I have something really exciting news to start with. There are two seats right up front. If you want to sit down way up close. There’s two seats and one there. Feel free to mingle around. My name is Laney Erokan. I run internal communications here at Blend. We are thrilled to have you here this evening. You’re going to hear some really great stories from my lovely ladies up here who I’ll get the pleasure of working with. If you don’t know Blend, we’re a software company that we partner with some of the world’s largest financial institutions like Wells Fargo and US Bank. We make it easier for people to get loans. That’s Blend.

Laney Erokan: I joined Blend two years ago this month. I wanted to come somewhere where I could build something special and I was ready in my career to go to a place where I could build out what I was going to do. I wanted to find out a way to help this really cool company work on their internal communications and the opportunity was too good to pass up. I made some errors. I had some wins but there was a really cool thing that I got to be a part of, which I think you only get to do when you’re at a company of about this size. I got to work with our executives and our founders on creating this cool book, called our Beliefs Book. When I joined, we had just rolled out our principles for the first time.

Laney Erokan: The company was four years old. I was the 120th employee. I just happened to get here right at that time. They said, “Well, you know how to write. You know to talk. Let’s take this and do something with it. Over the course of two years, we took our company principles and we refined them over and over. We did that in a couple different ways. We took input from employees. We had focus groups, had a Slack channel called Principles where you could drop in ideas or articles. You could create a web form where you could put any suggestions you might have about our principles of how we work together. Every quarter, I sat down with our founders and we reviewed the changes and we implemented them or we said, “Well work on this.” It was a really cool process.

Laney Erokan: Then, last year, they said, “Let’s make this a book.” I spent the last year sitting in a conference room with a variety of people, taking our principles and making them into a narrative. It’s called our Beliefs book. It was a really cool opportunity that if I was at a much bigger company, I wouldn’t have been able to touch them because they would’ve been written in stone on a wall somewhere. I got this really cool opportunity. That’s cool things that we get to do here at Blend. Anyways, this is a great place to be. It’s a great place to work. You’re going to meet some of my favorite women tonight.

Laney Erokan: A quick housekeeping note, we would love for you to ask questions but I ask that you hold them to the end. We’re going to have microphone runners and all of that at the end, but please hold them until all four people are done speaking. That’s it. On with the show. I would like to introduce our first speaker, product manager, Priya Nakra to share some experiences from the many different hats she’s worn here at Blend.

Product Manager Priya Nakra gives a talk on making the case for the work you want to do at Blend Girl Geek Dinner.

Priya Nakra: Awesome. Can everybody hear me okay? Good. Great, great, great. Cool. Thank you. When I was first asked to speak at this event and by the way, I think other people are starting like that but since I’m first just to pretend I trademarked it. When I was first asked to speak at tonight’s event, I was shocked and honored but also incredibly terrified. Not incredibly terrified in like the typically sense, “Oh, I’m scared to talk in front of a big group of people.” It’s more like terrified that on this panel of illustrious women, I would definitely be the speaker who was definitively less qualified. That’s the thing about imposter syndrome is that it hits you the hardest when the proof is literally right in front of you that you don’t need to feel like an imposter.

Priya Nakra: Still, it retains. It persists and it haunts you. Between this and having to write a blog post for the Blend website, shameless plug, it goes up next week. I even asked our content marketing team. I said, “Isn’t this too much? Isn’t this too much me talking about myself, my career? Aren’t people going to think I’m really full of myself?” I asked myself why am I doing this? Aren’t I opening myself up for scrutiny that I don’t really want? Isn’t everyone going to realize I don’t deserve to be here and that I’m a fraud?

Priya Nakra: My career at Blend has been a total whirlwind. Full of ups and downs, total roller coaster, full of moments and memories where I felt like the most qualified person in the room to when I felt like I could be fired tomorrow. All in a day, by the way. There are days when it feels like success just means survival. Just getting through the day. There are days where success means winning the competition and exceeding your own expectations. Then, there are days when you realize how much you’ve grown, how much you’ve learned, and proven to yourself that you are capable and worthy. Those are the days when I remind myself of where I started here at Blend.

Priya Nakra: The feeling I have on those days of accomplishment, and hope, and growth. That feeling and that realization is one of the reasons I’m really excited to speak to all of you today. How many of you have ever heard this phrase by show of hands? Anyone? How many of you have told yourself this phrase? Cool. Something in common. See that’s shared interest here. Okay, it took me a while to understand but being called technical is a spectrum. It means completely different things to completely different people all across industries. I had taken coding classes in school because my major was industrial engineering, but when I went to my first job in corporate consulting, you are either marked as functional or technical.

Priya Nakra: There wasn’t really anything in between. I was told by my manager several times that if I wasn’t learning how to code or actively with the engineers looking at code and debugging things or drawing systems architecture diagrams for our customers, I wasn’t technical. After four and a half years on the functional project management track, it was too late to try and be technical. That’s what I told myself when I joined Blend as well. Much to my initial chagrin and eventual appreciation, the deployment lead job that I took at Blend almost two years ago led me to our largest enterprise customer, which is Wells Fargo, who also happen to have the most complex and antiquated integration points.

Priya Nakra: I didn’t really have a choice but to at least learn the basics of how Blend could talk to other systems and their architecture in general. I started with a bare minimum. Understanding what systems Wells had. What systems we had. How we pass data from one system to another in order to support the process of the cycle of a loan. Then, I dabbled a little bit into air handling, alerting and monitoring, debugging some critical issues. It was essentially the equivalent of me tepidly dipping my toes into the really vast seat that is the technical world. It was at this time and during this project that our head of technical integrations, Irsal Alsanea, who’s also our only female engineer and group lead. She and I were sharing a glass of wine in sunny Des Moines, Iowa when we were at the Wells Fargo office.

Priya Nakra: We realized that we have these really symbiotic complementary strengths. She had a team of integration engineers who needed a lot of structure and I could provide that with my functional project management and in turn, I could learn a lot about what it means to manage technical products. It’s because of this and because of where Blend was as a company, she and I created together this enterprise integrations program manager role where I could, again, learn more about being technical and also provide a lot of structure for engineer. I’m extremely grateful that she took a chance on me on this and elevated me to the next level.

Priya Nakra: As the program manager for Blend’s enterprise integrations, I was managing all of our productized integrations with loan origination systems and CRMs. As well as managing any customer request. I know this is really riveting, bear with me. It was the first time I had any experience managing a technical project but I really did rely on my functional experience to provide some structure to the engineers. Things like helping them with capacity planning, getting better requirements on their tasks. As well as fielding any questions from customers and customer facing teams, so that they could focus on the actual code and development. During the initial stages of the role, I was pretty consistently overwhelmed every time I had to get on the phone or talk to a customer, partner and explain to them what it was like to build against our APIs and all the requirements that they needed.

Priya Nakra: I was pretty well prepared. I was doing my research on the side. I made a running list of engineering terms and added to it every time I heard a new one. Still haven’t quite figured out polymorphism. Don’t worry about it. It’s fine. Stack Overflow and Techopedia became my best friends and confidants. In the real time pressure of talking to engineers who at least acted like they know more than I did, it was really easy for me to doubt myself and shut down a bit throwing all my confidence I had and my skills out the window. It was at this time I again had a really lucky opportunity to work for Kelli Scott who is our head of services and support. She runs our professional services division. She was the perfect manager for me at the time because for every customer conversation that went awry or any bad experience I had with an engineer that made me feel less than, Kelli was always there to illustrate to me that I was capable.

Priya Nakra: That really, I just needed to focus on those muscles that I hadn’t been flexing before. Muscles like empathy for the end users and the developers who are building against our APIs. The folks who I was interacting with when were building these tools and also a keen eye on business process optimization. Most importantly, the muscles she encouraged me to flex was patience and empathy for myself. I remember a moment when during a particularly horrible partner call, after I admitted to the engineer on the phone that I’m not an engineer and don’t have quick access to the code. He stopped talking to me and calling me essentially a useless middleman, refused to speak to me any longer. Demanded to speak to one of the engineers on my team.

Priya Nakra: I was crushed, understandably. All this hard work had come to a halt. With Kelli’s help and mentorship and the lessons that she gave me, I put myself in the shoes of this particular engineer who himself was on the hook for delivering something to his boss. I also gave myself the time and the patience to ramp up on concepts I hadn’t been familiar with. Hopefully, the pattern is becoming clear in my career that with every new opportunity, every open door, I had a chance to learn something and push myself out of my comfort zone and prove my capabilities to other people and most importantly myself.

Priya Nakra: As I started gaining more confidence in the program manager role for integrations around Q3 of 2018, Blend’s first female product lead, Blair Martin also joined the company. She managed all integrations-related product builds. I remember even the first time we met, and I walked her through what I did on a day to day basis, how many customers I was the main point of contact for, how many integration patterns we scaled from one to many customers. Even on first meeting, just that first interaction, she said, “You’re already doing the job of a product manager, why aren’t you one?” I remember being really surprised but also quietly validated. The term product manager is a highly coveted position in the tech industry.

Priya Nakra: In the back of my mind, I was always wondered, could I be a good PM but surprise, surprise didn’t have the confidence to actually campaign for that position. I also told myself it was a far departure from what I was doing, I again wasn’t technical enough. Didn’t have the engineering resources or the chops, had never shipped a product. The excuses were endless as were the reasons to doubt myself. Between Blair’s product management leadership and her passion for growing PMs, especially new PMs and the work I had already done, managing multiple integrations and creating tooling and processes for other engineering teams to leverage, it became clear that the next step for me was to make my case to join the product team officially.

Priya Nakra: With Blair’s help and the consistent advocacy from people like Kelli, Irsal and other folks in the engineering and product org, I was able to step in to the PM role officially in September of last year. Since then, I’ve been able to launch internal and external tools, and truly build products that were API first. During my career at Blend, I’ve been incredibly lucky to find a circle of women who empowered me and believed in me, even and especially when I don’t believe in myself. This feeling and realization is also one of the reasons I volunteered to be the chair of our employee resource group, Women at Blend.

Priya Nakra: I realize if it hadn’t been for the people at Blend and primarily the women at Blend who believed in me during my time here, I wouldn’t be in the position I’m at today. I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to grow exponentially throughout my career. This made me really want to create these opportunities for other women at Blend and starting ERG-led initiatives like cross functional development, and mentorship sessions, I hope that I was able to help other women in Blend find another person or another circle to empower them. At the risk of sounding basic AF, the power of a girl squad is real and I wouldn’t be here without mine. Thank you.

Laney Erokan: Thank you so much, Priya. I love that story. Our next speaker is sales engineering manager, Ashley McIntyre. She’s going to take you through how she defined her career path and some counterintuitive lessons she learned along the way.

Sales Engineering Manager Ashley McIntyre gives a talk on finding your niche by identifying your strengths at Blend Girl Geek Dinner.

Ashley McIntyre: Thank you, Laney. Nervous. As I started preparing and really thinking about this event, and once we got the marketing material out there and I sent the Eventbrite link to a couple friends in the last two days. I didn’t want to advertise it too much lest they make too nervous. I kept coming back to what I had helped write in the description, which was Ashley’s going to talk to you about how to be what you … or how to figure out where you want to be when you grow up. Then, I realized I actually have no idea how to answer that question. Maybe I signed up for the wrong thing. The last time, I knew what I wanted to be when I grow up, I was five. I wanted to be an engineer.

Ashley McIntyre: Starting out an engineer, became an engineer but I wanted to be an astronaut. How do you tell that face that she’s not actually going to know what she wants to be when she grows up, but it’s going to be okay. Well, jump to the end there, I don’t know what I want to be and I have never had a dream job that I’ve been aiming towards as I go towards this path. I realize that a lot of times, people come to events like this and you hear these amazing stories of all the successes people have had but it’s hard to relate to those. It’s hard to say, “Oh, yeah. I can probably get there one day.” When I thought about this question and what I wanted to talk about, I realized that it might be more interesting for you all to hear about all of the nos. When I look at what actually ended up stringing my career path together, it is those nos that had a profound and positive impact on me but I didn’t realize that at time.

Ashley McIntyre: I want to share a couple stories with you all tonight about what that means and how I got here. To go back, my final year in college, I was coming out of an engineering degree at Berkeley and I couldn’t get a job. I went through on campus recruiting along with all of my peers and especially in that fall semester when you’ve got all the big companies who are hiring. I was in all of those meetings. I went to the career fairs. These jobs sounded amazing but I applied for all of them, and I got one call back for which I went to one interview, for which I got zero response. I didn’t even get a no. To the recruiters in the room, when you say no and actually formally end that relationship, it is so much better than you never getting back to us. I can tell you that.

Ashley McIntyre: That was hard. It raised a lot of questions for me as my peers were going into their spring semester with a job and I was trying to figure out if I’d ever be able to live in San Francisco and move across the bay, and achieve this dream. That question of am I capable? Do I have a path? I’m standing here at the edge of this cliff, what’s going to happen when I jump off in May was really hard to answer. I get to the very end. I get to April. I’m graduating in May and I end up taking the only job for which I got an offer. Hey, at least it was money. What that job was is I was commuting from Berkeley to San Francisco for a 6:00 AM shift to cold call people in New York and Pennsylvania, who would hang up on me if I couldn’t articulate myself in 45 seconds or less.

Ashley McIntyre: What that job turned into was something I never thought, especially at that time, that I’d be able to achieve, which was I ended up running one of the largest, most complex projects at that consulting company. A funny little side story on that is when I ultimately did decide to leave and I told that client that I was leaving, they’d actually almost forgotten that I didn’t work for them, that I work for the consulting company. They tried to hire me on the spot. We just heard about Priya’s experience with imposter syndrome. That’s one of the things honestly that I think back on when I feel that, which is still daily today, which I had a company that I didn’t even work for try to hire me because they didn’t want to lose me. Sometimes you need those boosts, especially when you’re coming from a job paying you $40,000 and you’re barely making a living to live in the city.

Ashley McIntyre: How did I get there? When I got to the consulting company, I leaned in. I worked hard. I did a lot of extra work and I made sure people knew Ashley’s name. I really try to do that by traveling and spending time in other offices. As I started working my way through the ranks, people started saying yes to me. There wasn’t that silence. There wasn’t that no. There was people who wanted to invest in my path. For me, that was one of the things that stands out as my first piece of counterintuitive career advice, which is sometimes, it’s better to stay than it is to go. A lot of times, you see people who are moving around from companies. There’s so many cool tech companies in the Bay Area and people tend to job hop a lot. A lot of times, maybe to increase their salary.

Ashley McIntyre: If you’ve got a company that’s investing in you, you’re never better set up for success than you will be with the rapport and the trust that you’ve built with them. Don’t underestimate those opportunities if they’ve shown that they’re willing to do that because every company is going to have their issues. In those four and a half years, I rose to a level that I didn’t predict that I’d ever have been able to and I don’t think I would’ve gotten those chances coming in without a record of trust. Coming out after that time, there did come a time when I wasn’t as excited about my path upward anymore. Then, I said no to the company. I decided it was time to look for my next job.

Ashley McIntyre: What I didn’t realize was that it was going to be back at the edge of that cliff. Another demoralizing seven months before I started that next job where I was sending out cover letters and resumes after my full time job, getting no responses. I had no idea if people were going to hire me for a job that I didn’t have. I was successful in my current role but I wanted to move to something else. That wasn’t defined at that time and nobody would even call me back for that. Where I struggled with that is I didn’t know how I was going to get my in. That came to my second piece of counterintuitive advice, which is sometimes that close work friend or your work wife leaving to go to another company can be one of the best things for you because that network may bring you on to that next challenge or that next role.

Ashley McIntyre: That ended up being how I got that next role. I’d sat down and started thinking about what I loved about my day to day job. I found that my planning sessions with my customer at the end of each year where we talk about the next contract, educating them as to the vision and how we could actually deploy these features and these products that they could use was one of my favorite things to do. That to me started pointing me towards sales engineering, sitting at the crossroads of people and technology. Then, when my friend reached out about the open sales engineer role, I went in there. I was so excited. I think both that warm referral and my interest helped lead me to get that job. Then, that company said yes to me.

Ashley McIntyre: I started at that job and a similar story here. I leaned in. I worked hard and I started seeing success. A year and a half in, I was gaining traction. I was put in a leadership role. I was going to have the opportunity to build a team for the first time, which was I so nervous about but excited about. Then, one day, I made a mistake. I made a huge mistake that ended up losing the trust of my colleagues and it ended up costing me my job. My company was going through some layoffs at that time and my mistake caused them to say, “You know what, you’re no longer a part of this team.” What have I done? The questions immediately sprung up, the shame, the embarrassment, the confusion, can I do this? Am I following a path? Did they just blow the bridge in front of me? What have I done and how am I going to get through this?

Ashley McIntyre: If anybody knows that feeling in the pit of your stomach after your breakup, when you hear your former partner’s first name and that knot opens up into a bottomless pit, that’s what it felt like for about a week. It was not pretty. I was scared. I did a lot of crying and I was really ashamed. It was really hard telling people that I actually had a role in this. I was really upset with myself. Then, one day about a week later, I woke up and realized I’ll be fine. I’m not going to let this be the reason that I say no to myself. I’m not going to cut off my own path here and I’m not going to let this lapse in judgment but learning experience stop me from continuing to learn from it. What I realized in that time and as I move forward is I realized that this time I actually had all the time in the world to find my next job, to find the next right thing. That’s what I started doing.

Ashley McIntyre: I sat down and I thought, and a couple things started coming to mind. The first was that I needed to capitalize on a job that had both a combination of strengths, and my interests where it played to those things, I knew that I would be the most successful, so I wanted to hone in on those roles. The second was even though I don’t think I am sometimes, I’m pretty darn smart and capable but my resume and my profile may not be what the sexiest, highest valuation tech companies or the biggest brand names actually want. That’s okay. Ultimately, I feel more at home as a big fish in a small pond rather than the other way around. Realizing that and really embodying it was one of the first times I actually felt the power of that because I kept judging myself when friends would talk about the coolest companies that they’re at.

Ashley McIntyre: Really, that didn’t mean they necessarily liked the culture of that company or felt motivated, or felt that they were in a place that they could grow, but they just had the brand name. I realized that that was going to be enough for me. I realized every time I saw rejection come up, it was quick to follow when I was focusing on other people’s strengths. I needed to focus back on my own. Ultimately, the challenges best suited to me where the ones in the environments where I was happiest and so, I started using those things as my guiding star throughout this job hunt. That’s not to say that that job hunt was easy either. There was 35 conversations that I had over two months as I tried to really expand my network and give it a chance. Then, one day, I found Blend.

Ashley McIntyre: I’ve been here for about two years now, which is crazy to me because as I look back at my opportunities here. I came in as an individual contributor on a small team of two people. Blend gave me a chance as a new manager last January and I now have a team of six that report up to me. I’m learning these new challenges as a new people manager but also in a growing company that you’ve heard a little bit about here. The reason that I came here was not because I thought Blend had a chance of being a name brand. It wasn’t for any reason other than when I interviewed with this team, I thought I saw those core values of mine reflected back at me. That wasn’t something I wanted to ignore. I leaned in and even though each time, I left the interview process asking is mortgage even interesting? Do I want to do this for another five years? Because that’s what I wanted. I wanted to go somewhere where I could be there for five years.

Ashley McIntyre: Ultimately, even though I wasn’t sure if everything was going to be perfect, those values and the people were what I knew I needed to invest in this time around, which brings us here. In summary, I wanted to go back to the woman standing at the end of the cliff when she was leaving college, and not sure what she was going to do. If I had to summarize a couple things for her to take with her on this journey from what I’ve learned, what I’d try to say, though I honestly don’t think she’d listen to me knowing her insecurities as well as I do. The three things are there are benefits to be had personally and professionally to grinding it out at a company for a few years. Getting a lot of experience, taking roles that you didn’t think you would take when you first start at that job.

Ashley McIntyre: Invest in those companies when you can because they’re investing in you. Second, is embrace every no along the way and cherish those yeses. When you hear the yeses, celebrate them and keep working your ass off. Third, just because you may not feel like you have a path today, you may not have a dream job. You may not know where you are in your journey, doesn’t mean that somebody won’t one day ask you to get up in front of a large group and have you fail miserably at answering the question, what do you want to be when you grow up? Thank you.

Laney Erokan: Thank you, Ashley, so much and I’m so glad you said yes to Blend. All right. Next up, I like to bring up our product design manager Eunice Noh, who not only is going to talk to you about her career choices that she’s made along the way, but she also was the third woman hired at Blend. I think that’s really cool. About four years ago, she joined the company and she’s learned a lot in the meantime so here we go.

Product Design Lead Eunice Noh gives a talk on how thoughtful design can drive collaboration throughout company stages at Blend Girl Geek Dinner.

Eunice Noh: She’s going to help me progress my slides because I have notes in my hand. Well, I’m grateful to be able to be up here sharing my story. Honestly, if you asked me 10 years ago, if I would be up here and have the opportunity to speak to all of you, I would not have thought this would be a reality. Thank you all for being here. Different from Ashley, from a young age, I knew I wanted to be a designer. I probably did not know what that actually entailed and one of my school assignments in middle school, and I’m sure if any of you had this as well was to write a letter to your future self. That letter would actually be mailed to you after you graduated high school.

Eunice Noh: When I received mine after I graduated, I’d completely forgotten what I had written and was pretty surprised that I said I wanted to be a designer. Not pretty surprised that I wanted to have two dogs so two out of three so far. Working on the second dog, trying to convince my fiance right now to get one. He’s not down. One of the things that stuck out to me most in that letter was the last thing I wrote to myself, which was don’t be too hard on yourself. I think I was a pretty wise kid actually. It made me realize that I struggled with self criticism at a very early age. When I was preparing for this talk, there’s about four moments in my life that stood out that I realized that the common thread in each and every moment was that I was really out of my comfort zone while still struggling with self doubt and self criticism.

Eunice Noh: The first one I’m sure most of us have gone through is going to college. There were a lot of thoughts leading up to that day, that first day. Am I going to like my roommate that I’m sharing a boxed room with? Am I going to make any new friends? How am I going to do this without my parents? Am I majoring in the right thing and so on. I was really nervous and scared already to start this venture. This is … actually, go to the next one sorry. This is a photo I actually found on my Facebook that while I was watching the news with my dad before starting college, it said top five useless majors. Just to clarify, I majored in fine arts with an emphasis in graphic design at USC. Not only did I have one but I had two up there.

Eunice Noh: Going into that, I was even more scared to start school. I really didn’t want to mess it up. School isn’t cheap. I really didn’t want to disappoint my parents and so, I definitely was in a little bit of a panic when I started. Reflecting back, I think I took a lot different, non-traditional path from most of my classmates and friends. During finals week, most of them were huddled in libraries studying for exams and I was huddled in the studio with paint all over my hands trying to finish my final art project in time. I think also too, a lot of them were getting internships to secure their careers. For me, I had … it wasn’t really that clear for me. Product design, how many people are designers out there in the room? Woohoo, okay. Just a few. Yeah, let’s stick together.

Eunice Noh: I think product design hasn’t been around for very long. It started in the ’90s but there’s so many titles. UI, UX, interaction, web design, and it didn’t really become well known until more recently. Also, in school, there wasn’t really a curriculum or a major that was really teaching us this experience as well. So I knew that I had a lot of work cut out for me to figure this out. I used internships mostly to figure out what I didn’t like. I actually had about six to eight internships while I was in college. Anything from fashion design, wedding event planning, and working for free for a lot of small startups. When I was going to school, free internships was a very common thing for most of us.

Eunice Noh: It wasn’t until I worked at a small startup as a web designer that I was really intrigued by the startup culture so I started spending a lot of my nights, instead of going out partying, drawing mocks of fake websites that I would come up with so I definitely don’t want to share with you those concepts that I actually worked on. After that, my final leap to my junior year, I heard about this new incubator program in New York that was hosted by General Electric and OMD, which is a small … I mean it’s not a small … an advertising agency. It’s a 10-week immersive program for 20 students who are aspiring to be entrepreneurs. I thought it wouldn’t hurt to apply. I honestly did not think I was going to hear back from them at all. I got selected so I packed my bags, moved to New York for three months before my senior year.

Eunice Noh: Again, so many self doubting thoughts the entire time leading up to the program. I was a broke college student in New York, barely turned 21 and this was the first time I had to interact with anyone that was over the age of 35. Now, that I’m older, 35 is very young. I didn’t know how to carry myself, what to wear, how to sound when talking because I thought my voice was too high. What to eat in front of them during lunch? I was honestly really nervous and frankly really scared. I woke up every day with butterflies in my stomach but also this uncomfortable pit in my stomach. You know, there was only one other woman in the program with me out of 20 and so, when I looked around and saw the men walking around, they had such confidence. Joking around with the execs, like seeming to have a really great time and not afraid to show their personalities. For me, I didn’t even know if I deserve to be there.

Eunice Noh: At the end of the internship or the actual program, there was a demo day where you had to pitch your idea. It was in front of the group of execs from GE and OMD. One of the requirements was that everyone had to talk. I wasn’t going to get out of that. My partner and I before we’re about to present, I threw up in the trashcan outside of the room. That was a really great start. To be honest, I really don’t remember how the presentation went because I’m pretty much sure I blacked out the entire time. But you know what, it was an exhilarating rush and I knew that I loved what I had and it was like a glimmer of hope for me that I deserved to be there. I realized though that I had one more year in school.

Eunice Noh: I decided at that moment that I wanted to graduate early. I’m sorry. I keep missing the slides, sorry. I knew I wanted to graduate early so I did everything I can to make sure I graduated in one more semester. After I graduated, I joined an accelerator program that led me to receive a seed round for my startup. They gave us the stability to build out our business. We hired two engineers and moved to San Francisco, which is where we are today. To be honest, I had a couple of years that I was in a very, very, very scrappy startup. I’m sure a lot of those few folks out there have experienced this. I found myself … actually, I missed a lot of Coachellas, a lot of Vegas trips. The struggle was really real.

Eunice Noh: At the time, that was really important to me. I was really, really bummed out that I wasn’t able to go on those trips. There was also a lot of really late nights till 4:00 AM but we were just figuring it out as we went. I was working on handling customer service, designing the product, teaching myself how to code so that we could have a working website. It was really hard to see if I was growing because we were learning on our own and everybody else that was around me was going through the same thing. We were just honestly just a group of new grads with zero experience running a business trying to run a business.

Eunice Noh: At the same time, still trying to figure out who we were outside of school. We were fortunate enough that we started to do pretty well, started to grow the team and we were profitable in two years. At that point, I was exhausted mentally and physically. At the time too, design didn’t really have a seat at the table. I find myself fighting for the value and importance of design and because I was the only designer, I felt like I was fighting for myself. Even though I co-founded the company, as well, I started to doubt myself and I convinced myself that I wasn’t right for the team, and ended up deciding to leave the company.

Eunice Noh: I wanted to make an impact, so again, having that seat at the table…. At the time, I thought product management was the only way you’re going to get that seat. I started to look for jobs in product management. Without even really thinking about if that role was right for me. Reflecting back, I learned two things. First, PM-ing is very, very hard, so shout out to all the PMs out there. I really appreciate everything that you do. Second, I realize that now I was trying to make myself right for this role for the wrong reasons. I wasn’t happy. I really enjoyed the parts of product management that was more around the experience and design. I thought if I just stuck it out that it would get better but it didn’t.

Eunice Noh: Also, in hindsight, the culture at that company felt like everybody was fending for themselves rather than working together. About after two years, I thought it wouldn’t hurt to look around and do what I love, which was product design. That’s when I was fortunate enough to work, come here, and work at Blend in the beginning of 2015. I’ve been here for about four years now. I remember my onsite at Blend, I thought I totally bombed the interviews so I called my boyfriend being like, “Well, that was terrible.” Had ready have made up my mind that they weren’t going to call me back. I ended up getting the job. When I joined, the company was still small. There was only about 30 people and I was the first woman hired in all of the EPD, which is engineering product and design team.

Eunice Noh: At first, it felt like everyone in this company really cared about what they were doing and the mission. It wasn’t just a job for them. Honestly, that was truly intimidating and motivating at the same time but I knew I had a lot to prove. People were taking so much time out of their day to onboard me and to make me feel part of the team, which is up here. This is actually a little bit further along when we’re about 60 people. Part of that was requiring us to run meetings on our own and to lead discussions. That was really scary for me. I was in fear every day that I was going to get fired, similar to Priya. I guess we’re all in it together.

Eunice Noh: One of the things that we had every Thursday was to do a design review in front of the entire company. Every morning on Thursday, I would wake up sick to my stomach knowing that I had to present in front of 50 people, which is now I’m presenting in front of more of you. This is … you know that I’m nervous. Speaking up in meetings was really hard for me. There is an analogy I like to use. I’m not sure if everyone feels this way but when I’m on a plane and I’d like the window seat, I think the entire time on the plane wondering when I’m going to use the bathroom. I’m like, “Okay, I’m going to go now. Should I wake up my neighbor? Am I going to get stuck in front of the beverage cart?”

Eunice Noh: By the time I convince myself that I’m ready to go to the bathroom, they’re like, “Seat belts, please.” You got to hold it for another 30 minutes. It’s not a good feeling. It’s really not. I think that’s similar in meetings. I work myself in my head and I’m trying to figure out exactly what I’m going to say and making sure that what I say is not stupid and should I talk now? Should I wait till the person’s finished his talking and a million other questions in my head. By the time I get the confidence to actually say something, the meeting has ended. Everyone’s already moving out of the room. It’s very vulnerable. I was very, very, very vulnerable. Luckily, different from any of the past companies I worked for, I had a great support system through my manager and then an outlet to talk to a lot of women during our Blend ladies’ night out. Having people to help build that confidence and give you those light nudges and support from people around me.

Eunice Noh: I’ve been a manager at Blend now for about two years and did not previously think I wanted to be one. I told myself that it wasn’t for me, that I wanted to be an IC and my manager really told me multiple times to give it a shot and that I would make a great manager. That was I was the right person for the role. I didn’t believe in myself at the time but I’m so grateful that I had someone that did. I find it truly rewarding now to work with incredibly amazing talented designers and see them grow. As manager today, I strive to be like my manager to give support and help build confidence for every single person on my team. I’ve realized that building confidence differs per person, that being thrown into the deep end might not always be for everybody.

Eunice Noh: I still struggle with self criticism and self doubt. I know that it’ll be something that I deal with for the rest of my life. It’s really easy to be your own biggest critic and when in the moment and working but looking back at the past 10 years, I’m grateful for all the experiences and people that had been part of my journey that have shaped who I am today. To end, if I were to write a letter to my future self today, I think I would remind myself of a few things. First, you can’t do it alone. We need to support one another. I see it time and time again, women being more harsh to other women but it’s a responsibility for us to support each other. Second, vulnerability is a strength and not a weakness.

Eunice Noh: When you hear that voice of insecurity in your head, just tell them to shut up. Vulnerability might make us feel less confident but I actually believe it’s our greatest mark of confidence. Third, simply do what you love. We’re fortunate enough to live in a world in the tech industry that people support what you want to do and your actual development as well. Fourth, I’ll take from my eighth grade self, don’t be so hard on yourself. Thank you.

Laney Erokan: Thank you, Eunice. Is it good? [inaudible]. All right. Well, I’m getting on a flight in a couple hours and I’m definitely going to think twice about where to sit because I don’t want to wake up my neighbor. Our final speaker of the evening is Crystal Sumner, who’s our head of legal and compliance. She’s going to come up and talk to you a bit about her career in the legal profession.

Head of Legal & Compliance Crystal Sumner gives a talk on taking action to create a more balanced workforce at Blend Girl Geek Dinner.

Crystal Sumner: Hi everyone. Super thrilled to be here tonight. To start the same way that Priya did, when I was asked to speak to everyone tonight, Sarah came up to me and she’s like, I really want you to say … give the inspirational ending. She’s like, “You’re one of two female execs at Blend. I’m sure you have lots of words of wisdom for people in the room.” Maybe it had been a really long day, maybe another depressing news cycle, I turned to her and I was like, “Can I just talk about why we’re not there yet?” She was like, “Sure.” I sat down and when I went to write this speech, it was like, “Well, that’s really A, not very inspirational and two, not very helpful.”

Crystal Sumner: When I started thinking about where there was lots of things basically where I grew up, the steps that I’ve taken, the mentors I’ve met, my support system that I actually do think have helped me get to the place I am today. While, I will always say there’s still a ton of work for us to be doing to advance women and represent minorities in the workplace. I think there’s definitely some tools–very practical as a lawyer–that we could all have to help us progress in our career. I grew up in Texas and very traditional Texas. They care. They make up. We’re talking Dynasty, not the remake, like the 1980s Dynasty type Texas where again, make up, hair, and women should know their place.

Crystal Sumner: By that, I mean that you don’t interrupt the men. The men are having conversations and women should sit in the corner and listen. I think that type of environment can do one of two things. You can either mold to it or you can completely reject it. If anyone knows me today, they will know that I very quickly rejected it. At a pretty early age, I mean I was pretty much a terror as a child but I remember telling my father’s male friends that adults, you needed to earn my respect. I wasn’t just automatically going to respect you. I remember seeing the little girl standing up to the Wall Street bull, that’s how I remember feeling as a little girl just because I felt very much like this wasn’t who I was supposed to be.

Crystal Sumner: I put my head down, I studied hard. Played sports, got a full ride. I was a first generation college grad. Set me up for success and being able to go to law school. I still think back and I still tell my father that that experience really set me up for being successful in what is a very male-dominated field of both law and tech. Because very early on, I found my voice. I think people find it at different times and people can figure out the right ways to find their voice and express their opinion. I do think finding your voice is so fundamental to being successful in the workplace because so many people are afraid and I think that’s totally natural but that is what’s going to help build that foundation for success.

Crystal Sumner: After leaving Texas, I ended up going to Berkeley. Talk about culture shock. I immediately ended up in Walnut Creek because I wanted fast food and malls, and everything that felt like home. I also very immediately found that this was my vibe. Partially because at Berkeley and this was one of the first years that there were actually more female law students than men, which was pretty awesome. I was also finally surrounded by a bunch of smart, motivated, just kick ass women who were leading the pack. While I learned a lot of things in law school about how to become a lawyer kind of, the biggest thing that I found was my support system. These women behind me, originally was talking about outlines, dates, those types of things. As soon as we graduated and to this day, I texted them last night this picture. This is my system that I lean on.

Crystal Sumner: Whether we’re talking about should we take that next job, how should I’ve taken that feedback that really sounded gendered. What do I do to my next step? These are the people that I turn to. That doesn’t mean and you’ll see my next part that you won’t have mentors. I think having that group that it could be men, women, whoever that is the people that you can rely on. For the past 11 years, it’s definitely been this. I feel like I couldn’t be where I am today without having this support system. Find your support system.

Crystal Sumner: After I graduated, I actually went to a top law firm in California where again, very similar to law school, 50-50, a lot of women entering just as much as the men but I very quickly saw that while there was a lot of female associates, there was not a whole lot of female partners. In fact, out of a law firm about 1000, 10% of these partners were women, which seems pretty crazy. I was like, “Well, it takes a long time to be partner. Maybe it’s like systematic that back from the old days, I’m sure it’s going to change.” Again, I put my head down. Found eight mentors, a junior male partner, a senior female counsel, who helped open doors and got me on some of the best cases.

Crystal Sumner: Then, when it was time for me to find my next job, they were the references that helped me in that next step. Again, this is my first job in corporate America but I very quickly realized that finding your mentors and advocates could be whoever it is. That is really going to help open the door, not only for that job but for your next position. After a couple of years, you see every three years I’d like to mix it up. I decided to go to a government startup, which sounds really weird because government startup just aren’t things that go together. At the time, after the 2008 financial crisis, there was a new agency being started by this Harvard professor that I’ve kind of heard of, Elizabeth Warren. It was really cool because she was still there at the time before she ran for senate.

Crystal Sumner: When I applied and got the offer, I remember very distinctly my hiring manager at the time, which was Richard Cordray, who went on to lead the bureau said, “Your offer seems really low. I’d really negotiate it.” I had never negotiated a salary because when you enter a law firm, it’s just fixed, flat. Everyone makes the same thing. You don’t have to worry about is someone making more or less. It’s just everyone starts. I was really proud of myself because I negotiated a $12,000 raise, like additional 12% I think at the time or 10%. I was one of those things where I was like, “Oh, I’m glad he gave me that advice.” Why would I not do that? What’s interesting and again, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the whole mission of this is transparency and fairness in consumer finance.

Crystal Sumner: Fast forward a couple of years, everyone’s salary is actually public and you hear rumblings when you started looking at people’s salaries. This person same years experience makes more. There actually was … I love the bureau but there was an investigation. The office of inspector general report that showed that women and minorities had actually statistically been paid less at the bureau. They didn’t find there was a discriminatory intent, but it just went to show you that even at these government agencies, that are really focused on protecting consumers than have been at the right moral compass, you still have this disparity in pay. My takeaway was negotiate, negotiate, negotiate. All the studies show, the 20%, 30% less women and just generally negotiate less.

Crystal Sumner: Studies have also shown that you could be leaving up to $2 million on the table by failing to negotiate. It was so eye opening to me and ever since then, every job I’m probably a huge pain in the ass because I essentially in the back of my mind, I refuse to make that 80 cents to a dollar of my male colleague. I’m going to push as hard as I can. I don’t need to make more … I don’t need to make more but I definitely need to be equally paid to my male colleague. I just encourage everyone when you’re applying to negotiate, I tell every person on my team, I’ve had a couple that didn’t negotiate as soon as I started. Next time, please negotiate for your salary because it’s expected.

Crystal Sumner: When I moved back to San Francisco, I was actually still working for the government. I decided that instead of suing people, which is fun at times. I really wanted to build something. I went in to tech. You think San Francisco, super progressive, but you do realize that not all tech companies are created equal. I really wanted to identify companies that cared about culture, cared about diversity, belonging, and inclusion. I joined Blend similar to my other colleagues quite early when it was about 50 people. It was lovely because as soon as I started, they actually had around 60 people, hired a Head of People and at 100 or 200 they hired a diversity, belonging, and inclusion leader.

Crystal Sumner: I’ve worked at two tech companies both actually who had a strong focus on this. What I saw was that, if you’re not working at it and thinking about it, it’s not actually going to get better. That also even in companies like that, there is still so much room for improvement. One of the things that I talk with the women here and we’re actually doing a listening sessions are how we hold each other accountable. It shouldn’t just be on women and underrepresented minorities to drive that path, it should be an every person at the company and especially the leaders of the company. I just want to encourage everyone because I do think we’re not there yet to really use your position to drive influence and change to help make it a better workplace.

Crystal Sumner: For me, I actually had really fortunate, unfortunate for this picture, an opportunity this year when a law firm, Paul, Weiss, which is a very large international law firm announced their partner class, which as you can see is 11 white men and a white woman. I’m on a general counsel network thread that blew up. Fast forward, it had been almost 10 years since I had started a law firm thinking, “Oh, the reason why there’s 10 percent women is just because it was back in the old days. There are women not starting but no, 10 years later, nothing had changed.”

Crystal Sumner: What I did with 170 women and men general counsel was write a letter. It was talked about in New York Times, talked about on law.com that said, “Embrace diversity or lose our money.” I have a half million dollars in budget that I can spend. If you law firms are not actually making this an effort, and not trying to make a more inclusive place to work, I don’t need to work with you. I’ve received probably 30, 40 letters from law firms talking about what they’re trying to do. It was one of those fortunate and unique positions that I could be in and use this position to try and drive change. Not only in my company but also hopefully with all the other law firm that they’re working.

Crystal Sumner: It’s one small area to drive change but I think if everyone is using their position to try to do that, that we can try to make a difference here. I’m out of breath because I’ve been talking all day [inaudible]. I think what I just want to leave you with is we all have a place and role in this. Drive towards that and hold the people that you’re working with accountable. I’m happy to answer questions as we wrap up.

Laney Erokan: Thank you, Crystal. That was awesome.

Mariam: Hi. My name is Mariam. Thank you so much for all your stories and vulnerability. It was really relatable. I know it’s not easy to get up in front of a group and just share vulnerabilities and stories where you haven’t done great and awesome. That’s really helpful. My question was actually coming off the heels of Crystal’s talk and how equal pay day was on the 8th or was it … my days are off. I think there was a recent policy that got passed that on a Monday that companies that have a hundred employees or more are now required to report to the EEOC gender and race pay, basically how much they pay all their employees based off of gender and race. That was awesome and a great victory.

Mariam: I was wondering, there’s certain companies like Blackrock and others that take this incumbent on themselves to go ahead and take the data, and analyze it and see where they’re at as a company. Are there initiatives like that at Blend and do you see more popping up and what are your thoughts on that?

Crystal Sumner: It’s definitely a conversation that we have had and I think there’s two different things that you can do in this space. One, we have very rigid bands that we look at to make sure that people that are in the same roles are being paid the same amount of money. I’m a lawyer and so there’s a lot of statistical reasons why larger companies actually have a better way of doing that but it’s something that I think as we’re now hitting more than 350-400, you have to have the right data points and the right number of women and minorities across subsets to make sure that you can be assessing that there’s actually equal pay being going on. It’s definitely something that as we’ve had listening sessions and it’s an ongoing conversation that we have had specifically because it’s something that we care about. I think again, as a smaller stage company because you didn’t … would have one person in design and one person here, it was harder to do that.

Crystal Sumner: We try to make sure that we had bands because I think that is the fairest way when you don’t actually have a bunch of different people within a particular role. It’s something that I clearly am very passionate about. It was very eye opening at the government, everyone was being … you could see literally every person’s salary. Very clearly, there were people who just made drastically more and it was very unclear as to why.

Audience Member: Would you say that white privilege has helped you in your career path and if so, how?

Crystal Sumner: Of course, I mean … sorry. Do you think white privileged has helped you in your career path and why? I’m like 100%. I definitely … I think that I would be completely missing the point to not understand that there is privilege associated with being a white woman. I would even just saying always as a white woman and I grew up in a very lower middle class family but especially now as like a wealthy, white woman, it is something that … I’m so cognizant of sometimes that just … I think especially from where I grew up that it’s something that I definitely think helps me in my career and it makes me want to do more and give back. Also, be sure that we’re creating an even more inclusive and diverse environment as we work.

Ashley McIntyre: I would agree 100%. I’m incredibly lucky for that privilege but also have tried in the last many years to really recognize that. You look at all of the research and if you do all the reading on diversity and biases, nobody can really be bias-free. When you start acknowledging them and working with them, that’s when you can start combating a lot of the unconscious biases. Especially now as a manager, I am lucky that I do have the position to interview broad swaths of people. I coach people on my team and I’m really trying to learn about them and especially based on their backgrounds and all of the influences that put them where they are today, how I can help them get to their goals.

Ashley McIntyre: This is new for me in a leadership role but it’s something that I am committed to doing as I continue in my career because I 100% ended up in a lot of these opportunities because of that. That doesn’t mean other people can’t end up there as well.

Audience Member: Hello. [inaudible]. Hi everybody. Thank you guys for your talk. One thing that I wanted to talk about was it’s huge in the tech industry, intersectionality. How do you address that not only in the meetings that you attend but also with your teams because being leaders, you have to also push this message down to the other woman that look up to you in some respects. How do you address that? It’s kind of twofold, like yourself and then, within your team. How do you address intersectionality without being overbearing like I’m a woman, rah, rah, rah?

Crystal Sumner: I think there was some lack of clarity but are you talking about the intersectionality in terms of both women and other … go ahead.

Audience Member: Yeah. Okay, so I guess I didn’t clarify. Intersectionality just in general but also in the room with predominantly males. It’s not a secret that all of us are in this tech industry and it’s still mostly male dominated. I recently switched careers. I came from the IT background, so white male dominated. It’s like been my life. Then, now, I’m recruiting tech industry, same difference. Addressing in not only with the men that you work with like your peers up and down, but then also the people that you lead because that’s probably more important. A lot of the work that we’re doing now for diversity, equity, and inclusion probably won’t affect us but it’ll affect the people that we’re bringing up, our kids and our kid’s kids, et cetera, et cetera. I hope that that’s more clear.

Priya Nakra: I think the short answer is, at least in my stage here, I’m still usually the only woman in the room. It’s not like–there aren’t a ton of opportunities where you can–obviously if you’re with other women and you’re noticing that they’re getting cut off, you would want to say actually can we let Eunice speak or Crystal speak or something like that. There’s a lot of techniques around how to be an ally to women in the workplace. If you’re the only woman in the room pretty consistently, it’s hard to be … especially me so someone who has imposter syndrome, I’m not going to be like, “Hey can you stop talking until I can talk.” I don’t have the confidence for that. I will say if people have been … men have been really receptive sometimes, some men, not all men. Some men have been really receptive if you could just point something out.

Priya Nakra: Even in a Slack channel, like having a conversation with a male counterpart but then, having that male counterpart, put it in a public channel that … yeah, we can do this too and it’s like actually I told you that idea. Then, having calmly calling, not calling them out but being like actually we really would appreciate it if you gave me that credit or gave some other woman that credit because that was the idea. Obviously, a lot of people are more receptive to it than others. I would think it’s just a small things about … a lot of men in the workplace do want to understand how to be an ally especially when I was the chairwoman at Blend, the ERG group. We had a lot of people, a lot of men who were just quietly in the channels and wondering how they can be an ally and wanted to get those resources. You just have to find those champions and hope that those champions will permeate that message across their male circles as well. I don’t know if that really answered your question but it’s just like one tactic that I help promote intersectionality.

Crystal Sumner: Yeah. I would say that again, I’m one of two female execs on executive teams so I take that role quite seriously. I remember there was a week or two in which I had a lot of women. I think it just happened to come give me some feedback but I took to heart and Jonathan who’s back there on the executive team as well. I brought it up at the executive team. We can do better. What was so refreshing, again, I don’t even know if we still had our … we’d hired our head of product who’s a female at that time so I might’ve been the only female in that room was the number of men executives who echoed and talked about how we can improve as an executive team and be the leaders and examples of that. I think that again, I always go by using the position that you have. It could be in the executive team. It could be on the manager level as you indicated to just try and surface if you’re hearing messages. Also, pushing everyone to be better. It’s not for just women. Women or under represented minorities across the board.

Eunice Noh: Yeah. I think the last thing I’d add to is I’m used to being the only woman in the room as well. Then, that’s slowly changing over time. It’s just continuing education, right. A lot of these people in the room don’t even know those things that you feel and when you kind of be vulnerable and explain those things, they’re like, “Oh, my gosh. I had no idea.” I think instead of getting really upset like I used to be like that where I’d be like, “This is ridiculous. I’m being mansplained.” Knowing that we’re part of the movement right now, we aren’t going to make change by complaining and getting upset about it that it’s because they need to be educated and we need to continue to remind people that the first time you say it is not going to click.

Eunice Noh: We need to continue to let people know about how you’re feeling because again, their intentions are not bad at the end of the day. If they were, they probably shouldn’t be working there. Their intentions are good and so, if you just explain that and continue to educate, I think we’ll start to see some changes.

Audience Member: Hi. Thank you so much for your stories. I was wondering how did you know if you wanted to be a people manager versus an individual contributor?

Eunice Noh: I can share a little bit more color with that story. I did not want to be one at all. I had an opportunity here where the head of design had left and a new head of design needed to fill the role and really wanted me to do that. To be honest, I think it took me just taking a chance and a leap that I knew I could always go back to being an IC. I was just more concerned about my career. I was like I want to grow myself. I don’t want to have to worry about anyone else. To be honest, I’ve learned and grown so much more just being around other people who are even more talented than I am. To be able to have them look at me for advice or feedback. I actually just took as a leap of faith. Try it out and see if you don’t like it because you can always go back and you can always do what you liked before. You will never know unless you try.

Ashley McIntyre: I wanted to add to this because now that I’ve had a year plus in a people manager role, I have so much more context on what it is compared to what I thought it would be. The one thing that I would love to share with you all is just there’s no difference between … you can be a leader whether or not you are a manager with direct reports. That’s one of the biggest things that I would emphasize here is that having direct reports and being a manager comes with both driving vision and leading a team and coaching them. It comes with the responsibility to giving them the hard feedback. When they’re upset or when they’re don’t feel that they’re being paid equitably or something else, you’re also dealing with that side of things. Understanding and knowing that you want to practice that and work on that with people is important before you jump into those positions. I definitely thought a people manager role was just a leader role. I thought I was that head of this pack helping to set vision but you don’t necessarily plan for those other things.

Ashley McIntyre: Thinking about that is really important because people can still and this is something I really like about Blend is Crystal talked about those bands. We look at individual contributors and managers differently but they actually have scales that overlap where it’s possible for an individual contributor here at Blend to make more than a manager. We try to embrace leadership that actually fits the skill set and the role that you’re playing. The only way up doesn’t have to be acquiring a team of direct reports. I’d say think about a lot of those things. Think about if you want to be coaching and managing people. Really, if they’re unhappy and thinking about quitting or if they want a raise, is that a conversation you want to have or do you want to be a leader in another way? Those are some of the things that I’ve learned that have helped me get clarity on what it is and what it may not be.

Audience Member: Hi. I think Priya had talked a little bit about being at an early stage company and feeling like sometimes as part of your day, you’re just trying to survive the day. I think part of that chaos you can get stuck in just trying to survive over and over, and not taking a step back and thinking about your longer term career growth or what kind of skills you want to develop. Especially at early stage companies, there’s not always that clear mentor or person who can be an advisor to you about continuing to grow your skills. I was just wondering, sorry not to [inaudible] … I was wondering if you could give some advice as to how you found your mentors as you navigated these jobs. Especially at early stage companies where there isn’t that clear mentor or the company doesn’t always put as much focus on how can we develop you when everyone’s in this survival mode getting through the chaos.

Priya Nakra: Sure. The short answer is I got extremely lucky. Right place, right time a lot of the times. Especially when I first met Irsal and then, Kelli and Blair, et cetera. When I joined Blend, they did set me up with a mentor who’s an engineering manager now and he actually got to … he is working for Irsal. He’s also been a really, really incredible mentor. I think–I don’t know if this is going to help, but honestly, I never actively seeked mentorship. I just worked hard at my job and it presented me with a lot of opportunities to collaborate with other people. I think the most consistent thing about my career has been because I haven’t been searching for those roles and searching for those mentors, I relied a lot on just executing really well. Again, it doesn’t happen for everybody but I personally just got really lucky that I don’t know why I keep saying lucky. I talked to Ashley about this before too.

Priya Nakra: We both mentioned in our speech, we’re so grateful that somebody took a chance on us. That’s also self deprecating in some way but whatever, it’s the thing … what was I saying, something about mentorship. Yeah, I wasn’t like, I don’t think I was like, “Oh, I want Irsal to be my mentor. I want somebody to be my mentor. It’s more just like, “I’m going to work really hard, ask a lot of questions.” Then, again because I demonstrated some interest and also execution and that I could be heads down and get the work done. I think that that actually opened up a lot of opportunities for me, both at Blend and my previous job.

Priya Nakra: Yeah, structured mentorship is a really, really important thing for an early stage place. I would say if you don’t have that structured mentorship, just find someone else that you want to emulate. It doesn’t have to be like a formal mentorship thing, just like if you’re seeing someone in meetings, or having conversations in the hallway and you’re like, “Man, that person’s really knows what she’s talking about or has a very good way of communicating.” Just like emulating that person and having it be like an official someone to look up to inside of the company.

Crystal Sumner: I also think that’s where the external support system kicks in. There’s a lot of women here that finding people who are navigating this at the same time, I was lucky in earlier in my career to have mentors but especially, I’ve come in this role much less so and so, that group of women, I phone them to have coffee with them. We have mocktails all the time because they’re often going through the same thing. While I do think people are very lucky, it’s not always the case that you’re going to find it within your job. Having some external resource for you to go to is, I think it’s extremely helpful to help navigate often these difficult situations sometimes.

Eunice Noh: I think for me before Blend, I didn’t have anyone as a mentor and I think a lot of people look at their managers being the only person that can be your mentor. I think for me, I’m fortunate now at Blend that I do have a great manager that is one of my biggest mentors in my life. It’s finding multiple people who can fill that. Sometimes, it’s not just one person who can do that for you. I find that a lot of my peers or my mentors, the people that I’m working with, every day I’m just honestly lucky and grateful to be able to work with them. It’s finding a couple of things that you like in each person and creating a Megatron of a mentor for yourself. I think always people are looking for that one person to do it for you. To be honest, that person probably doesn’t exist or is a unicorn. Find those multiple people that you can lean on and it’s sometimes it’s not someone who’s in a manager position that can do that for you.

Audience Member: Hi. Thank you so much for talking tonight. You’ve all shared your stories about your various career paths and talked about culture at the various companies you’ve worked for. My question is if you see that you’re working at a company where the culture is less than ideal, how do you decide whether to stay and try to change it from the inside or to find a company that better reflects your values?

Ashley McIntyre: I had a mix of that at the second company that I talked about in my story. That was my first role as a sales engineer and as a sales engineer, you partner very closely with the sales team. That company had your stereotypical, bro-y, white guy tech sales culture. It was infuriating at times. For me, this is just a heuristic I used for myself is when I was at the consulting company, as I said, there’s always going to be detriments to being at a company. Nothing’s going to be perfect. Things are going to frustrate you but for me as long as the pros outweighed the cons, and I saw opportunity and it wasn’t as if I was uncomfortable on a day to day basis. I was maybe just aggravated or frustrated but I had other things I was excited about. Those are the ones that I wanted to lean in into and invest in. I think culture plays a huge role. If it starts getting into, you’re so stressed, you start clenching your jaw and grinding your teeth again.

Ashley McIntyre: Or if you don’t feel comfortable and accepted or included in that workplace, and the quality of your work starts to suffer and you don’t see the path upward, I think those are all incredibly valuable reasons to go. Weighing that impact on you is what I would recommend.

Eunice Noh: I’ll say one last thing. I think the thing for me is one of the things that I did was write down what’s important for you first, make it really clear about what you care about in the company and those are your principles and don’t stray from that. Don’t make exceptions for it. I think it’s really easy to … it’s comfortable to say stay at a company but if you follow those things, I think it makes it really clear if you should stay or not. I think also, too, because I’ve worked at companies where the culture was nonexistent to be honest and I think you just have to remember … sorry, I just forgot. I think you just have to remember that you’re learning when things aren’t going well either. I think people like to think about that is everything’s going wrong but you’re learning what you don’t like and you’re also learning what you know you would like to do differently somewhere else.

Eunice Noh: Take it as a learning experience and sometimes, sticking it out a little bit longer and seeing if things pan out. It goes in waves, startups especially some three months, six months, things are not great. Six months later, things are going to be at a high and that sometimes it’s worth sticking it through and we both have been here for quite some time. A lot of us here. There’s been ups and downs for sure. Katie, who’s my friend here has heard a lot of this stuff at Blend but sometimes, it’s worth sticking out because things can really turn out well.

Audience Member: Thanks.

Audience Member: Thank you so much for telling your stories this evening. It’s been such an amazing group of women and really inspirational. My question for all of you is how do you actually go about doing the due diligence on the culture. I think all of us have had that experience of talking to folks who work at the company, ex-employees, reading all the websites, Glassdoor reviews, and we think we know what we’re getting ourselves into and then, you show up and it’s some combination of what you thought you were going to get and a lot of stuff that you didn’t even know about. To the extent that multiple of you have changed jobs multiple times, what have you done that’s actually worked in your favor to actually figure out what you’re getting yourself into and what have been some of the surprises along the way? Thank you.

Crystal Sumner: I feel like for most the two tech jobs that I’ve gone, even before I interviewed, I tried … I did the LinkedIn stalking, which then identifies some person who works there, who then, I have multiple conversations with and try and do some diligence even before I apply to just get a sense. At that point, they’re not trying to sell you quite as much as to the job. You’re just getting a little bit of insight into the company. Then, specifically for Blend, I did have the luxury and this is when we were smaller and actually think we interviewed a lot of people. Had the opportunity to interview them and talk with the CEO and push him, and asked those questions. He, which I really like, was the interviewer that like to just go for a walk. You could get a sense and have a person conversation with him.

Crystal Sumner: You could see for me that the vision that he had for where he wanted to drive the company. Again, if you have the luxury and the ability to talk to people before you apply, I feel a much better real assessment at that stage.

Priya Nakra: I’d also say it changes … you could think the culture is one thing, and then you get there as you said, it’s completely different. Even if you get there and you think it’s going to be what it is, like Blend was a totally different company when I joined two years ago. It’s totally different now. Some for the better, some whatever. I think … yeah, I think talking to people as much as possible. In consulting we have this thing called the airport test. I don’t know if you guys have heard of this but as part of the interview training, they would say when you’re interviewing somebody who could join a consulting firm or treat your team, they would say, “Would you spend, if you were delayed at an airport … because consultants are traveling all the time, Monday through Thursday.” If you were delayed in the airport, would you spend three to four hours with them?

Priya Nakra: Would you want to hang out with them? I always took that with me even after consulting because ,I again, was lucky to have a bunch of interviewers at Blend who I would totally spend multiple hours in an airport with just hanging out. I was pretty lucky for that. Yeah, they stayed my friends throughout the company. That’s what I like to do.

Ashley McIntyre: I don’t think there’s a silver bullet. It’s hard to figure that out, especially as the interviewee because you’re going in and you’re being asked these questions and you have to show why they should continue progressing you through the process. One of the biggest things I’d recommend not being afraid to do is ask to come in for your interview maybe over lunch to see if you can have lunch there while the employees are having lunch. Especially if the hiring manager is someone where maybe you’re just not sure yet if this is someone you want to spend a lot of time learning from and working with. Once you’ve gotten far enough long, ask if you can just have coffee with them or a conversation to talk about some questions and concerns you have. As much as possible, use your gut to understand when someone’s being or to try to understand when someone’s being genuine when you ask about the culture or not.

Ashley McIntyre: Ask about the culture. You may get a lot of generic responses but you’ve met so many hundreds of thousands of people in your life and you get that gut instinct right away. See if that will lead you down the path. Don’t be afraid to ask for more information, to spend some time with people. As a hiring manager, especially once we’re excited with someone, we usually see that as a good sign but we just want you to start now. I think it’s very fair for you to evaluate us as much as you’re being evaluated.

Laney Erokan: Can I say something about that? Be authentic in yourself. I am a mom. I have two little kids. When I came to Blend, I knew that there weren’t a lot of parents here. I led with that. I don’t want you to hire me because I’m a mom or whatever but know that that’s important to me and you don’t have to hide yourself once you get here. Just be authentic and don’t hide who you are and they’ll respond to you. It’s a two-way street. This has been so cool. I’m so glad you guys got to hear my colleagues speak tonight. I’m inspired. I hope you are too. We’re hiring, so if you’re interested in making a move and working in this great culture, in this great cafeteria where we eat, lunch, and dinner every day. Come talk to us. There are volunteers around who work at Blend in Blend swag, so go find them. They want to talk to you. We want to talk to you. Email us at careers@blend.com. We have dessert, so grab something sweet. Make a new friend. Thank you for being here with us tonight.

Blend girl geeks: Ashley McIntyre, Crystal Sumner, Eunice Noh, and Priya Nakra answering audience questions at Blend Girl Geek Dinner.

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