Watch the 18C intro from FounderDanielle McLaughlinabout working with companies to hire exceptional women engineers. Here she shares an overview of how 18C can help women with job search and salary negotiation services.
Danielle McLaughlin: Hi. Thank you, Angie. Excited to be here and get started. Let’s jump in. My name is Danielle. I’m the CEO and founder of 18C, which helps women engineering leaders find impactful roles. Today I’ll be sharing a bit more about me, my company mission, and what services we provide. This presentation will be about eight minutes and I’ll leave time for questions at the end. I’ll quickly share the agenda for today, a little bit about me, 18C’s mission, our open roles, our services, and kind of break those down in a bit more detail.
A little about my background. I’ve been in recruiting for about 10 years. I’ve done tons of different startup roles, larger tech company recruiting roles, from two people to 5,000 people. I got my start in executive recruiting in the higher education and non-profit industry. Since then, I’ve been specialized in engineering recruiting in fast-growing companies like Square, Waymo, Lyft, Blend and Fitbit. I’ve also taken on leadership roles as the head of talent at a few early stage ventures, and advised and built women’s communities for technical women. Outside of work I’m a big dog lover and avid yogi. I’ve been teaching yoga for about 10 years on the side and I love to be active. A bit more about why I started 18C.
I grew up with a mom in software engineering. I used to go to work with her in San Francisco as a kid, and I remember her being the only woman on her floor or seemingly, in the building. I continued to see this a lot as I got further into the tech industry in my career. And now I’m kind of really passionate about bringing more balance to the technology sector. Some of the best businesses that I’ve worked for have really prioritized diversity, giving women a voice in the organization at the leadership level. And I believe that the more women there are in technical leadership roles, the more balanced tech products will be overall.
The 18C name is short for 18 cents, which believe it or not, has been the average difference between what women and men make per dollar in the US for the last 20 years, and it has not changed much. So my goal with this business is really to close that gap in the tech sector by bringing more female voices to the tech leadership space. And I’m super excited to see where this business grows.
I’ll quickly flash a few of our open roles. You can see here there’s a good range of company sizes and stages from seed to series C. These roles update weekly. If you’re just starting to think about a search, working with a search firm early on is a great way to supplement your job interview pipeline. So you can work with multiple agencies. You can still apply to roles, but having kind of a breadth of people on your team as you’re looking for a new role can be really, really effective. I also partner with other recruiting agencies, so I have a pretty wide network that I can distribute your information to and just help you get more jobs in a really challenging market. You can view all of our jobs on our website at 18cpartners.com.
I’m early in my journey in starting a business or a startup, so these services may evolve over time, but today I’m working with businesses that want to build their teams mindfully by connecting them with exceptional women. For women, we offer job introductions to roles or companies that match their preferences, negotiation support and coaching, offer benchmarking and branding opportunities via our podcast, which I’ll cover towards the end. Let’s jump in and break these down and the process a bit more.
Job search support. So our job search support process involves a few quick steps. You can sign up for our network or apply to a role on the website. We will reach out to you to schedule time to get to know you and what matters to you, to learn your preferences, which are unique to you. And we’ll email new roles to you as they come in. You can get introduced directly to the hiring manager or jump into the technical screen. There’s no need to do another recruiter screen if you’re speaking with 18C. We do work with startups of all sizes and stages. In some cases we may be working with public companies, we may be working with really tiny startups, but the companies that we work with really value diversity, and so they’re coming to us to invest in that. And that’s important to me and for the women that I work with.
Our negotiation coaching services. These services support women who have job offers from other companies that we don’t work with, but still need help. Over one to two calls we’ll get to know you and your unique situation and help you with a talk script for handling different questions, share relevant data for your unique needs and go through some exercises to make sure you’re clear on your goals. We also have an offer calculator that can be really helpful for understanding startup equity, which is a very complex topic we’ll talk about actually in the session later today.
Negotiation support is one of my favorite things to do by far. I love women helping women feel empowered to ask for more, get to the next level in their career. So far, we’ve helped women get as much as 20K on their base salary or significantly improve their equity package. I recommend signing up for this service at the beginning of your search because a successful negotiation really starts with the second that you start speaking to the company and can also just go a lot further if you really are clear on your goals from the start.
Like I mentioned before, we do offer benchmarking. Let’s say you’re at the end of your search, you have an offer from a company and you just want to know how much room is there on this offer. We can help you with that so when signing up for the network on the website, you can express interest and we will reach out with more details.
And last but not least, our new podcast. The 18 Cents podcast tells the story of influential women leaders with the goal of inspiring other women to grow into technical leadership roles. We’re currently recording these. I just shared a sneak preview of the intro video. This podcast is a great way to grow your social media brand, practice public speaking, or tell your unique story. I’m excited for this to come out in a couple months. And that’s it for my intro.
We have a short amount of time today. I’d love to connect with you. Also, feel free to add me on LinkedIn, sign up for the network. I’ll be speaking later today at the employer booth from 12 to 1 as well as hosting a session on landing leadership roles, negotiating at startups at 2PM. I’m happy to answer any questions on services right now with the last couple minutes. Also, Mariella, who’s on my team noted we’re offering a 20% discount for girl geeks on negotiation services. Email us at info@18cpartners for more info on that.
I’m going to offer up any questions here. It looks like we have a few. Are you open to hire entry level engineers? We do have one client that is working on some roles with front-end engineers with two years of experience or more, so not quite at the entry level yet, or intern level, but two years of industry experience. If you do want help in how to find internship roles, feel free to email us at info@18cpartners and I can forward you some resources.
Other questions? Are you open for non-engineering roles? Yes. In some cases the companies that we work with do have non-engineering roles. We do active sourcing for engineering women, specifically leaders. But if you do want us to include your resume in our database, feel free to email us and we can work on that for you.
Okay. Just looking through questions. That’s right. The two years of experience position is not on the website, but feel free to email me and I will add another general posting later today.
What is the difference between positions in Series C and seed? Really good question. Usually the size of the company and the funding amount, but I can cover that question later today at 2PM or in the booth, if you want to stop by for that.
In this fireside chat, Merav Bloch (VP and General Manager at Opendoor) interviews Raji Subramanian (Chief Technology Officer at Opendoor) on the topic of navigating change and uncertainty. Raji shares her leadership philosophy and offers advice for job seekers and career builders by emphasizing the importance of passion, purpose, and working with people you can learn from.
Like what you see here? Our mission-aligned Girl Geek X partners are hiring!
Hi, everybody. Happy International Women’s Day and thank you so much for joining us for this fireside chat with Raji on the topic of navigating change and uncertainty. My name is Merav Bloch. I’m a VP and general manager here at Opendoor. I get the pleasure of working with Raji all year, not just on International Women’s Day. The product my team is building is an online marketplace that connects buyers and sellers directly to transact on houses without the pressure and hassle of the traditional model.
I’m going to let Raji introduce herself in a minute and then we’ll transition to some Q&A. We should have some time for your questions as well. We’ve got about 30 minutes together, so if you have questions either now or as the discussion progresses, please throw them in either the Q&A tab or in the chat here and I’ll try and keep tabs on them. I’m going to hand off to Raji to introduce yourself.
Raji Subramanian:
Thank you Merav, Angie, and Sukrutha. Very excited to be here. As both Merav and Angie mentioned and shared, I’m the Chief Technology Officer here at Opendoor. And what I do here is to lead a team that’s modernizing the residential real estate industry. We are digitizing every aspect of the experience as well as building the real estate e-commerce platform of the future. With that said, Merav, I know you wanted to share a little bit more about what we do, and would love to get into Q&A after that.
Merav Bloch:
Great. Our topic today is navigating change and uncertainty, and I’m sure it doesn’t come as a surprise to anybody on this call that that is the environment we’re operating in today.
Just to set the stage for some of the topics we’ll be digging into in this discussion, this particular moment of uncertainty and disruption is, I think, driven by two things in particular. One is the economy and this once in 40 year shift in interest rates that we’ve been experiencing in the last 18 months from a zero interest rate policy or what we’re now calling ZIRP, to where we sit today with the Fed having hiked interest rates pretty aggressively. And that is, those are actions that are having ripple effects across sectors, across industries, and of course anything that impacts our working lives impacts our personal lives as well.
The second thing that has been informing this moment is this rapid acceleration of AI, artificial intelligence, that we’ve been witnessing again over that same period. And so I give you that context to share a little bit about why this topic is particularly close to mine and Raji’s hearts. We are a technology company at Opendoor, and like all technology companies, we have been staring at the opportunities created by AI and how we think about serving our customers.
We also operate in the real estate industry, and those of us in the real estate industry have been particularly aware of this once in 40 year interest rate shift because it’s having a very immediate effect in how our customers, buyers, and sellers are experiencing the world. For buyers of real estate, interest rates place a lot of pressure on affordability. For sellers, they often have the benefit of a locked in interest rate, but that has the flip side impact of really raising the bar on the decision to move, right? How sellers are sitting there thinking, how much do I need that extra bedroom, and is it worth giving up my locked in two or 3% interest rate? So interest rates having a very, very immediate effect on how our customers are experiencing well.
So as executives, leaders at a technology company as well as in the real estate industry, this is a topic that’s particularly close to our hearts. So with that context, Raji, I’m curious if you can speak to how you’ve been experiencing that uncertainty. You joined Opendoor as CTO in September ’22, if I’ve got that date correct, and that’s right on the tail of a global pandemic, right ahead of these interest rates shift. And I’m curious how you experienced the last 18 months and maybe some high level thoughts on how you’ve navigated them.
Raji Subramanian:
As you accurately called out, the interest rates have had an outsized impact very specifically on the real estate industry, and at its core it’s about affordability for both our customers who are looking to sell as well as buy their homes.
What interest rates have done for the buyer is as you look at a home that you want to buy, if you have a certain budget and can buy a home of a certain value, you need potentially to pay double your monthly payment to just be able to bridge where the interest rates are today versus where they were two, three years back, not that far off. So at its core it’s a question of what can you afford right now and what do you want?
And on the sell side, we have an interesting dynamic in the real estate industry. In the real estate industry, sellers are also buyers, so the customer base is interconnected. Demand and supply are very interconnected. Many of the sellers are looking to sell and potentially upgrade their homes have potentially bought their homes at a lower interest rate, which means that if they have to buy a home right now, they have to pay that much more and the question is can they afford it?
The second aspect, which adds a double whammy in the sell side of the equation is that over the last 18 months specifically, home prices have not appreciated as much as if they’ve appreciated in the past. And so that appreciation has not happened to the extent that can buffer the interest rate increase. And so there’s a cyclical effect which keeps demand and supply at a historical low level at this point of time.
With that said, the question is what have we done at Opendoor? And as all of us know, necessity is often the mother of invention, so we had to quickly adapt to this macroeconomic climate and we did this by doing three things.
The first is focus, and the focus has been on the fundamental business model and getting it to work across a range of macroeconomic scenarios, and that was vital for us. In fact, it made us stronger and we’re coming out strong through that journey.
The second as we’ve navigated through this macroeconomic shift is we looked at levers that we can control and did everything that we could to go ahead and make sure that those levers worked across these different shifts that were happening. That, in many ways, shifts the power back to the business, because if you can control your input metrics, your output metrics will follow.
And the third thing which is vital as we went ahead and did this, was to make sure that the customer value proposition continued to remain strong. What do you do in terms of your business model? We need to continue serving the customers.
As we look at this uncertain macroeconomic climate, I looked at four different things to help us navigate through that. It’s focus, innovation, optionality, and adaptability. Focus as we talked about is getting back to the core. It is about the fundamentals of the business and usually when you are in a volatile situation, it kind of pushes your model to go ahead and evolve and evolve quickly, and that’s what we did. And focus helps there. Doing few things, more often than not can be really good if you’re doing the right things.
The second is that while you are focused, it’s also important to continue to innovate. And we have to continue to build those differentiated customer experiences and add that must-have value proposition. For example, Merav, you are working on one of the key innovations which is building out the marketplace for Opendoor and you cannot stop doing that because innovation is no longer a nice to have, but a necessity today. Only companies that continue to innovate and deploy that continuous innovation will thrive and survive in today’s scenario.
The third as leaders is also to make sure that we are building optionality. Optionality is looking at all of the strengths that we have as well as the opportunities that we have and to continue to create new lines of businesses so that you can diversify and economy-proof. In some ways there is a balance between focus and optionality that you build. And more importantly from an execution perspective, it is important to make sure that we are adaptable and we can adapt fast because companies that can adapt fast in this fast changing world will ride the wave while companies that don’t will really drown in there.
Merav Bloch:
So focus, innovation, optionality, adaptability. I think that’s such a good prescription for the tech industry in general and in particular in this moment of uncertainty. And just to underscore that point about adaptability, it reminded me of one of the best pieces of advice I ever got from a coworker. He said, “To survive in the tech industry, survive and thrive in the tech industry, the thing you got to remember is if you’re working in startups and you love your job, wait five minutes. If you hate your job, wait five minutes, right?” You have to be adaptable. It’s the name of the game and I think it’s so important in particular in this moment.
You talked about building customer value and building differentiated products for customers. And as you were talking, it struck me that really as it relates to product development and meeting the needs of customers, two things have changed in the last 18 months. One is the needs of customers and how they are experiencing the world, and you spoke to some of that with respect to sellers and buyers, but the other thing that’s changed is the tools we have at our disposal to meet those customer needs, those changing customer needs. So I’m curious for you to speak to that in particular, how we’ve thought about or how you have thought about product development in this time of changing customer needs, and AI as an incremental tool to meet those needs.
Raji Subramanian:
In fact, we are, I would say, in one of the most innovative and transformative times in the world. The magnitude of the change that we are going through, especially with AI, could be as big, if not bigger, than I think the internet revolution, what happened with the digital revolution as well. In smaller circles, some of the talk that’s happening is as this intelligence grows, it could be as big as the industrial revolution if not bigger. It is that transmitter of the times that we are in and it’s going to change completely how we serve customers. Customers now from… If you go back into the past and look at any time in the past, they’re going to be going through a sense of abundance. We are in a phase of customer abundance in ways that we’ve never seen before. That abundance is going to come in the form of highly personalized teachers, doctors, therapists, financial advisors, and much more. And AI is going to enable us to do that. I call it enabling automated intimacy or personalized intimacy in ways that really work.
And so the question is how do we enable our products to embrace that automated intimacy and the intelligence that AI can provide to put customers at the center of the ecosystem, feel and act and enable them? Technology has always been able to listen and solve for our customers. AI will enable products to feel and act on the customer’s behalf.
And at an Opendoor, Merav, you are very familiar with this. We’ve been investing heavily in AI, and we are looking at how AI can transform the customer experience. And some ways in which we’re doing that is we are making sure that our customers have highly personalized 24 by seven AI driven experience partners, but at the same point of time with the ability to switch to a human at the click of a button, and we are enabling our humans and experienced partners with AI copilot so that AI copilot so that they can serve our customers best.
The second aspect is AI, as I called out, is also going to personalize products. If you look at homes, homes are actually very, very personal for people. But if you look at the experience today, it’s still very commoditized in terms of how you go through the journey of discovery. And what we are going to see is highly personalized experiences in terms of how homeowners discover their next home. So we are just about starting and there’s a lot more that we are doing.
Merav Bloch:
Thanks for that, Raji. And I’ve noticed we’ve gotten our first question in the Q&A tab, so another PSA to anyone on the call who has questions for Raji, please throw them in there or in the chat and we’ll get some time for audience questions at the end.
Angie mentioned at the top of the call that there are people here at all different stages of their careers, and I imagine there are a number of people here in management team leadership roles who are thinking about leading teams in this moment of change and uncertainty. I’m curious if you can reflect on how you’ve thought about leading people, leading teams in this moment. What leadership philosophies have you evolved, leaned on, changed as you’ve gone through that journey?
Raji Subramanian:
Yeah. My personal leadership philosophy is to create value and care deeply about our customers, employees and shareholders. If we fail one, we fail all. And I cannot repeat if we fail one, we literally fail all. It’s that important. And I use five operating principles to live by this personal leadership philosophy.
The first is to create long-term value over short-term gain. And one way of doing that is to continuously obsess about the customer. And we can obsess about the customer if you’re willing to think big and to innovate. To do that, we’ll have to have a beginner mindset, and as we are innovating and thinking big, we have to tread with courage. The treading with courage is super important and the ability to embrace failure. That collectively will help us create long-term value.
The second operating principle is about bringing clarity and reducing confusion. As leaders, it is a responsibility to create and engage and ensure that the team has a shared understanding. It’s very easy for teams to go out of alignment and very specifically in uncertain and ambiguous situations. It’s about bringing that shared understanding, because once you have a shared understanding, you can enable the teams to make high quality, high velocity decisions and they can define a course of action.
The third is to own trust by being trustworthy. And I believe and aspire to be trustworthy because trust is an output of being trustworthy, and the way I do that is by being honest, competent, and reliable, and there’s no easy way to it. You have to be honest, competent, and reliable. You also have to be holistic in what you do. You have to be rigorous, and you have to avoid affinity bias.
And the last thing is to be vocally self-critical. That’s kind of vital. As a leader, you’ve got to be vocally self-critical because if you’re vocally self-critical, then what you do is you can make hard decisions as well as have the hard discussions and foster culture where the team can have hard discussions, ask you the hard questions, as well as make hard decisions.
The fourth is to generate energy, lead with passion and enthusiasm and conviction. And that kind of helps inspire performance with purpose. I think it is vital as leaders to anchor on purpose, because everything else will follow The why matters. And once you have the right purpose, it’s what creating the right climate, which is both the soft climate and hard climate because that creating the soft and the hard climate will empower and enable your team.
The last is, and it’s one of the most important things, is to actually deliver success despite odds, I would say most odds. And in fact some of the hardest things, we’ll have odds along the way and we have to figure out how to deliver that success. And in some ways we can do that by doing stuff that matters and not being wedded to only your idea, but be seeking boundary-less solutions and be in tune with the details. It is about thinking, solving, problem solving, and finding the way.
Merav Bloch:
Raji, there’s a question here in the chat that I’m going to pull out here, because I think it’s highly relevant to what you’ve just talked about. And the person here asks about leading a team after a layoff. She describes here that after a layoff, the team can be down and struggling. Do you have any advice for leaders who might be pulling teams together after a reduction in force?
Raji Subramanian:
Yes, I think I’m sure many of the folks here on the call would’ve had an experience similar to that. Again, especially in today’s climate, and I think it comes down to a few things. If you go back and look at the leadership philosophy that I talked about, it is about making sure that we take care of our customers, employees and shareholders. And especially during a layoff, the why matters the most. Why are we doing this? That is one. And I think it’s kind of important to make sure that leadership down, everyone is aligned and understand why we are doing this and why it is important for all three stakeholders, customers, employees, and shareholders. Because if you fail one of them, again, you fail all. And if you anchor the why around that, I think there is an understanding that you create within the organization. So that’s the first part of it.
And the second part of it as we go back and look at as coming out of that layoff is that we’ve got to set the right vision as we look forward in terms of, okay, now what? How are we going to go through this tough journey? And what is our plan to come out stronger? It’s not just about reacting and doing a layoff, but to have a clear plan on what are we going to do to get this business back to the right stage or step or to ensure that it’s at the right size. And that’s kind of where you have to bring the leaders to the table, define the plan, define the journey, and make sure that you’re taking the time to communicate that to the team. That’s the second piece.
The third for me is a very, very personally important one is to take accountability as a leader, because when we are doing a layoff, it is also on the leadership to look back, be vocally self-critical in terms of what we would’ve done differently and be vulnerable and share that with the team. So taking accountability and being vocally self-critical is the third piece to this. That along with taking the responsibility to take the company through the journey of coming out stronger is what gets us there. This is going to take time, it is going to take energy, and we as leaders need to do this and go through this journey both with vision and conviction on the one hand and empathy on the other.
Merav Bloch:
Thanks Raji, and I love how you’ve reframed the goal there as well. Coming out of one of these events, the goal shouldn’t only be to recover and regain the prior baseline, but to come out stronger with some of the mechanisms that you’ve described, communication, truly reinforcing the why, building trust, accountability.
So please continue to ask questions in the chat and I’ll take them either in flow or at the end.
I’m going to take us to leading and operating in a time of austerity. One other very obvious feature of this post-ZIRP era is that there is increased pressure on companies to deliver profitability at the same time. We are in the business of innovation, and you spoke to this earlier. The great companies are the ones that build innovative products and meet the needs of customers like no one else. So I’m curious for you to reflect, Raji, on how you’ve thought about balancing innovation, cost discipline, and finding that right balance in particular in an uncertain climate.
Raji Subramanian:
As leaders, we face this decision on a daily basis. In fact, it is more the rule rather than the exception today. And in the current macroeconomic climate, balancing the need between innovation and profitability is a rule book that we potentially have to build on a continuous basis. Again, I don’t see that going away. It’s the balance that we’ll have to constantly and consistently do.
I’m reminded of a quote by Albert Einstein and it’s one of my favorite quotes, and again, many people have said this quote in different ways, but it is, “That in the midst of every crisis, there is also an opportunity.” And as a leader, it is that opportunity that excites me. What that does also is it also gives you a sense of clarity. Adversity makes you super clear in terms of what matters. And as you’re looking at innovation as well as profitability, what matters always starts and ends with the customer.
In fact, it is one of Opendoor’s operating principles and values that we live by on a daily basis. So if you go back and look at that, and if you start with that, there are many frameworks that you can use, but the two that I lean on quite a bit. The first as you’re balancing innovation and profitability is to be able to work backwards as well as work forward. You’ve probably heard work backwards, but again, if you think about working backwards, it is to have a north star, understand what are the long-term outcomes that we are looking to achieve because innovation helps us get there as well as profitability because you need cash profit to be able to get there. But we have to do that in such a way that we assess where we are and work forward so that we call the steps to that north star. That’s why I calling it both the working backwards as well as the working forwards.
For example, Merav, you are familiar with this. While we were building our AI strategy, we looked at what is the goal or the outcome that AI can help us achieve and how it’s going to disrupt the real estate industry in three, five, or seven years. And then we worked forward from where we are today to build a quarter over quarter plan, and that’s kind of what makes the difference, because it is giving you the steps to the vision that you’re building.
The second is a very important one, but it’s a very subtle one, but it’s a very widely important one. Companies typically operate in three phases, and all three phases probably at the same point of time. And the three phases that I call it are the invent, implement, and optimize phase. Every company starts off with invent phase. There’s a nugget of an idea. Everyone is scrappily trying to figure out product market fit, what works, and build a viable product around it. And then we start scaling at which point of time we move to the implement phase for that business line of product where we are building the foundations needed to operate that particular business at scale. Once it reaches a certain scale, there is still a lot more white space to conquer after that and companies are now optimizing that particular core business to start gaining more market share, continuing to serve those customers and continuing to realize value for the business.
Now, the reason I call out that there are three different phases is because each of these three phases operate in very different ways. So typically when you are doing the optimize of a current business, you’ve got to run fast circles. You’ve got to be able to deliver quarter over quarter value that continues to make that business profitable.
While when you’re doing implement, it’s a little bit more long form. You’re probably planning for 12 months, 18 months and taking that forward. And most importantly, innovation takes three to five years. Merav, you are in a seat of innovation right now. You know it’s going to take three to five years and most people forget that. They think it’s going to happen in two months. That’s not how it works. And so once you acknowledge that you have three phases, then what you do is you build an investment strategy that actually anchors in each of these three phases differently. You acknowledge that, okay, these are the things I’m going to do in the invent phase, these are the things I’m going to do in the optimize phase, and then you build your plan based on that. The most important thing though is while building your investment strategy and deciding how much you want to invest with, what percent you want to invest with, we need to be ROI driven. We need to understand the impact of the investments that we are making, both in the short as well as the long term. Because as we all know, a process without measurement is destined for failure. And an investment strategy that does not understand the impact, well, you’ll have to depend on luck for it to succeed.
Merav Bloch:
Raji, count me among the fans, and it looks like there’s a few in the chat of that Einstein quote. “In the midst of every crisis, there’s an opportunity,” and how true that is.
We’re getting close on time. I’m going to go to the top voted question in the Q&A tab, which is actually similar to a question I had for you, Raji, and it’s about building a career. What career advice you have for job seekers looking to build products in tech and crafting a career path during this time of uncertainty. I’m particularly excited for the audience to hear from you. You come to this conversation as a serial founder, as an executive at Fortune 500 companies, so I’m curious what advice you have for the job seekers and career builders on the call.
Raji Subramanian:
Yeah, and again, many of you on this call are probably at different stages of our career, and so the first thing that I’ll call out is step one to that is to really look at what’s the value that you’re creating, what’s the game changing value that you’re creating? Are you doing something that will really transform the world, is meaningful to you, and meaningful to the quality of life of whether it’s a hundred people, thousands of people, millions of people? So it’s kind of important to look at your passion and intersect that with purpose and that purpose, is that meaningful enough for you as well as in the world?
Now, it’s interesting when I call that out because it’s a more conscious decision of deciding what you do, and there’s a third piece to this puzzle. And when you’re early in your career as well as even in later in your career, it is important to work with people that you can learn from. I call it the three P framework, passion, purpose, as well as people.
The second thing that I’d kind of call out, as you are growing in your career and taking on more and more leadership roles as well as even as an individual contributor, it’s important to focus and understand the visible results that you’re creating. We as women tend to be very holistic in what we do. We can take on a lot of horizontal things in terms of what we do, but how are you able to measure those results? Because if you can measure those results, they become visible results, whether that’s horizontal or vertical.
I would focus on making sure that you look at what visible results that you created and be very conscious. Do a check every year to see what visible results you created that year.
The third is kind of what I would call as working backwards from your aspirations. Where do you want to be? What is the change that you want to bring in this world? What is the impact that you want to create in this world? And then working backwards from that in terms of what’s your plan to reaching that? And so that’s the third thing that I would do.
And the last piece I would call out, and this is something that’s helped me massively, and there’s one last, but then this is the penultimate one is to have mentors who challenge the status quo. Look for mentors, and this is something that I’d say, look for mentors who are not therapists. Look for mentors who are going to kick your butt and make you better every day because they will grow and move you through your blind spots. Mentors need to make you uncomfortable and keep pushing you to grow.
And the last one I’ll say is be your authentic self. Always be your authentic self.
Merav Bloch:
I love that. And it’s so authentic and true what you say, Raji, about women in particular being at risk of succeeding invisibly and that push to focus on visible achievements and visible results. Thank you so much for that, Raji.
I think we have time for one more question, so I’m going to close us out on turning failure into opportunity. We have people in this moment, people on this call facing very genuine hardship in their personal lives. We had a story here in the chat of somebody who just had an offer withdrawn yesterday. That’s very, very stressful. People have gone through layoffs. What advice do you have for people going through those kinds of hardship and in particular, what are your reflections as a founder, as an executive on turning failure, crisis into opportunities?
Raji Subramanian:
Yeah, in fact, again, there is a saying which kind of says that success and failure are two sides of the same coin. And especially when you look at success that’s meaningful, that’s differentiated, and that it creates that step function impact. Again, it’s very hard to do that without failure, because if that was the case, then everyone will be successful. Every success would be easy and it’s no longer a differentiated success. And so it’s important to understand that they kind of go together, because there’s a resilience that is needed as you’re going back and looking at it.
And so with that said, then the question comes down to how do you turn those failures into opportunities? And this is kind of where a growth mindset plays a very big role. It is about applying that growth mindset so that you can learn from every failure. In fact, one of the products that I built, I had to pull my hair out. We actually had to go through 16 versions over a year before even we got a signal that this could be successful. But today, it’s one of the biggest businesses that we see in this world, a product that all of us use.
The second part to this is in many ways, if the success that you’re going after is a moonshot, then remember that every failure that you encounter and you cross, you’re building a moat. It’s hard to see that, but you are building a moat.
The third piece and the fourth piece are kind of counterintuitive, but they kind of go along with each other like being two sides of the same coin. The first is you have to fail often and then fail fast. Again, we, especially as women, as we go back and look at it on the one hand, as we are kind of gritting through it, we also need to make sure that we are not getting too attached to a failed idea, but we are applying that rigorous thinking and decide when to move on. And it’s okay to tell ourselves that it’s okay to move on. Because sometimes we are that hard on ourselves, and that is kind of vital.
And on the other hand, it is also to have conviction. Sometimes it’s okay to dig your heels and say, “I have conviction on this and I’m going to stick with it, because there are still a lot of false positives and false negatives that we are seeing. But I still believe, and I will be able to find the way to take us through.” But again, you have to use fail fast and fail often along with making sure that you’re sticking with things.
That would be my guidance, but at the end of the day, I’ll kind of say that it is kind of important to understand what motivates you, what drives you, and index on that, and continue to find a way to remove the obstacles and build a network of friends, mentors who can help you find a way to break through those barriers.
Merav Bloch:
Thank you, Raji. And what a good reminder at the end to re-anchor to your purpose, right? If you’re going to grit through 16, was it 16, versions of a product? It’s worth reminding yourself and your team why you’re doing that. So I think we’re up on time here.
Angie, thank you for having us. Raji, thank you so much for the wisdom and insights today and, in my case, every day. And thank you everybody for the engagement and questions.
Angie Chang:
Yes, thank you so much for those gems of wisdom that you’ve shared with women around the world on International Women’s Day. See you in the next…
Like what you see here? Our mission-aligned Girl Geek X partners are hiring!
Boomi employees Bindu Mukundan (Senior Manager, Software Engineering), Nina Francis (Principal Software Engineer), and Cole Alfieri (Talent Acquisition Specialist) share why they enjoy working at Boomi and how the interview process works.
Cole Alfieri: Yeah, so maybe before I jump in, I don’t think originally I was supposed to be here, but I am filling in last minute for Erin, who unfortunately has fallen ill, so we do wish her a speedy recovery. Nonetheless, I’m super excited to support her and then in turn, hopefully support you guys here as well. So thank you for having us. Welcome. Happy Friday. Happy weekend. And then more importantly, happy International Women’s Day! My name is Cole. I am with the talent acquisition team here at Boomi. I have been here for roughly a year. We’re coming up on that year mark, so time flies when you’re having fun. And I’m supporting engineering, product, IT as well as strategy operations and sales here within Boomi.
And at Boomi, we believe in accountability as well as transparency and proudly enable innovation. When you work at Boomi, you can be your true authentic self in our unique independent culture. Our company motto is, “Be bold, be you, and be Boomi.” We are a remote first work environment and we’ve recently been recognized by Flex as one of the world’s most flexible employers, voted by our own. We’ve also celebrated the grand opening of our US headquarters this week, and we’ve also invested in several other hubs to include locations in Vancouver, Barcelona, as well as an upcoming office in Australia. These locations will provide areas for Boomi, as well as meetings and our customer, pardon me, as well as meetings for local employees to work from.
We will have a hybrid work model for our employees located near those office locations to go onto roughly about three days per week. And we offer a very wide range of benefits that reflect our commitment to our people. Our benefits are designed to provide employees with choices, flexibility, as well as value, starting off with some flexible time off. We also offer medical, dental, vision, and prescription benefits. 401k will actually match a 100% of your contributions up to 6% of the year, and you’ll become fully vested immediately.
The flexible time off, medical, dental, vision, as well as prescription benefits. And our 401k are all accessible on day one. We also offer 12 weeks of parental paid leave, fertility support, tuition reimbursement, career and personal support, fitness reimbursement, pain management, legal assistance, as well as rewards and recognitions. Some of the open roles that we have here, software quality engineer and software quality engineering lead, senior software engineer, as well as a senior product owner. I would implore everyone here to please keep an eye on our careers pages. We will have more availability for roles in the future. We’ve also created a Girl Geek source code so if you are applying, if maybe you know someone or this sounds like a good role to one of your friends, have them use that source code so we can recognize you guys for being here.
Jumping into our hiring process, we do move rather short and sweet. First would be a recruiter phone screen with myself or Erin or any of our fabulous recruiters here, followed by a hiring manager interview. For engineering, it does vary a little different. It’s about one to two panels, which usually involves a hacker rank exercise. For product, there are one to two panels with a mix of our engineering as well as product members. And then lastly, a wrap up with our hiring manager. I am super excited to maybe see you guys in the next round and answer any questions that you have, but I’d love to pass it over to Bindu.
Bindu Mukundan: Hi, all. Thank you Cole. Happy Women’s Day again, everyone. I’m Bindu Mukundan, I’m the Senior Engineering Manager at Boomi. Been with Boomi for the past two and a half years. For those who don’t know Boomi, Boomi is the largest cloud native integration company, offering the best integration and automation platform for businesses. We have more than 20,000 customers and growing, and pretty much unstoppable at this point. As Cole had mentioned, this is the 10th consecutive year that Boomi has been recognized as an industry leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. It’s super exciting. In the space of integration platform as a service is where we have been recognized as a leader. This is a testament of the innovation, the resilience, and the excellence that makes Boomi who we are.
In terms of when it comes to the different Boomi products that we have. Of course, integration, which is the core that helps you connect your data and your applications. We have Boomi AI that automates integration with generative AI. We have B2B ADI to collaborate with your trading partners. We have a master data hub feature that provides a 360 view of your data. We have APIM, the event streams. And we have Flow, which is a automated workflow tool with low code that you can use. These are the different Boomi products that we have. Again, Boomi is made up of very dedicated, talented, and passionate individuals that really make it successful. Our core values are be bold, which means being transparent, innovative, and accountable. Being you, being our true and authentic self. We have a lot of ERGs that allow us to meet and share our passions, and together as a community. Be Boomi, of course, which is our unique and independent culture that really focuses on rewarding for performance, growing talent and is very inclusive, making it an amazing place to work for.
And again, we just had a grand opening in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania like two days back. It’s an amazing office space and we were very vibrant. We all went in for the grand opening, and the facilities and the collaborative spaces that is including the office space is awesome. Free Friday lunches and we have a barista cafe with all free pastries, whatnot. And it’s just exciting to have this space to use to collaborate innovative and grow and continue to have Boomi, the amazing company it is right now. So again, super happy to be working with Boomi and I am passing on to Nina Francis, who’s a principal engineer in R&D.
Nina Francis: Thanks, Bindu. Hi everybody. Good afternoon, good morning. Thank you for this opportunity, first of all, to be able to share some of my thoughts on my career at Boomi. So I’ve been with Boomi for around six plus years now. And speaking about our team, we are a team of six individuals, four developers and two QEs. So we are responsible for the development of new features as well as the support of our connector SDK, as well as all of its peripheral services. The SDK is our development framework, or you can call it a collection of code libraries that our partners and our customers use to develop and implement their own custom connectors. Connector would be like the main integration component of the Boomi AtomSphere platform that allows all our users to seamlessly integrate their different enterprise applications.
And I want to speak more about my role here, that has significantly evolved over the past six years. I used to be an individual contributor implementing features and also solving complex customer use cases. And now to where I am today where I am an integral part of the discovery as well as the feature development, the design of these new features, most of these requirements come from our product or our support or our success teams, which is all based on customer needs. Following the discovery, we have grooming, brainstorming of acceptance criterias, testing strategies, and then the actual implementation of these features and their delivery.
Outside of that, I’ve also been leading the team with most of our Agile ceremonies, which I believe has helped us get through our commitments with quality and on time. The growth I’ve experienced here is not just technical, but also with my leadership and also strategic thinking. I’m very grateful for that from Boomi, so that’s a great thing that you will see here.
And speaking to the tools and technologies that we use here, it’s been continuous learning and adaptation. We’ve been constantly trying to modernize our tool set, so we work on both new and old technologies like Java, GWT, SQL, Groovy, REST API, Ansible, New Relic. There’s so many. Even our CD pipelines have moved from Bamboo to Jenkins, and now we are at Harness. And also DevOps roles with all our AWS stacks.
Watch the AppFolio intro from Susana Rivera (Manager, Quality Assurance Engineering), Holly Gardner (Director of Software Engineering), and Perla Vidal (Manager, Product Development Coordination) on why they enjoy working at AppFolio and how the interview process works.
Susana Rivera: Hi everybody. My name is Susana. I’m a QA manager at AppFolio. I have been working here for almost five years. At AppFolio, we create property management software that help our customers to do their business. My role is to support the QAs and the platform teams. The platform teams are those that are working in all those services and apps that are used by all our customers and their customers, apps like email, SMS, or reporting.
When people ask me, “Why AppFolio?” I can say that it’s because of the focus on people and how the company invests in them and in their growth. I like that the team members are recognized and rewarded for delivering meaningful work. I like that we can get coaching, mentorship and dedicated time that we all call FFF or Future Focus Friday. Those Fridays are the days that we use for explore, experiment, or learn something new.
We have an individual budget that we can use for training and professional development. We get paid to learn and grow. How awesome is that? At AppFolio, we promote an inclusive and connected culture that generates high-performance, innovation and collaboration no matter where or who we are. We empower each other and lead by example. We take risk. We own our mistakes. We are one team, no matter if you are at the hub or at home.
One of the things that attracted me to AppFolio was the focus on people, our value of great people make a great company has been something that really resonates with me. Putting people first and their success is something you get to experience daily.
We love customer feedback. We love to listen to our customers and learn from them. By creating partnerships with our customers, we can create a better experience. When our customers win, we win.
Every day, we work on our company’s vision of wanting to power the future of the real estate industry where we build a platform that helps our customers to do their business. There’s so many things that I love about working at AppFolio that would take more than the time that we have, so for now, I will pass it to Holly.
Holly Gardner: Thanks, Susana. Hi. My name’s Holly. I’ve been with AppFolio for 2 1/2 years, and I’m the director of engineering for the maintenance domain. While AppFolio is focused on creating the platform where real estate comes to do business, my teams are focused on making sure property managers are able to solve their resident work orders in a timely manner.
Since AppFolio’s founding 17 years ago, we’ve been focused on creating innovation in real estate, first with SaaS, then MOPL, and now, AI. AppFolio has been investing in AI for the past five years, and we’re currently developing our most innovative generative AI product yet called Realm. And we’re hiring people to help us make that vision possible.
At AppFolio, we have a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion that begins at the hiring process and continues into our company practices. We aim to make AppFolio a place where you can bring yourself to your full potential.
We believe that diversity improves innovation, attracts great people and helps us listen to our diverse AppFolio customers. We do recognize this as an ongoing journey and it’s one we’re committed to every day. This includes monthly DEI events, which really started as a grassroots initiative by employees. We use these moments as opportunities to learn more about the lives and experiences of our fellow AppFolians and to identify ways that we can better support our colleagues.
We also have AppFolio Voices, our employee-led resource groups, including Be @AppFolio for Black AppFolians, Bridge of Cultures @AppFolio for the Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander community, Pride @AppFolio for those part of the LGBTQIA+ community, as well as our more informal affinity groups or channels where communities can connect around shared identities like our Working Parents channel or our Women in Tech channel. So if you’re interested in AppFolio’s vision and want to be part of our Women in Tech community, come talk to us at our booth. Now on to Perla.
Perla Vidal: Yes. Thank you Holly. And if you like what you heard from my coworkers here, from Susanna and Holly, you are in luck because we are hiring. My name is Perla Vidal and I’ve had the joy of working at AppFolio for almost eight years. I lead a team of coordinators who run engaging events like hack days and tech retreat and execute on programs that keep all of the roles and product development engaged.
Our team motto is to create a work environment where AppFolians are empowered, engaged, valued, and inspired to create innovative solutions for our customers and build meaningful connections. And just a greater call for my role. It’s something I love to do every day.
Now, I’d love to share with you all some of the roles that we’re hiring for and give you a preview of the interviewing experience for some of those roles. One of the roles we’re actively recruiting for is our senior data scientist in accounting. For this position, we’re looking for someone who has experience in product analytics, time series forecasting, and user behavior data. Any previous experience with accounting software or payments would be ideal.
The interview process will start with you meeting with the hiring manager to discuss your overall experience and knowledge. And should that go well, you’ll meet with one of our team members to do a technical interview that will cover your data science, data engineering, and analytical experience and knowledge. And from there, you’ll wrap up with three final interviews with team members you’d be working closely with within the role to go over skills and behavioral questions.
Additionally, we have two senior software engineering openings. One is with our student housing team, which I’m a little biased, but it’s such a great team, and they’re in this brand new area for AppFolio and student housing. And we’re looking with someone with extensive Ruby experience and ideally, is able to work from our Santa Barbara office, which is not a bad place to work from.
The other opening is in frontend-heavy position with our Realm-X team, which is our new AI offering. And it’s a very exciting and cutting edge place to work from.
For our interview process, our senior software engineers will undergo four separate one-hour technical interviews with behavioral questions. These interviews will be a deep dive into your previous projects, general engineering practices, computer science fundamentals, and a coding challenge. Equally important, we’re looking for communication and collaboration with these questions. We don’t expect you to have anything memorized and we encourage you to use the languages that you are comfortable using for the coding challenge. With that, we’ll invite you to join us at our booth at 12 PM Pacific.
In this ELEVATE session, three product managers from the U.S. Digital Service discuss their experiences and insights in working in government. Karin Underwood, Esther Sportello, andPooja Shaw highlight the importance of finding champions for projects, getting the right voices in the room, and using data to drive strategy. They also address questions about working remotely, transitioning from the private sector to government, and the scope for non-tech government employees to influence equity practices.
Like what you see here? Our mission-aligned Girl Geek X partners are hiring!
Pooja Shaw: Before we dive into our talk, I wanted to just give a high level overview of what USDS is and very much look forward to answering questions about USDS towards the end when we get to our Q&A. Any luck? Can you see my screen or no? Okay, I’m just going to keep on going then. U.S. Digital Service, as Sukrutha mentioned, is an organization within the federal government. Many of us, including all three of us on the screen here, come from private sector backgrounds before deciding to join government.
We’re a team of cross-functional experts that use design and technology to deliver better government services to the American public and have an array of backgrounds ranging from designers, engineers, product managers like the three of us, data scientists, bureaucracy hackers, and we are really focused on doing the greatest good for the greatest number of people in the greatest need.
In that role, we work with agencies across the government delivering services to the American public on issues ranging from veterans to healthcare system, to our justice system, to farmers, to immigrants. And as we go through our talk, each of us is going to voice over an experience with a particular project that we’ve had in three themes. And as soon as I stop talking, I will pull the slides up so that this will make more sense., but the three themes we’re going to go through are: Finding Your Champion, and Karen is going to speak about some work she did with the Department of Justice in that.
Getting the right voices in the room, and I’ll speak to some work I did with the Administration for Children and Families on childcare. And using data to drive strategy, and Esther will speak to some work she’s done with the CDC in that front.
Again, we hope to keep our remarks so that we have time for questions at the end and look forward to answering any questions you have about USDS or what it’s like working in government. With that, I’ll hand it over to Karin to speak a little bit about a key theme that applies in all sectors, but especially true in government about finding your champion for a project.
Karin Underwood: Great. Thank you Pooja. And hello everyone. Nice to meet you all. My name is Karin Underwood and I’m a product manager at the U.S. Digital Service and very excited to be just with this community of women today.
I wanted to share a quick story about work that we’ve been doing with the U.S. Department of Justice. Myself and a team of USDSers have been working on a project called the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database that was really launched earlier last year to track law enforcement federal misconduct. And in this project when we came in, we realized that one thing that was really critical was the need for some senior leadership and some senior buy-in.
We needed to find stakeholders, like in many projects that you might’ve worked on, that really were bought into doing the project, rolling it out, and creating momentum and urgency to drive it forward within an aggressive six-month timeline. And so what we learned there was that finding your stakeholder, finding your champion. In this case, we work directly with the office of the Deputy Attorney General at the Department of Justice that was willing to really spearhead this effort.
Finding those people is what will carry the work on for the long term, and it is essential. And so, as you think about rolling out projects, doing product work, find that champion and you’ll be set on a path for success. And with that, I will pass it to Esther to speak a little bit about getting the right voices in the room. Pooja. Back to Pooja.
Pooja Shaw: You gave me time to get the slides kind of right so you can at least see the slide now. It’s not perfectly framed, but… Like Karen said, finding a champion, a theme that we find true across most of the work at USDS. Another one that I have found especially true in all sectors, and I’m sure we all find as product managers, we’re always working to get the right voices in the room, but it’s incredibly important in government in particular. I’ll speak a little bit about a project I did with an agency that supports childcare subsidies.
If you’re a low income family and you need childcare, there’s a federal benefit available to subsidize the childcare cost. But like many government forms, the application to receive this is often fairly intimidating and not as user-friendly as it could be. We brought in a small team from USDS to think about how we could improve that experience and reduce the burden on families. And so we naively went in and we’re like, “Oh, we need to just fix the form.” We brought in some designers and a product manager to think about how we could do that. And then as we started digging in, we realized, oh, the reason that these forms are often so complicated is because they’re rooted in policy and regulations and statute and the form is an artifact of how people are interpreting that policy.
We realized very quickly we need to have policy experts in the room as well as we’re seeking to do that work. And then we got one step further and realized, oh, every state, this is a state delivered program. So every state actually implements this slightly differently. We need to talk to the state implementation experts to understand why they’re choosing to implement their application and processes in a certain way. And then we soon realized, you know what? A lot of what’s driving state decisions is their compliance programs. We need to bring our compliance friends in from the federal government, and… You get the general idea, which is, what we thought would start off as a fairly straightforward, we need to redesign the form and that takes technologist skillset to do so.
We very quickly realized, needs to have a lot of stakeholders around the table ranging from policy to implementation to legal to compliance, in addition to our core technologist skillset to have the impact that we wanted. And there’s actually a writeup about this work on the USDS blog for any of you that are interested. But we were able to turn out some guidance in a model application to help states figure out how to best adapt it to their situation. And a number of states have adopted this to reduce burden on families that are applying for childcare subsidy, which we’ve been very happy about. With that, I will turn it over to Esther to talk a little bit about our third theme here of using data to drive strategy.
Esther Sportello: Awesome. Thanks so much, Pooja. Now we have a champion. We have all the voices in the room, and so now it’s time to let the data talk. Data is the cornerstone of informed decision making, and whether that’s qualitative or quantitative data, it’s really figuring out how to use the data that you have available to you or you have access to collect, to help tell your story in addition to the narrative that you’re crafting. Specifically on the project I’m working on with the USDS team, partnering with the CDC, we’re working to modernize the National Disease Surveillance system, which is a tool that is used by public health departments across our local, state and territorial jurisdictions to manage disease investigations. When it’s working well, you probably don’t even know it’s existing, which is the beauty of the whole thing. And the magnitude of this project is huge.
When thinking about this project or a project similar to this magnitude of scale, there’s often two pitfalls that teams are challenged by. And the first is analysis paralysis. You see our friend on the left, they have the inability to make a decision because there’s such an overwhelming amount of data, which sounds great, but you can’t find the signal across the noise and it becomes paralyzing and you can’t move forward. It’s pitfall one.
Pitfall two is on the other side of the spectrum, intuition based strategy, which I affectionately refer to as IBS, similar but different than irritable bowel syndrome. Similar in that it feels good when you’re starting with that intuition. You’re like, “Yeah, my gut feels like this is the right strategy and answer.” And then you get a few weeks or months down the road and you’re like, “Wait, how do we get here? This doesn’t really make sense.” And it’s all messy and you’re questioning some decisions you might’ve made earlier. All similar.
To avoid these two pitfalls, there’s really three strategies that I like to use and that we’ve been using on this project with the CDC. The first is to aggregate and synthesize existing data. We wanted to understand the landscape of the data that already existed because there’s years of data available. And so in this specific case, it took the form of support tickets and empathy interviews that we then clustered into themes to make sense of it. And then when we cut that data, we looked at different volume by condition, by state population, by a bunch of different factors so that we could see really what was the indicator of which direction we should head. And we use that information to form a hypothesis.
The great thing about hypothesis is we don’t know if it’s right or wrong, but we have an assumption based on the information that we’ve gathered, is that leads us into the second step, which is to define a research plan. And so what we did with that hypothesis in hand is, developed a robust research plan to validate the assumptions we had, taking the ones that were most laden with risk or had the most unknowns first, and try to debunk those, validate or invalidate them first.
And this involved creating a half day virtual workshop with people across the country from all those various levels, from state to territorial jurisdictions, with the goal of really quantifying the magnitude of the pain that they felt in each of those themes that we had clustered together. And so what that really enabled us to do is to take that qualitative data, a layer on some quantitative data, and that leads us to step number three, which is to gain buy-in and enthusiasm.
What we finally were able to do with the data that we’ve collected is create a roadmap that was prioritized based on the opportunity that we had understood from those two prior steps. And when challenges arose, which they always do, people are passionate about the problem they are interested in solving.
We were able to use this data, we were able to lean on this data to tell the story for us of why we believe that this problem should be solved now because it would be serving the greatest amount of people at this point in time. And so the journey to modernize our disease surveillance system has been challenging.
That’s because every decision we make carries an enormous amount of weight. And our commitment to using the data to guide the decision making has really been instrumental to keeping momentum and excitement and focus, honestly focus, as we navigate this complex set of priorities to gain clarity and purpose for the strategy to take us into the future.
To recap, the three things we did was aggregate and synthesize the data. We defined a research plan and then we gained enthusiasm by letting the data tell the story for us. With that, we hope that these few examples have illustrated how finding a champion, bringing the right voices to the table and using data to craft your strategy within government can set you up for success just like it does in the private sector. There’s really no difference in how you do that internal and external to the government. And so with that, I will turn it back to Karin for some closing remarks. And I think we’re going to open the floor for some Q&A.
Karin Underwood: Absolutely. I wanted to mention a few things that are here on this slide. We have some sessions around product management in public health on March 8th, mentor hour, and also a career fair kickoff introduction to the U.S. Digital Service, as well as a booth networking hour with the U.S. Digital Service, the U.S. Digital Corps, which is a younger earlier career program, and also the office of the CIO at the White House. So some very exciting opportunities.
I just want to say thank you so much for joining today. We love being part of this community. And if you haven’t looked at the U.S. Digital Service as a place to apply your tech skills and really bring your impact to all Americans, please look us up and consider what we would call a tour of duty. And with that, I want to open it up for Q&A. I see that a few questions have come in from the chat and I will moderate a little bit.
The first question I’ll take is just, I’ll go top to bottom. Reagan, I’ve always been interested in government work. I’m a passionate worker, but I worry I don’t have patience. How do you handle the slow moving nature of government and policy? And I know Pooja wears a lot of hats across the government, so I will turn this question to her.
Pooja Shaw: As we said, we all came from private sector backgrounds. I spent somewhere between 10 and 12 years in the private sector before joining USDS and I have done more work at a faster pace at USDS than I had at any point prior to joining the federal government. I think it’s definitely true. There’s definitely a lot of red tape, there are definitely a lot of hurdles to move through, but I think this idea that government is always slow moving is definitely not the case. Especially, roles vary, but for the type of work that the three of us have done at USDS, they’re often high profile, high visibility, high urgency projects to improve services that are our priority across the federal government.
I think with anything in the private sector, there are some roles that fit a certain stereotype, and within the government there are certain roles that fit a certain stereotype, but I wouldn’t necessarily assume that that will be the experience if you join government.
Esther Sportello: Plus one. Something I might add is, it’s just like any other product or I view it as any other product role where you’re setting goals and milestones. And really, I think, that adjustment period when you’re joining a new team is figuring out who are the key decision makers and what are going to be the biggest drags or what’s causing your velocity or speed to be slow and figure out how to accelerate them just like you would do on any other team.
Some strategies that you would use external to government are the same here with setting milestones and then being realistic about what can be delivered. That reduces the frustration because you’re setting realistic expectations for yourself, the project, and all your stakeholders who you’re working with.
Karin Underwood: Thank you so much. And I would just triple plus that. I think there’s times that things move fast and times that things move slow, but especially when you have important projects to work on, there can be some very fast movements.
Okay, next question. Maybe we can just touch briefly, are you all remote workers? Esther, I know you’re in LA. Could you talk about what it’s like to work remotely for USDS?
Esther Sportello: Yeah, absolutely. I was a part of a pilot program for remote work within the government. I’m based in Los Angeles. I am fully remote and some of my project teams do require me to travel. The CDC is based in Atlanta, and I make periodic trips there to be onsite with those individuals. That is my personal experience for my time here at the USDS.
Karin Underwood: Great. Okay. Next question. How does someone get into the tech side of government? I’ve been curious about it, but I’ve heard it’s hard to get into, like many government jobs are, so what are some advice about, any advice that this team has about how to branch into that space? And Esther, since you just responded, I’ll tee it to you to continue.
Esther Sportello: I think within the government, there is a tremendous amount of effort and work to bring technology to the forefront and hire tech talent or individuals who have that tech skillset into the mix in the fold.
USDS is one great avenue, right? We are like an internal consultancy within the executive office of the President. There are also the program at 18F, which is another organization within GSA. And Karin, I believe you were part of another program as well.
There are multiple avenues for technology to enter. Or if you would like to enter the tech side of government, there are multiple avenues to do so. [crosstalk] If you have anything to add to that.
Pooja Shaw: I was going to add two things, which is that a lot of agencies are also, we obviously sit within EOP, but a lot of agencies are also increasingly building up their tech capacity. And so I’m sure we can follow up, I don’t have the links handy, but I’m sure we can dig up how to easily find those across agencies because we’re definitely seeing that as well. And it is beneficial to all to have that capacity both living within organizations like USDS as well as within the agency. So just would continue to keep agency work in mind as well.
Esther Sportello: Oh my goodness. How could I have forgotten that? Shameless plug for the CDC. They are hiring. All skillsets. Please apply.
Karin Underwood: Yeah, I will shameless plug a project I’m working on at HRSA, which is hiring a digital services lead for the first time for their team. Yes, there are opportunities to look at there. Great. Okay, next question.
And I will keep an eye on the time. In terms of, let’s see… I want to shift my… In the PM process, how do you implement product discovery to get insights more quickly and make sure that you’re not in insights sequentially and not causing any delays. And I know that you’ve been doing a lot of product work, Esther, so I’ll hear what does this look like at USDS compared to maybe other places you’ve worked?
Esther Sportello: I think what I’m hearing the question ask is how do we get user, or maybe I’ll take it as, how do we get user feedback? And so, that I think is one thing that looks pretty different within the government than outside the government is how we engage with individuals a part of user research. We absolutely want to be human centered and do lead with a human centered practice, but there are some other requirements that we have to be compliant with, such as PR&A, making sure that we’re engaging users in an equitable way, in a way that isn’t creating burden for the American citizen as a part of the process.
It’s the approval process before you start your engagement that maybe a little, will look really different than in the private sector, but when it comes to doing usability interviews or empathy interviews or collecting data on usage, if it’s an application or a web form, all of that is really similar. The forms and web applications are tooled in similar ways to collect data so you can find insights just how you would normally do in the private sector. I don’t know, Karin, if you have anything different to add to that.
Karin Underwood: No, thank you for doing that. And I forgot to mention I was a presidential innovation fellow, so that’s another thing to look at, in terms of how to get tech into government. Thank you for teeing me up for that earlier.
No, I think it’s similar. It’s about building trust with the agencies that we’re working with to get the permission and making sure that we’re setting up these things in the right way. But very much, USDS runs discovery sprints. I was on a discovery sprint with Pooja last year and that is how we do some of our product discovery similar to the private sector.
One more question on this transition. What are some of the challenges you faced and similarities you experienced when transitioning from the private sector to government? And Pooja, I know you mentioned the wealth of your experience in the private sector and then entering into a government role. I will kick that to you.
Pooja Shaw: In general a lot is made of the difference between the private sector and government. My experience has been that if you came from a private sector startup where your experience has primarily been in working with a very small team of a handful of people, then moving into the bureaucracy and bigger nature of government will feel like a big adjustment.
However, for people that have joined USDS from places like Amazon and Google and other large bureaucracies, what you hear from them is, it doesn’t feel… Like a bureaucracy is a bureaucracy. It is a large organization, it has a lot of layers, you have to understand. If you do all the three things that we just talked about in our talk, but it’s not… A lot is similar between the public and the private sector.
Karin Underwood: Thanks Pooja. And I agree. I was talking to someone, a friend at J&J, the other day, and just talking about different… What political battles do you win and where do you have to not move your ideas forward? And it felt very similar. I agree with that difference. Great. And we have about five minutes left, so I’ll take one more question.
Is there a scope for non-tech government employees to influence how the government does equity and equity practices inside of the government? And Esther, I don’t know, if this is something you feel comfortable with, but do you want to get us started?
Esther Sportello: I can kick us off. Regardless of what your skillset is, I feel like there’s a place for you in the government, it’s just a matter of where and what that role is and what that looks like. There are just, like a private sector company, there are HR teams or there are operations teams. There are every kind of function that you need to run any sort of organization, exists here also. And probably 10 of them because you have it at the federal level and then you have it at each agency level as well.
I know I can speak specifically within USDS, we have a whole subcommittee dedicated to DEIB or diversity, inclusion, and equity and belonging. So there are folks fully dedicated to making sure that we’re focused on that as a team and culture and making sure that’s incorporated into our work. Those are the ones that I’m specifically familiar with. Pooja, are there others, other teams that you’ve worked with?
Pooja Shaw: I was just going to add one just because of the sheer scope and nature of the work that the government does, touching so many critical services that often you don’t even realize, you’re very uniquely positioned to use a equity focused lens in any room. It doesn’t have to be a technology room.
A very specific example that jumps to mind is, I was working with an agency on a project where we were launching a service that was going to be used by millions of people and we were prepared to launch it and usability tested it in English, but we hadn’t necessarily done the same thing for Spanish.
And someone, who was not on the technology team, was in the room and they were like, “Hey, you really should do all those same things in Spanish.” And it was like, “Wow, that is a hundred percent correct and that was an oversight and we should do that.” And so you don’t have to be a technologist or you can really be in any role and have that opportunity to raise those kinds of points.
Karin Underwood: Great. And I will just wrap by saying that one benefit of government is that you are thinking about how to not just deliver for some small segment of the population, but to really deliver for all Americans.
When we think about team USG, I feel like we think about how do we both use that same idea of who are we targeting, but also think about that equity lens. And when I was at the Office of Science and Technology Policy and I said the word equity pretty much every day in how we prioritized our work, how we thought about impact and how we really tried to do values driven work across the government and across federal agencies.
There’s lots of opportunity outside, but also lots of opportunity inside to really make sure that we’re here, not just to build good products, but really to think about those who could use them the most and prioritize that work. And it looks like we are at time. I see our minder back in the room.
With that, I just want to say thank you so much. Please visit some of our booths. It’s been an honor to speak with you all today. Take a look at the U.S. Digital Service and Girl Geek, thank you for having us. Thank you for letting us join today. It’s been an honor.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you for joining. Thank you so much. All right. Have a good rest of your day. Bye.
Karin Underwood: Yeah, take care everyone.
Like what you see here? Our mission-aligned Girl Geek X partners are hiring!
Evie Alexander: Hi everyone, so great to be here today. Very excited to be at a Girl Geek conference and talk with all of you.
My name is Evie, I’m the head of design for all of Opendoor, and I’m also the leader of our consumer products organization. And so what exactly does that mean? That’s a lot. I like to break it down into two teams at Opendoor, kind of two big internal teams in two categories.
One is consumer, and the consumer org is a team that makes all of the products that our customers use, and our goal with this part of the organization is to offer a simple and certain experience for our sellers and buyers to be able to explore their options and transact, as well as be able to really grow our business through solving customer problems first and foremost and so really customer minded and research oriented.
Our teams within consumer do a lot of zero to one research and product work to help us get there to make sure that we’re solving those problems and growing the business.
The second bucket I think of is operations. And obviously with that simple and certain experience I just talked about for customers, we have actually a lot of complexities of real estate that don’t go away.
We want to offer a simple experience for customers, but then on our end, we have to do a lot of work, there’s a lot of internal tools and complicated workflows that we work through.
Our engineering, product and design teams are focused on creating ops tools to help to streamline the process and make sure that we have the right things in place to support the end customer experience. This requires a lot of really deep thinking and complex workflows.
As far as why it’s a great time to be at Opendoor, one of my favorite things is that no matter where you are at Opendoor, no matter what function you’re in or what team you’re on, if there’s always room to have impact. We have really small teams who are focused on big problems, and the real estate industry is just so ripe for change, and so there’s no shortage of ways to grow and be able to see results with your work.
What we look for and value in candidates, we’re always on the lookout for people who love to solve complex problems and are excited to talk with customers and really get in the weeds, get in the details, and find ways that we can build the most impactful solutions. Please talk with our recruiting team and we’ll share some of the roles that we have open. Now, I’m going to go ahead and hand it off to Griselle.
Griselle Astrid Ong: Thanks, Evie. Hi everyone. I’m really excited to be here as well. I’m Griselle, I’m an engineering manager here at Opendoor, working with multiple teams across our consumer organization.
Our consumer organization, as Evie touched on earlier, we are building products and experiences that help people buy and sell homes with a peace of mind. And right now we are hyper-focused on meeting customers where they are, meaning we’re building personalized experiences and unique products that help people sell their homes no matter when, where, or how they want to sell.
This is a very tough product and design problem, but even from a technology standpoint, this really requires a very disciplined and highly maintainable architecture so we can handle all that complexity.
We’re building products today using the domain-driven design principles, flexible UI design system, and a lot of other technologies to help ensure that our products will scale going forward. The products we’re building today, I’m really excited about them, they’re going to be a real estate industry game changer, and I’m excited about all the progress we’ve made so far.
I’m also really excited about our use of artificial intelligence, not just within the consumer organization, but really all across the company. For Opendoor, AI is not just a gimmick, it really is a game changer for us in creating value for our customers, whether it’s in improving customer engagement, customer communication, or just improving our operations as a whole.
In terms of the engineering culture here, I’m really, really proud to be a part of this org. I work with really smart people day in and day out. I learn from them whether they’ve been an engineer for two years or 12 years, and at the same time, everyone’s super collaborative, everyone’s really humble, willing to jump in and help everyone work with our design, product and operations counterparts to solve problems for our customers.
I’m also super excited that we are expanding our team in India. I know India is a huge tech hub, there’s a lot of talent there, and we already have a lot of colleagues based in India who are helping shape the future of technology here at Opendoor.
I’m really excited to meet more folks in India and have them join our team. In terms of what we look for in our teammates, for me there are two important things.
One is being very customer-centric. Everything that we build here, whether it’s a scalable backend, a new pricing model, or really nice UI, this is all ultimately for the customer. So having the customer in mind is super important.
And then the other thing is just having a great sense of ownership. Here at Opendoor, there’s a lot of problems to solve and we really expect everyone to be proactive in finding those problems, finding out the proper solutions and working with everyone as a team. Really excited for all of you to learn more about Opendoor, definitely check us out during the recruiting sessions and I’ll hand it off to Cynthia.
Cynthia Herriott: Hi everyone, I’m Cynthia Herriott. I am an area manager here in Atlanta, Georgia. My team is a mashup of construction, project management, troubleshooters and magicians. We are possibly the only in-person individuals that will meet with a seller or a buyer.
We are a customer service driven team and we’re passionate about the seamless i-buying experience. Our company and culture, it’s the best. We build openness, we love the color blue. What could be better?
We are a team that has the pleasure of experiencing the retool and tooling of our software that happens on a perpetual basis.
Our customers create a scheduled assessment with us and then our HPM team, home project managers, go out and walk the seller through their home, we take photos, a final offer is created. And once we acquire the home, that same project manager goes into the home and manages the renovation. We also assist on the buyer side by managing the home throughout the resale.
We are looking for curious spirits that are change-driven, that is the best way that I could describe one of my teammates. Our initiative constantly evolves based on our market, and our software does the same.
An ideal team player enjoys a challenge. Thank you for joining. Please make sure to stop by our recruiting booth and learn more about our roles and speak with some of our team members. Thank you all so much.
In her ELEVATE session, Christina Chan (Wealthsimple Staff Engineer) discusses the importance of vulnerability and psychological safety in the workplace. She explains that creating a psychologically safe space is crucial for teams to feel comfortable asking for help, sharing ideas, and expressing their opinions.
Vulnerability is not a sign of weakness, but rather a measure of courage. She shares strategies for leading with vulnerability, including admitting what you don’t know, sharing when you’re struggling, developing self-awareness, and finding a trusted friend to practice vulnerability with. Practicing vulnerability, leaders give others permission to be vulnerable, ultimately creating a psychologically safer space for teams.
Like what you see here? Our mission-aligned Girl Geek X partners are hiring!
Christina Chan: Hi, everyone. Thank you for the warm introduction. It’s very exciting to be here and talking to you all. I guess I’ll just dive right into this. As leaders in engineering, we all share some common goals. We want to focus on high-impact work and build the trust and influence to actually get it done. We want people to feel comfortable coming to us with their problems and their ideas, asking questions, and sharing their honest opinions with us. And ultimately, we want our teams to be happy and insert your OKR here.
That all sounds well and good, but realistically, so many things get in the way and make it harder for us to accomplish these goals. Maybe you’ve noticed that your team doesn’t always ask for help or that it takes a long time for concerns to be raised if they’re even brought up at all. Or maybe you’ve been told that other developers find you intimidating and that they don’t feel like they can disagree with you. Or maybe you’ve noticed that there’s a lot of communication happening in back channels, and it doesn’t seem like people are openly sharing their ideas and their feedback. What all of these things point to is a lack of trust and psychological safety.
We can’t accomplish our goals without creating a psychologically safe space for our teams. Extensive research has shown how psychological safety, team members feeling safe enough to take risks and be vulnerable in front of one another, is the most important dynamic that sets high-performing teams apart. Maybe you’re looking at me, and listening and it’s like, “Cool. Hi, I’m just one person. How can I actually do anything about this?” And I get it. It’s really easy to brush off these problems and dismiss them as organizational or cultural issues that are too hard to fix by ourselves. But as leaders, depending on your position, and as role models and mentors, we have the power and the privilege to create the sort of culture that we want.
How do we do that? How do we create an environment where our teams feel safe? And as you’ve probably guessed, we need to lead by example and lead with vulnerability. If your initial reaction to hearing that is, “Oh, wow, absolutely not,” you’re not alone. Vulnerability in the workplace can make you feel uncomfortable like you’re letting your guard down. And believe me, I’ve been there. I believed that I always needed to be professional, that I needed to maintain my distance, and always project a confident and composed image, otherwise, no one would take me seriously. I was afraid to show any vulnerabilities or any weaknesses, perceived weaknesses.
Whenever I did start to feel vulnerable, I would also feel this immense shame like I was letting my image slip and that people would find out about the real me, and they would stop taking me seriously or valuing my technical opinions and perspectives. This fear and shame crept up whenever I started something new, needed to ask a question, was the only person that looked like me when I was in a room, whenever I made a mistake or struggled to balance my work and personal life. I didn’t see other people talking openly about this kind of stuff. So I believed that if I did it myself, I would be seen as weak and I didn’t deserve to be here.
For me, this looked like forcing myself to give 110% at work every single day, no matter what was going on in my personal life, never making a mistake, and if I did, I would beat myself up about it. And also spending so much time trying to figure out things on my own instead of asking for help when I needed it. In short, I was avoiding feeling vulnerable at any cost. But what actually ended up happening was I was limiting the connections and the trust that I could build with my team. And with the effort required to hide from these feelings and hide my vulnerabilities, I was also running myself straight towards burnout. So I realized something needed to change.
And it was around this time that I came across Dr. Brené Brown and her amazing TED talk about the power of vulnerability. If you haven’t watched it or read her books, I highly recommend them. I love her. I’m obsessed. The rest of this talk will basically be a love letter to Brené Brown. What she had to say fundamentally changed the way that I think about vulnerability. Brené Brown has spent over two decades studying courage, vulnerability, shame, and empathy. She’s brought to light the profound impact of vulnerability on our lives, especially in leadership. And she famously has said things like, “Vulnerability is not winning or losing.
It’s having the courage to show up and be seen when we have no control over the outcome.” She defines vulnerability as, “Uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure,” which I thought, “Great, that aligns perfectly with my views.” She also says that, “Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity, and that it’s the root of building authentic and meaningful connections.” I thought, “Hmm, that doesn’t quite fit.” But upon a lot of reflection and honestly reading her book, Dare to Lead and Daring Greatly, it became clear that vulnerability is about the courage to show up and to let ourselves be seen, to risk failure, and to still be resilient throughout it.
What does that mean for leading with vulnerability? This means embracing our imperfections, acknowledging our mistakes, being open about our challenges. It means having the courage to say, “I don’t know,” or, “I need help.” It’s about creating a culture where people feel safe to take risks, make mistakes, and learn from them. When we lead with vulnerability, we create an environment where people feel valued, heard, and empowered, which eventually leads to a culture of innovation, creativity, and resilience. And yeah, I see in the chat, it’s hard. So now, just because we know that being vulnerable is good for us and good for our teams, it doesn’t mean that it’s easy. And that feeling of discomfort with being vulnerable just goes away.
It takes a lot of effort and practice to sit with that discomfort and work through it. Something that has personally helped me is to reframe my anxiety and nerves as excitement and an indication that whatever I’m nervous about is an opportunity for growth. For example, say you’re speaking in front of an audience, virtual or live, that could be pretty nerve-wracking, but the body sensations of anxiety and nervousness align pretty closely with how it feels to be excited about something. Here I am, being vulnerable and very excited to be speaking with all of you.
Another thing that can make vulnerability seem scary is boundaries, and there being a misconception that vulnerability means we disclose everything, divulge every aspect of our personal lives, and kind of lay it all out on the table. But that’s not true. Vulnerability without boundaries is simply not vulnerability. Boundaries are the limits we set for ourselves and others, and they’re about understanding what’s okay and not okay for us. They’re about respecting our own needs and the needs of others.
Let’s use a theoretical example. Say you are a senior leader at your company, and someone on your team is coming to you expressing concerns about the stability of the tech industry. Imagine you reply to them, “Let me be vulnerable. I’m freaking out. I’ve never experienced a downturn, and I’m scared we’re all going to get laid off.” While those are valid feelings, saying it like that is oversharing. It’s not only unfair, it’s likely going to scare that person that came to talk to you. If you do genuinely feel that way, you should absolutely share it with someone. But in this case of being a leader, you probably don’t want to share that level of detail with people who are looking to you as a source of stability and guidance.
Instead, you can validate their concerns, tell them that you feel a similar way, but set the boundary of it’s not appropriate to overshare and dump your concerns on this person who came to you for help and support. But you can say, “I’ve never been through something like this, and I feel a similar way to you. If you are feeling overwhelmed, please come talk to me one-on-one, and we can go through this more together.”
Vulnerability is not about oversharing or dumping your feelings on someone. We need to think about why we’re sharing and with whom. Is the sharing going to move your work connection or relationship forward, or is it just going to make you feel better in the short term? Hopefully, by this point, I’ve convinced you, and you’re ready to go forth and practice vulnerability. As promised, I’ll share some strategies and tips to get you started. So I tried to come up with a nice acronym, but the best I have for you is ASDF.
Admit what you don’t know. If you pretend like you know everything, you’re closing the door to curiosity and continuous learning and signaling to your team that perfection is expected. Being vulnerable means we ask questions when we don’t know something, we ask for help when we need it, and we say no when something doesn’t fit with our time, energy, or values. And we don’t blame people when mistakes are made. An example of this is, say, your team uses an acronym all the time. You don’t know what it means, but you’ve used it in conversation several times. You can go on continuing not to know what it is. My acronym is ASDF. Yes. Using acronyms as my example for something is probably not the best, but thank you for asking.
The worst thing can happen is they just tell you what it is, or maybe they don’t actually know what the acronym stands for either, and then you all learn something together. Share. Share when you’re struggling. It’s okay to talk to your team about things you’re struggling with, whether it’s a specific project, a personal issue, or something else. It’s important to be honest about what you’re going through. And you can do this while respecting your boundaries and not disclosing every detail. You don’t need to go into the nitty-gritty details with everyone, but if you have a trusted team member, you can share more with them.
For example, if you have something going on in your personal life that’s making it really hard for you to focus, instead of suffering in silence and having it negatively impact your work, you can have the courage to be vulnerable and talk to your team and say something like, “Hey, I have something going on in my life, and I’m struggling with, and I wanted you to know. These are some ways that I can… that I need help from you, but I may also need to take some time off.” And then to your manager or whoever is a trusted colleague or a mentor, you can give more details if you’re comfortable. D. Develop an awareness of how vulnerability feels. So start by understanding yourself and your emotions and your reactions.
Self-awareness is the first step towards vulnerability because you can’t be open about your feelings if you don’t understand them yourselves. This one feels the most like a therapy exercise, but check in with yourself and allow yourself to really feel your feelings and what comes up when you’re being vulnerable. Finally, F. Find a friend to practice with. Being vulnerable is intimidating, and the best advice I can give to you is to practice with someone you already trust. This could be your manager, a mentor, or a trusted friend. Being the first to be vulnerable can feel like taking a leap of faith. But the more you practice, the more comfortable you will get with it.
Start with small disclosures to build a foundation of trust and gradually share more and more as your comfort increases. I’d like to leave you with another quote by Brené Brown. “Trust is earned, not through heroic deeds or even highly visible actions, but through paying attention, listening, and gestures of genuine care and connection.” Remember, vulnerability is not a sign of weakness but a measure of courage. It’s about showing up and being seen in all our authenticity.
By practicing vulnerability at work, you give others the permission to open up and be vulnerable to ultimately creating a psychologically safer space for our teams.
If we want to foster healthy debate for people to share their ideas, seek feedback, and ask for help, we need to lead by example and lead with vulnerability. Thank you. I think that I will stop sharing my screen now, or I’ll leave this up. And we have about five minutes left, I think. I could have some time to answer questions. And there is a question in the chat. Well, not in the chat, in the Q&A box. If you have any questions, you can please type them in there. What was the name? I think there’s one on screen that I maybe shared with everybody. What was the name of that TED talk person that I mentioned? It’s Brené Brown. I’ll share the specific TED talk in the chat, I think.
How do I do this? Okay. There’s a question from Cynthia in the Q&A, I think. Yeah. “I agree. Showing vulnerability is being authentic. Thank you for a great talk. Have you dealt with a coworker that saw you as weak and tried to take advantage of it when you’re showing vulnerability? How do you think one should handle it?” That’s a good question. I think I’ve been fortunate enough to work with people that haven’t done this. Although I think early on in my career before I had the title of staff developer, it was anytime I shared a concern, I was always a lot more anxious about it being perceived poorly. But I think the practice is you don’t have to be vulnerable with absolutely everyone.
You can work and build up slowly like you find a trusted mentor or a sponsor that you can work with and share these things and concerns and grow from there. And then if you have a coworker that sees you as weak and tells you that you suck and is putting you down, it’s kind of on them, and it’s their issue and trying not to take it personally. And I guess just giving them the feedback or giving their manager the feedback honestly, that they were not cool and basically said something inappropriate to you. And then, “Thanks for the great talk. Will you please share the full acronym again?” Yes. The acronym is ASDF. Admit, develop… or admit, share, develop, and find a friend.
Like what you see here? Our mission-aligned Girl Geek X partners are hiring!
In thisELEVATE session, Boomi team members Patricia Moore (Solutions Strategist, Boomi Innovation Group), along with her colleaguesSwagata Ashwani (Principal Data Scientist), Raji Venkatesan (Senior Engineering Manager), and Donna Matthews(Global SAP Ecosystem Manager), discuss their roles and experiences at Boomi, a company that empowers businesses with intelligent integration and automation.
Panelists talk about their non-traditional paths into tech and their accomplishments at Boomi, and discuss their future aspirations and the future of the tech industry, particularly for women. They emphasize the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the tech industry and the need for women to be involved in decision-making and leadership positions. Panelists also mention the growing role of AI and the need for ethical considerations and input from non-tech individuals.
Patricia Moore: Good morning, good afternoon, good evening depending on what part of the world you’re joining us from. I’m so glad that you’re here for our session. It’s titled Women Leading the Way in Research and Development to Empower Innovation. So the four of us are really excited to talk to you about the traditional and non-traditional ways that we have come into our current roles at Boomi.
For those of you who are not familiar with Boomi, you should know that it is an organization that empowers businesses with intelligent integration and automation. So we have over 20,000 global customers. We have a worldwide network of over 800 partners and organizations turn to us and our award-winning platform so they can connect their applications, data and people to accelerate digital transformation in those organizations.
I’m a solution strategist for the Boomi Innovation Group based out of Richmond, Virginia. We also have Donna Matthews with us. She is our global SAP Ecosystem Manager. Raji Venkatesan is our senior engineering manager and Swagata Ashwani, who is a principal data scientist with us here at Boomi. We’re just going to dive right in. I’m going to ask the first question to Donna. Tell us how you got your start in tech.
Donna Matthews: Wow. Okay. I’ll try to keep it brief because it is very non-traditional. Probably you are the only one, Patricia, who has a more non-traditional path than I do. But I started many years ago in emergency services.
I was a 911 center communications manager, an EMT, an emergency medical dispatcher. And I knew nothing about tech. I couldn’t spell SQL, I didn’t know anything, and I was nominated as the newest supervisor in to be the admin for our brand new computer-aided dispatch system, which was just being implemented. But after two and a half, nearly three years of being in the server room for every single update, every change, and using the system day in and day out to do your job, I got to know it pretty well. And I was very lucky to be headhunted by the software company that built the computer-aided dispatch system.
Patricia Moore: Awesome. Swagata, you want to tell us how you came into your role in tech?
Swagata Ashwani: Yeah, absolutely. Hi, everyone. So grateful to be here with my amazing and talented colleagues. My journey was traditional at the beginning. I did the checklist items that typically an immigrant from India does. I went to undergrad under engineering and computer science, and then I decided I maybe want to pivot and do something a little bit unconventional.
My degree was a mix of engineering and design, and my vision was that I’m going to get into a tech leadership position after I graduate. But during my master’s degree at Carnegie Mellon, and if anyone in the audience is from Carnegie Mellon, they know that machine learning is like the buzzword. Anywhere you go in the campus, everybody talks about machine learning. And back in 2017, it was still like a buzzword even outside of Carnegie Mellon. I was very intrigued by what this is.
And by a fluke, I was forced by a friend of mine to take a class and it was called Introduction to Machine Learning, which absolutely wasn’t an introduction. It was way deep into all these… It was a PhD level course. But while pursuing that course, I was so intrigued and so amazed by technology and especially machine learning that I was like, “Okay, this is what I am supposed to do.” And it was a class I actually audited. It was not even part of my credit, but I then decided that this is what I wanted to do.
Luckily somebody after I graduated trusted me to offer a associate data scientist position at a pharmaceutical company. And that’s when my journey started in 2018. And since then I’ve never looked back and I’m glad to be part of Boomi as a principal data scientist now.
Patricia Moore: Awesome. And we are so lucky to have you. Raji, tell us how you got into tech.
Raji Venkatesan: Sure, Patricia. Taking off on what Swagata said, mine is a very similar story, but a few decades earlier. I grew up in India and my father was a scientist and there was nothing else I would do but study a STEM field. I started off, I studied math and I came to the US. I went to grad school for math. Drexel University where I went to also at that time, math and computer science were part of the same department.
I began taking some computer science courses and then decided to stay a year longer and get a master’s in both math and computer science. When I graduated, I had a five-month-old baby. The world was in the throes of Y2K panic, there was a lot of hiring going on. I chose to select a company that built enterprise software for higher ed universities. And at that time, the only reason I chose it was because they offered flexibility. And that was super important for me with an infant at home.
My first manager, although I started as a programmer analyst, my first manager saw something in me and she made me a tech lead within two to three months, of a very important project. I got a lot of mentorship from her on being a lead, amplifying my voice, forming allies. And I stayed on at the company for two decades and it was a very fluid role where I was a developer in some projects.
I was a tech lead sometimes and I was leading entire initiatives sometimes. I was able to build my technical depth, get some good instincts for development processes, and it wasn’t unknown when the senior VP of engineering would call me in and say, “Hey, this product was sold on the basis of a brochure. We need you to go in and we are lagging in development. We need you to go and do your magic and get it out.” But nobody could really articulate what that magic was.
And that happens to so many of us that play the glue role, that there’s so much going on, but nobody can really say what it is. And then I was able to formalize, bring all of those skills, formalize it in my role as senior engineering manager of API management at Boomi.
Patricia Moore: Wow.
Raji Venkatesan: That’s the whole arc. Yeah.
Patricia Moore: Amazing. My journey to Boomi, much like Donna was not a traditional path. I studied music business for my undergraduate degree. I worked in live music and concerts for the first five years of my career. And while I was doing that, I ran a nonprofit in New York City that worked with New York City public schools and teaching kids business skills so they could turn their art projects into fundraisers to fill the funding gap for arts education.
..Started learning about entrepreneurship and how to grow a business. I ended up working in a nonprofit here in Richmond after business school. When I stopped working in New York, I spent some time abroad in Malaysia. That’s where my mom is from. But ended up going to business school in Austin, Texas. Wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do with my MBA and at that point that sounds like where I might have pivoted into tech, but it wasn’t.
I went into nonprofit and was the director of a leadership development program and started another business. I had a small business doing tea party catering, which was a different part of my life working in food and beverage. But all of those entrepreneurial experiences led me to teach a class in product management and product innovation at Virginia Commonwealth University. That adjunct professor position in product innovation is ultimately what led me to Boomi. This is my first job in tech, so I have almost 15 years of work experience in other fields.
I’ve been at Boomi now for three years and every day is like drinking from the fire hose. The four of us were talking about this in preparation for this panel today. Whether you start in tech from the beginning or you find your way into tech through non-traditional means, like Donna and myself, no matter your path, it is always like drinking from the fire hose. We’re all sort of in that together. But we do want to talk a little bit about some of our major accomplishments. We all do quite different things at Boomi, so I’m going to toss it back to Raji. Tell us about one of your greatest accomplishments while you’ve been at Boomi.
Raji Venkatesan: I’m an engineering manager and I’m a team lead. I lead an awesome group of engineers, and the engineering team has added significant features to the API DNA of Boomi’s integration platform.
My team has added significant enhancements to monitoring within API management, and I also had the opportunity to lead a team in their final leg of delivering a brand new product for message queuing and streaming the Event Streams product and to add event-driven architecture, provide event-driven architecture for our users. And that brought in different set of skills that I had to exercise as a manager compared to an established product. As I said, a team enabler and an amazing group of engineers at Boomi and getting to exercise all my former skills.
Patricia Moore: Awesome. Yeah, we don’t launch new products often, but Event Streams when it launched just last year has gotten a lot of attention, so that’s super exciting. Swagata, what have you been working on?
Swagata Ashwani: Yeah. I think every day at Boomi, like you said, whether you’re in tech or non-tech or whatever background you’re coming from, but if you’re working in tech, every day is a new learning and that’s been the journey for me, especially with Boomi AI.
We’ve been launching so many features and working on so many things, but I think if I could think of one particular achievement that I’m definitely most proud of is our patent on AI-assisted integration process generation, which we build a feature long back and I was lucky enough to work in a team where we are encouraged to file for patents and do more inventions for the company and outside of it as well.
It not only got approved, it was approved at the beginning without any feedback or any changes required, which is not very common in the software industry. That’s been one of the most proud accomplishment with Boomi.
Patricia Moore: And as it should be. It should be mentioned that Swagata and I actually both sit on the patent committee now. That is new as of just a few months ago. Obviously Swagata can’t vote on her own patents when she proposes them to send through. But that has been a great learning experience just to see the different ideas that come from the different departments at Boomi and sort of work with those folks on those ideas so that they’re ready to send to the US patent and trademark office. Super exciting stuff. Donna, what about you?
Donna Matthews: Well, that’s difficult to follow. I feel like I was just saying, “When I was five, I learned to tie my shoes.” Because nothing really compares, “I have a patent.” Yeah, yeah, that’s wonderful. Swagata, congratulations. It’s phenomenal. I think for me, after being in IT for many years and then going into SAP where I implemented SAP systems globally in every type of greenfield, brownfield, minefield, you name it, those were all great experiences and I just built and learned and learned. And then when I got to one of our global system integrators, I was running the integration capability globally and I heard about Boomi and this new product that they had, and it was a product that allowed you to extract data out of SAP, proprietary database everybody, never been done before, not easily, and not at scale. And I was just like, “Wow, what is this thing?”
And I heard about it about three and a half years ago, and it was at that time very immature, but I was still like, “Oh my God, where was this when I needed it?” It could have changed so many projects.
Luckily a role opened up at Boomi, and guess what? It was the manager of the SAP ecosystem, right where I wanted to be. And it meant that I was able to get my hands around that tool and be able to go out and advocate within Boomi to say, “Look, this is something amazing and different that we have that nobody else has.” And now we are very lucky to have our entire Salesforce mobilized around Boomi for SAP and out there talking to our customers and helping them change their projects.
Patricia Moore: Yeah, SAP is a tough one. That’s BAPI code, right? I’m trying to learn the terms. There’s so many things that we’re involved in at Boomi, but that is definitely something to be proud of. That Boomi for SAP product that we have is unlike anything else out there and something I know the company is super proud of and looking forward to growing as we move forward.
Thinking about the things that I’ve done at Boomi, probably my greatest accomplishment would be a tool called High Five. For those that don’t know, Boomi used to be under the Dell umbrella. And so we carved out from under Dell about two years ago now. And so when that happened, we had to stand up all sorts of departments that we didn’t have at the time because we relied on Dell for those. So HR, IT, finance, those were departments that we didn’t have on our own.
The team that I am on now, the Boomi Innovation Group was formerly called Product Solutions. And so they came to our team and said, “We have some holes we need to temporarily fill in our processes and we would love to use the Boomi systems to do it.” And so for a while, our team was sort of tasked with what we call Boomi on Boomi projects. And so one of the projects I was assigned to, we called High Five, and the idea was that people would be able to give kudos, if you will, to their peers in the workplace. And that would help people sort of remember the projects that they worked on when it came to end of year reviews, which we’re currently doing right now. So reminder to my panelists to look at your high fives that you’ve gotten over the last year.
It was an interesting project for me because I wasn’t just a builder, I was a stakeholder in this project working, I wanted it to work, and I was both the builder and the end user at the same time. And I had plenty of people to sort of ask for feedback as we were building this tool. That was one of the first things that I built, not just at Boomi, but in ever, because this was my first job in tech. That was super exciting to sort of collaborate with other departments to see that come to life and then to see it be in heavy use for the next about a year and a half, I would say.
We just got an enterprise tool to replace what was built. It was always meant to be a stop gap, but I’ll always be proud of that because a lot of times when you build things, you don’t really get to see how customers use them, but for me that was an opportunity for me to not only see how customers use them, but also to use it myself. That was really, really fun. As we’re thinking about the future of our careers, what comes next? What are you all thinking about? Where do you see yourself in five years? What does the future look like? I’m going to toss that to Swagata first.
Swagata Ashwani: This question is very interesting because given how technology is moving at such a fast pace and I, being a technology level from the beginning, the first and foremost thing that I want to continue not just for five years but throughout my life, is to keep honing my skills as a technologist. And changes in technology, learning new skills, what’s happening in the world has always been something that I not just do for work, but also in my spare time. That’s something I always will strive to do. At the same time, I do see myself if I’m not getting too ahead of myself in making an impact at a leadership level, so maybe something as cool as Chief AI officer is something that I would love to do. And apart from that, I also want to play a role in mentoring and encouraging women to take up more roles in technology and be part of such wonderful events and host them.
Patricia Moore: Those are great aspirational goals. And you’re not speaking too soon. I think we all should be thinking about what could we be the chief of, right? No goal is too lofty. I love that. And now that you’ve said it out loud, and three of us are here from the company to sort of hold you accountable to keep striving for that. And if any of us hear that that becomes a role, we now know that’s something that you’re interested in and we can sort of raise up your name. I love that. For anyone who’s watching, if there is a role that you are aspiring to, tell people and keep working towards it because it can happen and for a lot of us, it will happen. So the only way we can do that is speak it into existence. Donna, what are you thinking about in the future?
Donna Matthews: Well, for me, it’s a totally different end of the spectrum. I’m going to be 60 next year, which is very difficult for those words to come out of my mouth, but I say next year, it’s this year, it’s August, it’s upon me, but I don’t see myself stopping. I want to continue and I want to continue to make an impact. I want to continue to make a difference. I still want to aspire to greater things. And I don’t have any concept at the moment of retirement because I think I would go nuts, actually. I think I’ll always do something. And I’m kind of a natural-born mentor, and this is one of the first jobs I’ve had that I’m an individual contributor without a team and I love having a team. I think of maybe doing some business coaching or maybe some inspirational speaking or motivational speaking, that kind of thing when I leave full-time employment.
Patricia Moore: Yes, yes, yes, yes. And this is a good start. You can have this as part of your repertoire portfolio that you can put out as you start your speaking career. We’ll all be-
Donna Matthews: [inaudible]
Patricia Moore … on the lookout for more opportunities that we can pull you into. And I’m holding the audience accountable to that too. Donna wants more speaking invites. Raji, what about you?
Raji Venkatesan: I’m just so inspired listening to Donna as well as Swagata. I want in the next five years to see her dream come true. I want to see my mentees empowered at that time as well. My team. It is such a great question because we have to keep evolving. We don’t stop. Whatever phase, whatever stage we are in our career. And as Donna said. What do I want to do in five years? I’ve always been in a traditional tech role, and with AI accelerating, I have no idea what’s in the future, what kind of careers could open up. I’d love to get into a non-traditional tech role, and that’s what I’m going to keep my eyes open for.
Patricia Moore: Oh, I love that. I love that. We will also keep our eyes open for you for these non-traditional tech roles. I think it’s important for us to think about ourselves as fluid beings. What we do today does not define who we are as people. As somebody who has transitioned between different types of industries. In my career, my job could never really define me because I’m constantly evolving almost like a chameleon. And when I think about five years from now, I mean who knows? I’m always open to new experiences. I think a lot like Donna, I would like to do more speaking. I love doing things like this and passing on knowledge and giving back. I also want to do something AI related, so maybe sort of a combination of Donna and Swagata’s future goals. Working on the patent committee at Boomi has opened my eyes to a lot of things.
Also, I work in the Boomi innovation group, so a lot of my more technical peers are constantly teaching me things about the future of work and the future of workflows and what does that look like and what role does the human play in that. And so I think when I’m looking ahead, I would love to sort of pair what I’m doing now, which is a little bit of translating between business nomenclature and more technical jargon.
Being that liaison between those two worlds and applying that specifically to AI, because I think that there are so many people out there that are scared of artificial intelligence, they don’t understand it, and because they don’t understand it, there’s a fear there, but we can’t be afraid of it because it’s not even coming. It’s here. Instead of being afraid of it, we have to get to know it and understand it and understand how we can work alongside of it, because it’s not here to replace us, it’s here to make us better.
It’s here to help us work faster. I have this vision that we will all have a four day work week, if not a four hour work week, once we get this thing harnessed, and then we can spend more time with people. I would like to sort of gear my career towards helping that happen. And I think the more people that we can get educated around AI, the faster that we can get to that reality. If we’re all working from the same base level of knowledge, then we can all work more quickly. So thinking of-
Donna Matthews: Patricia, sorry just off the back of that. It’s here, right? If any of you are Boomi customers, you can get Boomi AI and you can actually see it working. We now have the ability to just through text tell the system that we want to connect SAP and Salesforce. “Okay, fine here’s how I know how to do that.” It’s just like, “What? Do you know how many years I’ve struggled making those types of things work? And now you’ve just… I’ve typed it and you’ve said, ‘Cool, I got it.”” It’s amazing.
Patricia Moore: And this is just the beginning, right? There’s so much more to come. Sitting on the patent committee, I hear these ideas that right now are just ideas, but I feel like everything’s moving so quickly. Today it’s an idea. But tomorrow, it could be a reality. It could be a reality in the Boomi platform, but anywhere else as well.
As we’re thinking about the future of the tech industry, I’m thinking about how do we get more non-traditional folks in? How do we get them trained up to work alongside AI? Donna, maybe I’ll throw it back to you. What do you envision the future of the tech industry looking like? And maybe even specifically, what do you feel like it looks like for women?
Donna Matthews: I think that it truly is…the world is our oyster when it comes to AI, but we have to be involved and shape it. I think that’s important. We just can’t wait for somebody to go, “It’s ready.” Like you said, it’s here. And so we need to interact and we need to be able to provide feedback and say, “No, that isn’t a good thing.” I totally agree with the idea of guardrails, and some… We’ve got to harness it, right?
We’ve got to make sure that it is used for the greater good a lot more, because we know in the hands of the bad guys, it’s going to, just like everything. When we first got cell phones, if somebody said, “Oh, you’re going to get spam one day.” “We just learned what spam was two minutes ago, and now you’re telling me I’m going to get it on my cell phone?” Right? Of course, it’s just every day to us now, right? Things like that are going to happen, so we need to make sure that we protect ourselves, but that we are involved right now in this very nascent stage where we can really make a difference.
Patricia Moore: Absolutely. I attended a panel in DC recently. It was the National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee to the White House. That is a mouthful. But it was really interesting just to hear people from different parts of the tech industry sort of weighing in on what is the guidance that we should be giving government, federal government around artificial intelligence and the future of how we’re thinking about tech and how it influences things like law enforcement.
There was a whole subcommittee on law enforcement. It was really, really interesting. And I think it’s something we all should be thinking about is we can use these tools for good, but just the same people can use them maybe not for good. And what is the role we can play in putting up some guardrails or helping to advocate for policy that will put up guardrails to ensure that this is used in a way that is positive and constructive.
Donna Matthews: And I think this is where we can get non-tech folks involved, right? Because we, as a technology perspective, you look at it in a certain way, but somebody who’s just out there living their life and is on Facebook and does this and does that, and they go, “Well, wait a minute.” Look at it from their perspective. Where they think, one, it’s going to help, and where they think that we should put some stoppers on and say, “No, that should always be an individual.'” And if we get those people from the outside the tech industry giving their input, I think that’s very important.
Patricia Moore: Yeah, super powerful.
Raji Venkatesan: And it’s important for AI to reflect the population that it serves and 50% of the population are women. And with all these non-traditional roles coming up, one doesn’t have to be studying computer science in school to come along. One doesn’t even have to go to universities and get higher education to get involved in some of these non-traditional roles that involve ethics and so many things that are open.
I would envision, I’d hope more women come and are involved with on-the-ground decisions, not just in the leadership positions, but on-the-ground positions.
Patricia Moore: Yes, absolutely. Swagata do you have anything to add?
Swagata Ashwani: Yeah, I think to add on what everybody said is I think this is such a golden period where diversity like DEI, diversity, equity and inclusion has been a serious agenda for so many organizations. And look at us. We didn’t apply for this panel discussion, but we were encouraged from the leadership.
I think leadership is focusing a lot on encouraging women, potential women leaders to rise up to the occasion and take charge. I think the outlook of the society is also changing where women are not just their primary role being caregiving, but they’re also taking equal stake at workforce. I think the future is very bright for women, not just in AI, but in general tech.
Patricia Moore: Absolutely.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Hi ladies. This was absolutely enthralling. You see the comments on the chat panel, there is a question. Christina asks, “Curious about what enterprise-wide tool replaced what you built?” We can just take this one question and then we’ll wrap. Who wants to answer that? I think this is directed to you, Patricia.
Patricia Moore: Sorry, can you repeat the question?
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Christina asks that she’s curious about what enterprise-wide tool replaced what you built?
Patricia Moore: Oh, that’s a good question.
Raji Venkatesan: High Five.
Patricia Moore: It was called Bonusly was the tool that we use. And so it’s pretty easy. It integrates with Slack, but I think a lot of people, myself included, use it from the desktop. It’s B-O-N-U-S-L-Y. I can type it into the chat so people can see. You get allocated a certain number of points at the top of each month and you can give those out to your coworkers and everyone in the company can see the things that you’re giving and talking about. I actually just peruse the Bonusly feed sometimes to see what kind of projects people are working on to see if there’s something that might be helpful to our part of the org, things that we can contribute to and help sort of move forward.
One of the things I really like about it is if I were to give Swagata 10 points, let’s say, for a project that she helped me with, then Donna could come behind me and add five more points to that. Then once you accumulate a certain number of points, you can trade those in for gift cards, but you can also trade them in to give more points. And I do this a lot.
If I run out of points to give each month, I can trade the points I’ve been given to give them to someone else. And you can also use your points to give back to the community. You can use it to donate. I always love when there’s a community giving component, too.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Wow, that’s wonderful. Well, we have to wrap unfortunately. Thank you all, wonderful ladies. I absolutely appreciate the time you’ve taken out to share your insights, your knowledge, and your experience with everybody. Thank you.
Like what you see here? Our mission-aligned Girl Geek X partners are hiring!
In her ELEVATE session, Shawna Martell, a Senior Staff Engineer at Carta and a political volunteer, shares her personal journey of getting involved in politics and how women in technology can drive political change in their communities. She emphasizes the importance of showing up, getting involved in local grassroots organizations, and using technical skills to support political causes.
Like what you see here? Our mission-aligned Girl Geek X partners are hiring!
Shawna Martell: I want to start today with something of a disclaimer because I’m going to be upfront. We’re going to talk about politics today, and I know that can be a little bit dicey, so I’m afraid that your imagination is going to something that maybe looks a little bit like this. I love this picture because it’s completely ridiculous, and the guy on the left is really having, I think, a pretty rough day. I don’t blame you if this is what you think of when I say being involved in politics, because if you go to almost any stock art website, you’re going to get a lot of pictures that look exactly like this. Before I was involved, honestly, this was what my imagination would go to as well.
Now that I’ve been doing this work for a while, though, I can tell you it looks a lot more like this. It’s about people, community, and conversations, more spreadsheets than I ever could have imagined, and an innumerable number of clipboards, and, at least to date, I haven’t experienced any boxing gloves, so that’s good. But I want to talk to you about today is, based on my experience, how we, as women in technology, are uniquely situated to drive political change in our communities. I want to do that by taking you on my personal journey from knowing literally nothing, I’ll show you just how literally nothing I knew, to being part of the leadership team for one of the fastest-growing county political parties in the state of Illinois, and it’s been a really exciting journey.
Let me introduce myself first, though. I am Shawna Martell. I do have a day job at Carta. I want to stress, nothing I’m talking about today has anything to do with my employer. I don’t mix my work and my politics. I definitely don’t want to right now. In my off time, I am a perpetual political volunteer. You’ll find me knocking doors, making phone calls. I’m an elected precinct committee person, and I serve on multiple boards and steering committees for both partisan and non-partisan political causes. You’ll see a list of some of the places I’ve had the privilege of working with here. I also want to stress, nothing I’m talking about today should be considered as coming from any of these wonderful organizations either. We’re going to be talking about my personal experience and opinions in doing my work in politics.
At the risk of stating at least some of the probably fairly painfully obvious, I am a white, cis, straight, middle-class, middle-aged woman, and I know that that gives me a bunch of privilege to show up in places that more marginalized communities have a much harder time, and I want to acknowledge that. I’m also incredibly fortunate to have a partner who is all in on this work. I have to give a shout-out to my husband, of almost 18 years. This is Joshua. This is a picture of us at 4:00 in the morning delivering yard signs to polling locations. He is a very patient man. We don’t have any kids, we don’t have any pets, so he keeps our household running, and often you’ll find him finishing dinner, running me a plate in between finishing my day work and moving on to some political meeting in the evening.
I know that my lived experience is different and that not all of us get to participate in US elections. Maybe you don’t live in the United States. Maybe in your community, there isn’t a space that is super welcoming to you. I know that those things are real, and it’s a bunch of work and a bunch of labor, but if you can find some other like-minded folks and you’re in that situation where there isn’t a place that’s welcoming to you, I’d encourage you to see if you can take on the immense amount of labor it is to create one because our communities really, really need us and our skills.
So I told you I was going to tell you my story. I’m going to start at the beginning. For the first probably 30 years or so of my life, I was really just politically apathetic, except for this brief period in high school where I decided I was going to run for president, and I really can’t tell you why. So I decided to have a mock… We had a mock election in my high school, and I was going to run a write-in campaign against Al Gore and George W. Bush, and please don’t do the math to figure out how old that makes me because it’s distressing sometimes. It’s fine. I won in a landslide. This was not super surprising because there were only seven people in my graduating class, but after this brief foray into whatever in the world this was, I stopped paying attention, and I stopped paying attention for a really long time.
It wasn’t until the presidential election in the United States in 2016 that I decided I needed to be involved again. It wouldn’t take you too long on Google to figure out that I am now an elected Democrat. So, to put it mildly, the results of the 2016 presidential election were not exactly as I’d hoped they’d be. I wanted to get involved, and I had literally no idea where to start. Literally none. It just so happened that across my Facebook came a campaign event for a city council candidate. Great. I was going to figure out if I should vote for this city council person and maybe even figure out what in the world City Council does. I showed up to this event. I didn’t know that there were districts in the city council. Yeah, this person was running in a part of town that I didn’t live. I couldn’t vote for them, even if I wanted to.
When I say I knew literally nothing, I knew literally nothing, but I kept showing up. They were very helpful to explain to me that I probably wasn’t doing this right, but I kept showing up for events. I would literally just scroll through Facebook looking for political events that I could show up to, and I started going to this local grassroots organization in central Illinois called The People’s Agenda. They were focused on voter education and voter engagement and helping people understand how local government worked, which I knew I definitely didn’t know those things. One day, while one of the organizers was talking, they mentioned almost in passing how they were struggling with collaborating on files. They’d been using email. The organization was growing. This wasn’t working very well for them anymore. I went up to one of the organizers afterwards and I said, “I could help you set up a shared drive if that’s something that would be useful to you so that maybe it’d be easier for you to do this collaboration.”
That was a really simple conversation, and I look back on it now, it’s been almost seven years. That was the beginning of my community organizing work. It was a simple conversation about, what to me, wasn’t a super complicated technical problem. I definitely did not know about voting, or government, or politics, but I did understand how to set up shared drives, and they had people who knew all this other stuff, but they could use a hand with some of their technology. One of those organizers, her name was Michelle, and I say, everybody needs a Michelle in their life because she believed in me and she saw something in me. I don’t know why. She sponsored me in becoming the volunteer coordinator for The People’s Agenda. I was like, “Great. I don’t know what that means, but sure, yes, Michelle, I will do this work.”
It turns out a lot of the problems they were having with volunteer coordination were actually just technical issues. They needed some piece of software that would help them understand, “Okay, which volunteers are scheduled for which events? Did they show up? Do they know when they’re supposed to show up and when and where?” So I did what I do in my day job. When I’m doing a build versus buy analysis or when I’m comparing multiple vendors, I look at different software solutions, I understand the costs, the pros and the cons, and the trade-offs, and then I put together the options for a wide variety of folks, some of them more technical than others. This experience was exactly the same as that, and I brought the options to the organizers, and we were able to make an educated decision. And, then, since I’d been doing the research on these software solutions, I was able to provide training and support as we adopted them.
This is something I’m going to say several times. Having the vocabulary to take in the information about software, especially software documentation, and understand different technical solutions, these sorts of skills can be incredibly helpful to these kinds of organizations, and it’s not just when they’re getting started, because as these organizations grow, they need to change and adapt. You end up doing this iterative process over and over so that you can meet those needs as they change. So in my experience, listening to Michelle was a good idea, and she encouraged me to take the next big step in my political experience. She told me to run for office. She told me to run for precinct committee. She said, “You’re going to be a PC.” And I said, “I don’t know what that means.” And that was okay. She said I needed 10 petition signatures. I figured I could manage that, and then I was going to be on the ballot.
I did that. I won in another landslide this time because I ran unopposed, and now I was elected to a thing I didn’t entirely understand, but that was okay. I had help. I had people around me who were willing to coach me and help me understand, “Okay, now that you’ve got this job to help the voters in your precinct, what in the world does that look like?” It probably looked like what you think of if you think about doing political volunteering. It meant I did a lot of door-knocking, made a lot of phone calls, wrote a lot of letters, but I also used technology when I was doing this work as PC.
If you talk to a precinct committee person just about anywhere in the United States, they probably use a piece of software that is pretty common to manage who to talk to in your precinct and keep track of history of conversations. This software is incredibly powerful. It’s not always the most user-friendly, but the documentation is really, really nice. So I started this work as PC, and I knew I needed to learn how to use this software. I read the documentation, figured it out, and then I was able to help other PCs who needed to learn this software too. I am not a data scientist by any stretch of the imagination. I can understand a basic data set and do some very simple analysis, but that’s about it. If you do have a data science background, that sort of work is so incredibly useful when you’re doing work as a precinct committee person because you want to be able to understand what’s happening in your precinct and how is it changing over time.
This last one I end up doing in just about every organization that I work with, and I used to do web development in a previous life as a day job, but I actually tend to do stuff that’s a lot simpler for these sorts of organizations because I want to be able to pass it off. Often, a Google site with some drag-and-drop, especially for something that doesn’t have a web presence, is all you really need, and that’s something that you can easily teach somebody else how to maintain going forward. So after I’d been doing this PC work for a while, I found myself in this situation where I was literally mobilizing hundreds of volunteers to do voter registration in the county, and it was very exciting and it was very intimidating.
There were technical aspects, like the volunteer coordination work I was talking about before, that came into play here. But what I found was particularly interesting was how, at least in my experience, being a woman doing this work was really useful. I won’t pretend to understand why this is, but very practically, what this looks like is, you get a whole bunch of volunteers in a room, you explain to them the work they need to do, you hand them a clipboard, and you send them out to do the work. Inevitably, some of them have questions, and I don’t know why, but volunteers were more likely to come ask me a question or one of the other women or non-binary organizers than they were to ask the men, at least in my experience. My husband Joshua is often with me when I’m doing this work, and he is just as equipped to answer questions as I am, but he could see he was less likely to get approached. So I don’t know why this is, but this was a spot where, specifically being a woman, I found to be really helpful.
Let’s just recap. In 2016, I went to an event that was for city council, and I didn’t know what city council did or how it worked. By 2019, a friend of mine said, “I’m going to run for city council. Will you help me?” And I said, “Sure, I’ve never done any campaign work, but we’ll figure it out.” My friend AJ ran a fantastic campaign. He lost, but we all learned so much in this experience of trying to get a campaign off the ground. I’ve never worked at the very beginnings of a startup, but the entire time we were trying to launch this campaign, I wished that I had. So if you have experience getting a startup off the ground, I encourage you, find a campaign in your area. I bet they will be delighted to have you, especially if it’s one of these super local campaigns like city council or school board, because you have to set up a bunch of internal communication tools and external communication tools and a zillion other things that we just had to figure out as we went along because we’d never done this before.
In 2020, I was asked to take on, by far, the biggest challenge I had done to date. I was asked to join the leadership for the Champaign County Democratic Party. Champaign County has more than 200,000 people, and there were six of us on the executive committee. I was terrified, and I immediately started looking around for like, “Okay, what skills can I bring to bear in this role?” And it was wild how stuff I did at work came into play here again. When you’re doing county party work, a bunch of it is just really bureaucracy. Some of it’s literally in state law about what you can and can’t do and how you need to do it. We hadn’t inherited a ton of information from the previous administration. I don’t know why. So we had to figure out a bunch of this stuff on our own.
I went into the mode that I go into when I’m figuring out what we need to build in software. I started gathering requirements, I solicited feedback, and I built artifacts. In this case, the artifacts weren’t software. There were a bunch of spreadsheets and checklists, but the process was exactly the same. In the end, we were able to streamline a bunch of really important workflows to ensure that we were maintaining consistent and transparent processes. Because when you’re doing things like slating candidates to appear on the ballot or making recommendations to fill county board vacancies, you want to make sure that those processes are very clear, transparent, and repeatable. I also did some work helping them set up social media tooling.
Now, I am not a content creator by any stretch of the imagination. So if you do content creation, if you’re a graphic designer, if you like to build infographics and stuff, places will be clamoring for you. That is a really, really important skill. I can’t do that, but I could set up social media tooling to make it easier for our content creators to stay engaged. When they had trouble, I was able to help them troubleshoot the software that they were using. I did this work for about two years, and then, actually, I moved out of Champaign and I moved to the Chicago area, and I got started again up north. I’m running for precinct committee person again. I’ll be on the ballot. It’s in less than two weeks. I think I’ll win again because I’m running unopposed again.
I also have found work doing volunteer coordination for a state rep candidate in town, and I’ve been serving on multiple boards and steering committees both for partisan and nonpartisan causes up here in the Chicagoland area, and it’s been really, really exciting. Some of the stuff I love to do is train other volunteers so that they can figure out how to do their very best work. I also get to do really, really cool stuff like this. I love the opportunity to get to talk with and learn from our elected officials. I’ve gotten to meet senators and governors. One of my most treasured memories of this experience is, I was having a conversation with Illinois Governor Pritzker, and he asked me to tell him about my experience as a woman in technology. He was so interested and he was so engaged, and it’s really beyond my wildest dreams that I get to do this work.
That’s me. That’s my story. I hope that you found something in here to convince you that our skills are needed right now. The things that we know how to do today, those things are valuable to the political organizations and our communities. So I want to leave you with just a few suggestions. If you’re excited to get started, what might you do? Step zero, show up. When I say show up, I mean show up anywhere. Show up for a campaign that’s not in the part of town that you live. It worked for me. Go to a city council meeting. If you’re not comfortable going in person, find it online.
Listen to your elected officials. What are they saying? What are they concerned about? What are they doing that you want to understand better? And then reach out to them. They represent you. Make sure they understand where you are on the issues that are important to you. If you really want to jump in with both feet, join your local political party or grassroots organization. In my experience, these places are delighted to have new people, and they will be so excited to get you engaged and started right away. It could be that you end up using your special skills even sooner than you think. Thank you so much for this opportunity. I am so excited to be at ELEVATE. Thank you.
Like what you see here? Our mission-aligned Girl Geek X partners are hiring!
In her ELEVATE keynote, Corliss Collier, Amazon Head of Product, Research & Science – Amazon Seller Satisfaction & Insights, discusses the process of crafting a personal brand. She drives home the importance of self-discovery, reflecting on values and goals, identifying a target audience, seeking feedback, and the need for continuous development and networking to foster and refine your brand.
Like what you see here? Our mission-aligned Girl Geek X partners are hiring!
Let’s dive into an intro. Hi, I’m Sukrutha. I’m the co-founder and CTO of Girl Geek X. It used to be called Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners and we dropped the Bay Area because we wanted to go global with our virtual conferences and podcasts and so on. Over the years we’ve actually crossed over a decade of Girl Geek Dinners in the San Francisco Bay Area, and over five years of virtual ELEVATE conferences. With this, we are creating even more opportunities to give more women the mic on stage. Oftentimes we find that our amazing, amazing speakers are actually giving a talk for the first time and giving a talk at a Girl Geek Dinner or at an ELEVATE conference has really boosted their confidence level, their comfort level in sharing who they are, what they work on, and it really then multiplies and encourages women to not only get into but stay in tech and that’s what we are here for.
Thank you for joining us for our conference celebrating International Women’s Day. This year’s theme is Inspire Inclusion and we hope that we can provide a safe space to do that with each ELEVATE conference that we do. We have a virtual mentorship lounge as well. It’s kicking off tomorrow with experts on everything on a variety of subjects. From engineering to product to product management, to design to career transitions and so much more. We really hope you’ll find a way to connect with others, whether it’s mentors in attendees or they’re speakers.
There are a variety of ways to network over the next two days and we hope you add folks on LinkedIn and stay in touch. A wise person once told me to put my business card behind my driver’s license so I always have it with me, but in the world of LinkedIn and in the digital age, it makes it so much easier to connect and build that network because you’ll always need to build it before you actually need to use it, right?
Work on that network. There is a participation leaderboard as well and that encourages and rewards folks for visiting the virtual employee booths at noon to 1:00 Pacific time on Friday. The top three participants will get a Girl Geek X swag bag of cool stuff. It is really cool, carefully curated by Angie so it’s really awesome. If you are one of our top participants across the next two days, you can win that amazing hamper bag. Over to you, Angie.
Angie Chang:
Hi, my name is Angie Chang and I’m the co-founder of Girl Geek X and I wanted to say thank you so much for coming today and celebrating with us International Women’s Day this week and we want us to say thank you to our sponsors and it is because of their support and event sponsors that keep us hosting Girl Geek X events like Girl Geek Dinners and the Elevate virtual conferences and career fairs, providing opportunities for us to, like Sukrutha said, pass the mic to girl geeks, but also for women to connect around the world and lift as you climb, and so thank you to the United States Digital Service or USDS, US Digital Service. There’s so many ways we could say it. Opendoor, Boomi, AppFolio, and 18C for all of your support and enthusiasm for women in tech. So for your partnership in recruiting and retaining and working and building up reputations of women in tech.
We can’t wait for your recruiters and hiring managers to meet our attendees at the virtual career fair booth hour, which Sukrutha as said starts tomorrow at noon, Pacific Time. For one hour, you get after employer intros and you hear a bit about the companies, where they’re hiring, the cities that they’re in. I heard Santa Barbara, San Diego, New York, Dallas, Pennsylvania, Hyderabad, lots of roles in engineering, staff and senior roles, San Francisco. Yeah, please come hear them talk about their roles, learn about the companies, and then meet recruiters in their employer booths because I know in this macro economic climate, you probably know someone who’s looking for their next role in tech, so it’s a good place to go, make connections and get a foot in the door. So I encourage you to look at those company’s jobs at girlgeek.io/jobs and please talk to them tomorrow. They will be here in person.
Today we’ll be hearing from an inclusive set of women working in tech from managers to individual contributors because we love hearing from women about their unique expertise and inspiring stories. We like to see their cool job titles and hear about their passions, geeky side projects, and that real-talk career advice. So hopefully today, our speakers will inspire you to do something that hard thing that you wanted to do this year or help you think differently about something that’s been challenging you. So we’ll be learning so much today and we encourage you to help us share all these takeaways from incredible women. We have a hashtag ElevateWomen if you want to share on social media, we can reshare or you tag us or usually Girl Geek X at any of the social platforms that exist today, and yes, all of our talks are recorded.
You can hit replay right after the session ends and watch it to your heart’s content today, tomorrow, this weekend, and then they’ll go into our Girl Geek X YouTube channel where all of the sessions from our previous events also live and you can watch all of that content when you would like to, and most of our speakers today actually did apply to speak via our website. So I encourage you to go to girlgeek.io and go to the speak link at the top and apply to speak at an upcoming Girl Geek X event because we host them quarterly and we host Girl Geek Dinners as well. We’re always looking for sponsors who are looking to hire women in tech to partner with us to showcase their top leaders and talent, recruit from girl geeks and put more technical women on stage creating more role models in the world.
And as introverts, we’re always looking to elevate introverts, crushing it in the workplace, so I would like to bring up our keynote speaker this year, Corliss Collier, who is the Amazon Head of Product Research and Science, Amazon Seller, Satisfaction and Insights. She’s won numerous awards and has been recognized throughout her career for outstanding achievements in insights and marketing measurement and scientific modeling, and was recognized by her undergraduate alma mater Spelman College as a distinguished alumni in business and tech. We are excited to welcome her. Thank you so much for being here.
Corliss Collier:
Thank you, Angie. Thank you, Sukrutha, for having me and especially a big thank you to the Girl Geek X community. Without all of us girl geeks out there, we wouldn’t have anything to talk about today so I’m so happy to be here. Today I’m going to talk to you guys about crafting your personal brand and this is a timely discussion because like I heard, Angie just told us about the networking tomorrow and there are going to be so many roles open, but you need to know what you’re bringing to those organizations and be able to say it very confidently and stand up, and if you don’t know, think about it tonight. You have a whole day and the rest of the night to think about it and build it and hopefully you can get some tips for me here on how to build your brand.
I’m going to try to go through my slides, not too fast. I want to make sure you guys kind of find out how I built my brand and about me, but I will leave some time at the end if you want to ask questions. So as you’re thinking about this, if you want to go ahead and start putting your questions in the chat or whatever, we will capture them there and we’ll be able to answer those at the end. So what is it about crafting your personal brand and why do you need a personal brand and a blueprint to success? And this is the blueprint that I’ve worked and kind of worked for me.
If you think about your personal brand and what the importance is, it is good for your professional and your personal growth. So when you step back and think about that, I want you to kind of take a moment to yourself or if you’re in a group watching with your other girl geeks or allies out there, think about what are you known for and do you even know it? Do you know why when people send people your way or you’re called or asked certain things, do you know why you’re asked for those or why you’re called? And I am not talking about those adjectives or those descriptive words that you would describe a piece of furniture or your best bag or your favorite pair of shoes. You’re not reliable, you’re not sturdy, you’re not healthy, but what are you known for? What do you bring to the table every time that you get there?
And so kind of think about that as we go through this process and we work through this together and then while you think about what you’re known for, what about that makes you unique? So what is your UVP, your unique value proposition? And I don’t mean you have to be that necessarily that unicorn, you don’t have to sweat glitter, although all of us girl geeks do because we’re just that amazing, but what is it that sets you apart from the person standing next to you, the next person who’ll come behind you? And it can be something so simple as you’re able to deliver the things in scale faster or you’re able to connect, and then how do you craft that message and make sure that message is what’s whispered about you when you’re not in the room. That’s how you really know that your brand has been solidified.
When people come to you and say, “Hey, Angie told me to reach out to you about X, or Sukrutha told me to reach out to you about Y,” what is being said about you? And that is how you know what your unique value proposition is. So I’ll tell you a little bit about me. I’m going to take you through a story or story time as the young kids are saying. I have a teenager so I have to learn these things because she calls me oftentimes and says, “Let’s have a story time.” And that’s just code word for I’m going to tell you about my day or tell you some really long story. You’re going to catch some pieces, you’re not going to understand half the words, but I don’t use as much young slang. So hopefully you guys understand me. So who is Corliss, what is her brand?
How did she get there and what is her unique value proposition? So if you think about Corliss and you just kind of throw some words or word cloud out there, she’s a friend, she’s a mother and she’s a wife. She’s a tech leader for over 24 years. She’s a mentor, she’s a coach, she’s a speaker and she’s from I guess some people call it that forgotten generation. She’s a Gen X-er, but we weren’t forgotten. We’re actually out here doing very big things in this world, but what is she known for and what is her career path? So I’m going to take you through story time with my career journey and kind of like I said, you can kind of build up to kind of what I’m known for, and in order to know what I’m known for is I’ve crafted my brand, but I’ve also, I seek feedback from people.
And for that I’ll tell you, I’ve been told that I am a connector. That is what known for, is a connector, that is my personal brand and not only a connector as in bringing people together or a gossiper, but I’m able to connect data and turn the analytics and stories into strategy that really help businesses and brands and things grow. I’m able to connect stakeholders and customers and consumers with the right assets and those type of things. I’m able to connect people ultimately. I put the right people in the room at the right time to make sparks happen and so being known as a connector, whether it’s through my mentoring, my coaching or my speaking, that is my brand. So whenever people feel like they need something done where they need someone who can connect the dots quickly, move forward quickly with a strategy, that’s often the things that I’m called for, especially when they’re data-driven, analytic-driven.
Let’s go through my career journey. You guys will stare at my picture for a while, plus look at me talking, but I’m going to take you through the story time. I started my career in an industry that was heavily male-dominated, however, it was an analytics role so it was always been in a tech role. I was in the tobacco industry, but when you’re working in analytics, that is considered tech roles in a tech, especially when it’s predictive analytics and I became quickly known for the person who was able to take that data and write that story and not only write that story, but write that strategy that delivered dollars back to organization. So moving on, that was the thing that I was identified for and helped me be able to grow and move and grow as I built in that community. Once I got comfortable in identifying that, I became a mentor. How do I help bring the other women along with me, the other girl geeks?
I love that term where they say lift as you climb. That is one of the best things that has always driven me and connected me with Girl Geek is lift as we climb is how do I bring the other women along? How do I go from when Corliss started in building her brand, being the only woman in the room to now when I look around I see more women in the room who are leading and delivering and really just kicking butt at these things, and then along the way, I had some key learnings about myself that always what you do with your brand is not what you think or what you say it is, it’s also what people say it is. How you show up, how those things start, how you deliver and the consistency in which you’re there.
Let’s talk about this a little bit. How did I build that brand? In working to build that brand, there are two key areas that I look for and building a brand, if you guys think about what I’m saying, it’s not just you doing your job. Your job is not your brand and oftentimes when I start working with people, whether it be in my mentoring or just working or developing my employees, they’ll say, “Oh, well my brand is X.” Your brand is not X, so-and-so the software engineer, so-and-so the product manager, so-and-so the analyst or the applied scientist. Your brand is something much bigger than that. That’s your job code, your job title. So you have to be intentional about your brand because if you are not intentional on the brand that you set out in the marketplace, people will give you a brand.
And I can guarantee you, you won’t always agree with that brand, but the brand that’s given to you are the opportunities that will follow. So when you think about, there are two main areas that I always dive deep into when building my brand. I call that identify and reflect, and so how do you identify? So you have to know what your strengths are and your strengths are not everything. You cannot be everything to everyone but exhausted, and so this is one of the things I learned in my story as I say, “Who is Corliss?” So let’s step back to that story. When I was working through my career, I’d say probably about five to seven years, I received my first role. I had done very well in my role. I had been promoted very quickly in advancing and I had now hit my, I think it was an associate director at that time role.
And I tried to be everything to everyone because I was not clear on what my brand was. I allowed my brand to be given to me and it was just always like she’s going to work hard, she’s going to get it done. Those adjectives are not a brand. Work hard and get it done are not badges of honor. They’re not your brands. So you need to identify your strengths, your skills, and most importantly, your passions. Your passions will fuel you as you move along and your passions may and often do lie in the things that you do daily, but it may not be all of it. So identify that one key thing in there and remember and tie that to your UVP, your unique value proposition. So I quickly identified that my passion was the ability to take data and not just report on data, report the news, be the weather girl.
I wanted to take data and predict actions and drive strategy from that aspect. So that’s what I started to really fuel what my brand was going to be, and then as you’re building your brand and doing that self-discovery phase, you also need to reflect on your values and goals. Your brand needs to align with the values and the goals that you hold personally and professionally and how you bring those to market and how you show up at work and you use those.
A story there, I will talk to you about that. So in working through my brand, there were things that I was doing in roles that I was taking in organizations and when I would look back, I would say I won’t return to that type of industry or I won’t work in that industry even if it is in a technology-driven role because it no longer aligns with my values. So your values are part of your brand. Your values could be something like, “Hey, I only like organizations that respect the environment.” And if that’s part of your brand, that’s how you connect those things into turning those into your brand. So when people is looking for someone who is say, their brand is they are really good at connecting data points or really good at engineering and learning how to engineer at scale, but they engineer at scale in a way that is more ecological, economical, you connect those points.
And then next part in building your brand is identifying your target audience, understand your audience and their needs. So when I say that, I mean understand who you want to buy that brand at that time. Are you trying to convince your manager or your leadership team that you’re ready for a promotion? So continue through the journey of who is Corliss. I remember after taking that first role of associate director, it was time to where I was ready to move on up and move into a director role. So I needed to understand, did my brand align with the goals and the brands and delivery of the organization? And I had to get a sponsor to understand my brand and to whisper my name in those rooms that I was not in yet because they were having senior executive meetings and I was just an associate director and make sure that when those projects came along, for example, when I was working with another analytic organization that they were looking for someone who could do the things that aligned with my skillset.
They were tailored to my brand and they knew that I could deliver on, that I was getting those opportunities to work on those and it’s not just a skill set, but it was like the people knew that this was part of the brand. So the fact that I had that strong brand with that room and instead of just saying, “Well, we need to find someone to this role.” They were able to say, “It’s Corliss.” Another example was understanding an audiences moving into the role that I’m currently in. I could say fast-forward almost 15 years later, I’m not going to count too many more years, then I’m going to start aging myself quickly, but fast forwarding 15 more years later from that role I was associate director maybe five, seven years into my career, then move into a director role for years. So fast-forward is the role that I’m currently in.
This opportunity was brought to me because people understood my brand as a connector and when I asked the executive team why I was called and asked to interview for this role, that is exactly what I was told. I’ve heard that you were the connector. So understand how you build that brand and how you make sure you keep people in a room. So how do you have that sponsor, that mentor and the whisperer, and that whisperer is most important because the sponsor and the whisperer in building a brand may not be the exact same person, and when you’re trying to get your name mentioned into those rooms, and the way I build my brand, that is your target audience is that whisperer. You want that person to understand you enough to respect the things that they’ve heard enough about you that they will raise your name in the room and you tailor your brand to resonate them.
And note I said tailor your brand, not change your brand. If you change your brand so often, then is it really your brand or is it just the gimmick that you’re using at the time to get where you want? That is not necessarily a bad thing. However, that’s not what we’re doing now. We want to build longevity and building longevity is in building that brand aspect. So I’ll move forward a little bit and continue the story, and so consistency. As you build your brand and people now they understand you as going back to Corliss, being the connector, the person, everything. You have to maintain a consistent presence whether it’s at work, in your social settings. So think your community or your social settings or online, and don’t forget that social media posts live forever and the reason why I say that is because having a dual presence is what I call it for social media is just okay, especially nowadays where people use a lot of social media.
Like Sukrutha mentioned, we no longer carry business cards. We ask you guys to connect with us on LinkedIn. So the things that I follow and I connect with and I comment on and the people who are in my network, they are part of my brand. So be intentional about that as you guys are connecting with other geeks today and girl geeks, excuse me, that you are intentional in who you’re connecting with and that you’re adding value to them and they’re bringing value to you and that the companies and organizations that you’re following very much like Girl Geek X, you’re very intentional that they align with your brand, and remember that the things that you post, whether you delete it, remove it or those, they live forever. So they need to align with your brand until you have an intentional pivot or change in your brand.
And as you’re building your brand, you have to develop. You never stop. Your brand is never there, whether you’re in your career or where you’re just done. I’ve made my brand, this is it. I’m going to mint it in plastic and wear it on my shirt. That doesn’t work that way. You need to seek development in areas that are aligned with your brand and from people or organizations that align with your brand and they also nurture your brand and they’re able to also mention you for things of that nature. So think about continuous learning and skill enhancements, when you’re taking those things on, learn from organizations or people or ideas that can enhance your brand at you are at that point in time, but also understand that as you’re through this developmental journey, my brand that it was when I was 25 is not my brand that it was when I was at 30, 35 and so forth and so on.
I’m not going to go any further. Again, we’re not going to keep counting, but just remember it’s okay in your development realm of you’re building your brand if they change. Secondly, you’re going to showcase your growth and your brand narrative. Your brand narrative is not necessarily the way you talk about yourself. Your brand narrative when you know you’ve got it right is the way other people talk about you and how you show up when you’re at work, whether you’re in professional settings, networking settings, events such as this, is what people are saying about you. That is a true reflection of what your brand is in the narrative. Seek feedback. I know this is an area that is hard for a lot of us and sometimes we don’t want to seek feedback, especially with something that’s very personal to us when we think, “Well, this is my brand, why should I need feedback on my brand?”
But you think about it this way, going through my journey of my career and building my brand and really coming comfortable with being called a connector, which I didn’t like at first and I still don’t call myself that as a brand. My actions show that is the feedback that I get from my stakeholders, my mentors, my coach, people I interact with, people I meet here is the feedback on how I show up to them, and when I ask them, oftentimes I’ll say, “Hey, give me a word. How would you describe me if you had to? How would you describe me if you had to introduce me or you had something about me?” This is the type of feedback that I asked to understand. Am I showing up the way that I intend to and am I intentional in building my brand? And then finally, you have to adapt and refine your brand over time.
Treat yourself just like you would treat a brand that you would go in the store and you would pick up or the brands that we buy or brands that are in the marketplace. You have to adapt and refine your brand over time and it’s okay. That’s called growth in a journey. So I go back to the final, going back on one more step in my career in the story, of course, the story time. So then fast-forward to getting promoted, getting a project given to me, getting promoted, making some career moves, getting promoted and reach. I finally reached a pinnacle about I’d say maybe about 20 years into my career where I thought I had refined my brand and I realized and I was told that I wasn’t showing up in the way that I thought. I was still considered a connector, but I was connecting too small.
And so I needed to go back and really figure out what that person meant because they just kind of said, “You’re connecting too small.” So really understanding my brand and what was meant and how did I grow more, it was they wanted me to kind of be intentional and how I mentored and coached and brought on and brought other people along and so that is another area where I refined my brand. So I am very, very, very intentional now in my coaching and mentoring where before anyone who would call, reach out, send a message, LinkedIn, “I need some time with you. I want to understand coaching or mentoring. I heard you know how to do this.” I would take them in because I thought that was my brand is connecting. I have to gather and connect, but now I’m very intentional in my connecting on that portion of my brand.
That part of my brand is the mentor and the coaching is I focus on women and specifically I focus on girl geeks and because that is the area that is still very much untapped. Although we’re all together today, we’re only a small drop in the huge bucket of opportunity that is out there, and then again going back and refining this process, we’re back to that. This is a continuous process. I wish I could say once you get it, you’re done, but you’re not. You constantly have to come back, but it looks different at this time. So the self discovery that is now I’m back to reflecting again. I’m reflecting again like, “Okay, well this is what I said. This is what I’ve learned in this period of time.” And I say that I probably do intentional self-reflection. So my self-reflection looks at my personal goals, my career goals and my brand and am I showing up how I want to even as a mother, I do that probably about for professional career and my brand, I do that probably about every six months.
Every half year, I treat myself as an organization and I do that reflection. I look at that, I evaluate, I do intake, and intake comes from maybe organizations I work with or people, or my business in my role I work in my company, or if I’ve done some mentoring or speaking opportunity organization, I ask for feedback there as well, and I really think about that and I reflect on it. Is the feedback that I’m receiving and the input that I’m receiving, does it still reflect on my values that I want to project and the goals where I’m aligned at this point in my life? And again, I refine my strengths, skills and my passions because as they may change, I want to make sure that I’m still staying true to self and keeping my brand because if you’re doing this process that I’ve used, and I’ve been using this process now for about 15 to 16 years, it has helped me continue to grow.
And like I say, it’s constant re-evaluation and don’t think when I say you have to look at it every six months that you have to sit down, block out a day, get your calendar, but it’s just kind of something you think about as hey, as you’re thinking about it as you’re cleaning out your closet, because if you’re like me, I absolutely love to shop. So I have lots of shoes and clothes to go through probably every six months to clean out, donate so I can make room for more. I sit and I also think about my brand. How do I show up at work? How do I show up professionally? How do I show up personally and people know that, and then finally, as you’re doing the cycle, you have to network and you have to build genuine relationships in order to foster your brand.
People are only going to put their brand on the line for you when they feel like the relationship is genuine and that you can truly live up to the brand that you are putting into the marketplace. Attend events such as these. Network, network, network. Join different types of communities, reach out to people when you’re on LinkedIn, but don’t just reach out with, “I’d like to connect.” Develop your brand, add a personal note, tell them why you want to connect. Tell them what you bring to the table, tell them what you can do for them and allow them to know, “Hey, I can raise this name, I can raise this person. I know this person now. I built this relationship, I’ve built this genuine relationship, I have this community and I’m able to do that.” So in conclusion, because I would definitely want to leave time for questions if you guys have them out there.
Get ready if you haven’t already written them, I can’t see yet, start writing your questions. In conclusion, when you’re building your brand, it’s kind of like I say a virtuous cycle. There’s always going to be self-discovery in there. You’re going to have to know who your target audience is. My target audience, my brand here is I’m looking to kind of bring other girl geeks along, other allies along with us. My target audience when I’m building my brand as mom is to my 19-year old who corrects me every day and tells me that my brand is not quite as cool as I think it is. My target audience, my executive leadership team is to see me as a leader able to bring large tech projects through the pipeline for organization. Always know what your unique value proposition is. Know what you bring to the table that’s done so differently that people say, “If I don’t have this person do that, If I don’t have Corliss do this, I’m not sure if it will be done the way I need it or be done to the best of its ability.”
Be consistent in your delivery of your brand. Whenever you find that you can’t be consistent anymore in that brand, that is the time to go back to that self-discovery phase. So this flywheel is constantly working. Your online presence, that is something that is unique to represent as well, especially in this technology age and this world where we’re now reaching further and further out. We’re not only knowing the people who are in our community or the people who work in our office building. We know people all over the world, people who are in networks. So make sure that your presence in your group there represents your brand. How you’re creating that content that you share online, whether you’re reposting, you’re sharing those things, you’re interacting with those things, that’s part of your brand.
Networking, networking, networking. And I’m not saying just networking like shaking hands, meeting people, how are you doing? My name is Corliss, I work here, but is networking and bringing stuff to the table be very genuine, and again, I like the way Angie said that earlier, “As being an introvert. I know it’s hard.” So be intentional when you network. If you meet three very good connections through this process, be very intentional. Follow up and bring through notes. Make sure they know your brand without a doubt and then consistently develop.
Consistently develop your brand. Consistently develop yourself. Consistently develop your knowledge in your area. Reevaluate and make sure that you’re meeting the expectations of your brand. So I want to stop here because we have a few minutes. I know we have a hard stop and I want to answer any questions if anyone has any. I don’t know if we have any in a chat. I can stop sharing and look and see. Oh, there. Okay, we’re going to start this person, how do you select a whisperer? You can’t select a whisperer. What you can do is you can influence who that whisperer is and that’s how you interact across the business.
I would say your selection of a whisperer is very passive in that aspect. It’s how you show up to your executive leadership, your senior leadership or even your peers around you. It’s those people who have a seat at the table who have the ability to say your name when you’re not there and they know of the things that may be happening. It’s really in the influence that you have in how you show up to your work. I don’t know if that was helpful or if you have anyone else or if it didn’t answer that question, well let me know. Identify whisperer.
When building your brand, is it how others view you and when a situation comes up or how likely they will remember you? It’s a little bit of both. So building your brand is how people view you, it’s how intentional you are and what you put out in the marketplace, and it’s what they will remember most about you. So it’s like a three-part triangle of that, but so if you’re putting out your brand in a way that is intentional and consistent, they will remember what you are you telling them. So that is the best way. So that’s how you’re building a brand because you don’t want to let someone give you a brand, because if you remember my story time, I allowed my brand to be given to me like my first five years of my career and it wasn’t necessarily something that I aligned with.
In this challenging market, how do you advise about being willing to step outside your brand and keep building your skills in other areas and stay in the industry? I’m probably a bad person to ask about that and the reason why I say that is because I’ve always been a risk-taker and I say take risks because to give you an analogy and it might be right to tell you that I use analogies a lot. No one’s going to bet on you more than you. If the market is challenging, if you’re not willing to bet on yourself and step outside and develop your brand and to make sure that you’re really dealing it, you can’t expect anyone else around you or any other organization to bet on you. So only you can be your best advocates.
Angie Chang:
We have a question from Mina who says, I’ve been thinking about my brand, although her peers see her as young female director. How do you tailor that because she has so much more to offer?
Corliss Collier:
Okay, being a young…your brand and your peers see you as young female director. The easiest way for me to answer that for you is you’re a director. You’ve earned that seat, you’ve earned that title. You can’t change how people see you from something that is, I’m going to use the B word, biased as age or your gender, but you can change how they see you as you show up. That’s some inner work that they have to do on themselves. You are a director, you earned that title, you’ve earned that seat, but that title of director is not your brand. So I would say ensure that you’re delivering and that you’re doing what you say that you can do and doing in that aspect. I hope that helps you there. Is there any more, Angie?
Angie Chang:
Any advice when it comes to making your brand known to potential employers? Especially when you’re breaking into a new field and don’t have any long-established record in that field?
Corliss Collier:
Not at all. Who’s your biggest cheerleader? Who can speak the best about you? That your brand should be splashed everywhere where you are known. Your LinkedIn profile, your resume, your Instagram, all those things. Your brand should be there. It should be no doubt what your brand is and so letting it be known is not a problem at all.
Angie Chang:
Okay, there’s a question about you mentioned working hard and doing the job aren’t brands, but what would be a brand if we want to be known for consistent, very good work?
Corliss Collier:
Delivery, just doing the work. Working hard and those things… those are adjectives that describe things and I laugh and chuckle a little bit about that, but working hard, that describes your favorite briefcase if you’re like me and you’re on a plane every other week, it’s been drug through airports all over the world. That briefcase works hard. Working hard, you don’t want to be described like that. You want to be described as something that’s memorable. You deliver on anytime that there are hard problems. You are able to deliver. Those are the type of things you want. Working hard, reliable. Those are things you say about your favorite pair of flat shoes that you put on after a hard day and your other favorite pair of heels. Those work hard. Those are reliable. That’s not what you want to be for.
Angie Chang:
You want to be impactful and you want to have be results driven and talk about things, not necessarily character traits, but the results of your character traits of hard working.
Corliss Collier:
Exactly.
Angie Chang:
Good question.
Corliss Collier:
Do you recommend posting your brand on your LinkedIn profile? Yes. All day, every day. You may not call it brand, but when they read your headline, your story or things, they should be able to say, “Oh, this is the person I should call if I need expertise in Y or X or Z.” That should be their brand.
Angie Chang:
Absolutely. I think we have two more minutes, so if you want to take another question.
Corliss Collier:
Someone says when you revisit your values, goals, strengths, skills, passions every six months or so, what tools do you use in your journaling? I use journaling and I also use something I call my board of directors. I didn’t talk to you guys about that, but it’s a group of people who I’ve worked with through my career, all managers, people who’ve worked for me with me or people I’ve met throughout my journey and they change out. As your life evolves, your career evolves. I use them because no one’s going to tell you more and then oftentimes for that last piece of check, that cool check, I use my 19-year-old, because they’re going to tell you quickly if you’re not cool, you’re not showing up right, but I use those things. It’s really an introspective look for yourself. It’s done for you, but it’s how you show up.
Angie Chang:
Awesome. All right, well we are out of time, but thank you everyone for asking questions. We look forward to answering many more of your questions with our speakers for the next two days. Thank you, Corliss, for joining us from London and making this work. So thank you so much and we’ll see you in the next session.
Corliss Collier:
Thank you guys, please find me on LinkedIn.
Like what you see here? Our mission-aligned Girl Geek X partners are hiring!
