Celebrate International Women’s Day with the team behind Girl Geek X – Angie Chang and Sukrutha Bhadourias – Join us online as we share our motivations for creating the annual conference for mid-to-senior career level women, and why it’s so important.

Change is unavoidable. Change also breeds fear. A common reaction to fear is to build conspiracy theories and play the blame game. “The customer support team is lazy”… “Sales teams don’t sell enough”… “Product teams just don’t have a product ready”… “It’s all stupid politics!” Anu has experienced it all, having led company-level transformational change at Atlassian. In her morning keynote, Anu will share tips of how, with a big dose of empathy and love, you can find the courage to cut through the bullshit and thrive in times of change.

Extending opportunities in digital marketing will drive growth for technology leaders. Discover best in class design with a focus on customer journeys to improve customers’ digital experience and build loyalty. In this session, Faylene will cover eliminating customer pain points, allowing customers to self-serve through digital, and creating a personalized journey-based approach.

Research and design is impacted by the intersectionality of age, sexuality, gender, and culture (among others). Inclusive tech starts when there’s inclusivity throughout the entire production cycle. In this session, Kat will cover best practices to maintain research rigor by identifying the actual research need. With real world examples, she will discuss dos/don’ts for research surveys or interviews. This talk will also share tips to empower folks, even if they are not a researcher or designer, on ways they can advocate for more inclusivity in the production process at their job. At the end of the session, participants will have learned the 3 questions to ask in order to identify the actual research need, seen examples on how to ask the right questions, and received practical suggestions on how to get buy-in from leadership when advocating for change.

Come hear from an awesome panel of U.S. Digital Service engineers about the gnarly problems in government tech, and how they are using their skills to improve government services and benefits for all Americans.

Auris Health, Inc., part of the Johnson & Johnson family of companies, is redefining medical interventions. By combining advancements in medical robotics, instrumentation, navigation and data science, Auris is building intelligence platforms capable of growing the applicability of robotics to a new spectrum of medical procedures. In this talk Hedyeh will give an overview of the technology of the Monarch™ platform, the first robotic system introduced in the field of bronchoscopy, and provide examples of its data and AI capabilities and clinical use cases.

Last summer, OpenAI launched our first commercial product, the OpenAI API, which has become the core platform for accessing our latest AI models. Unlike most AI systems which are designed for one use-case, the API today provides a general-purpose “text in, text out” interface, allowing users to try it on virtually any English language task. Since launching, we’ve seen hundreds of production-ready applications built utilizing our generation, data parsing, summarization, search, and classification capabilities that span a wide variety of industries. This talk will provide a deep dive into how prompt design and engineering works to build a variety of GPT-3-powered applications.

For women especially, we benefit from feeling the impact of work and developing a deeper sense of purpose. Our skills in tech can help others propel their careers, finding ways to leverage those skills and give back – and in the process of teaching, you learn more as well. In this fireside chat, Manara CEO Iliana Montauk chats with GitHub Director of Product Management Dimah Zaidalkilani about providing mentorship, sponsorship and impact to their teams, companies, and externally, from TechWomen to Manara, to name a few programs focused on emerging markets.

From growing up as a refugee on free lunches to excelling academically, Ashley Dudgeon will share how she’s built resilience at many stages in her career and life. She will share tips and tricks she’s learned along the way, climbing the ladder to VP of Engineering at Salesforce and navigating two maternity leaves. Tune into this rare interview, with Girl Geek X co-founder Sukrutha Bhadouria, and get Ashley’s advice on decision-making in the face of career challenges, how to negotiate for impactful projects to secure career growth, and more.

In this session, Amrisha will cover 5 DevOps insights that are essential for engineering managers to know to unlock their true potential. While DevOps teams are usually seen as having the same goal, product and customer as the company as a whole, it’s actually better to think of them as a vendor to product teams with a goal to create a delivery pipeline serving product teams’ evolving needs.

Pandemic work life would be easier with schools in session or vacations to take to avoid burnout. The building of high-performance teams in this time of remote work is a universal human challenge in 2021. In this panel discussion, we will hear from engineering leaders on how they approach challenges, from defining the technical career ladder (versus an engineering management career ladder), to walking the fine line of compassionately supporting women in the workplace – during normal times and otherwise.

In this session on building resilient products, you’ll learn how to think about reliability in every aspect of the software life-cycle for cloud products. Starting with the fundamentals of measuring reliability, defining metrics to be more insightful of the pain our customers are feeling when our products are buggy, and auditing end-to-end resilience of systems. Most importantly, Swati will share her learnings on Confluence Cloud of building a reliability habit in the team. This goes beyond DevOps best practices, and focuses on treating reliability front and center in team processes, tools and decisions.

In this session, Tracy will talk about modernizing and refactoring code, with lessons drawn from an overhaul of the mobile codebases at Slack. She will discuss reasons why the refactor was needed, options considered for how to approach it, and what were the most important improvements for developers. Additionally, she will discuss the phased approach Slack took, and the factors that made the modernization effort successful.

In this session, Nicole will cover how to release products faster while working from home. With a background in Public Relations and Communications,  she was able to A/B test and create a new communications strategy for staying aligned with Engineering, Executives and Business Stakeholders as they moved to being a remote team during the pandemic. This allowed everyone to continue to make decisions and get approvals faster so that we could make important changes to our products while working from home.

In this session, Kellee shares guidance from her time counseling younger employees about career moves. She distilled the guidance into 3 key principles: choose your boss and reporting chain carefully, prioritize roles where you have a differentiating skill or area of expertise, and be clear on what skills or content you want to learn in your next role, so you can look for growth opportunities – and prioritize those skills that you think are most valuable. This allows you to advocate early and often for the types of projects and work you want to take on, so that you will be top of mind when opportunities arise.

What makes a good product team? How does being a problem-oriented leader set you and your team up for success? Vrushali Paunikar, Vice President of Product for Investor Services at Carta, will talk candidly about her own career journey and why a problem-oriented mindset has been such an important tenet of her leadership. She will share her perspective as a senior leader at a rapidly growing financial technology company where being helpful, relentless, unconventional, and kind are core identity traits, and where she’s built a stellar team she couldn’t be more proud of.

AI is driving transformation in all the industry sectors like automotive, financial, manufacturing, health, etc. However, health and lifesciences is a key sector where AI holds high impact, both in terms of potential opportunity and risk, as we have seen during this pandemic. Responsible AI should be considered to address limitations presented by AI in healthcare and drive better patient outcomes for all.

Enabling rapid feature development while maintaining key quality attributes such as security, performance and reliability is a constant challenge. This session will describe how Slack innovates in proactive security approaches. In this session, Suzanna will show several best practices and explore how Slack’s Product Security team collaborates with other engineering teams and delivers secure by default libraries and services.

Dessa is a rapper, singer, and writer who’s made a career of defying genre conventions and audience expectations. She’s written essays for The New York Times and National Geographic; presented a TED talk with more than 2 million views; written a memoir; appeared on the Billboard Top 200 charts; contributed a track to The Hamilton Mixtape at the invitation of Lin-Manuel Miranda; and performed in fancy theaters and grimy basement clubs on five continents. She is also the host of Deeply Human, a new podcast created by the BBC and American Public Media. Dessa’s work is driven by an interest in finding unexpected connections — between love and science, big ideas and mundane moments, instinct and philosophy. For Girl Geek X, Dessa will discuss her viral song “Who’s Yellen Now” — a 90-second Hamilton-inspired send-up to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen — that is one part biography, one part brag rap.