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

How do you know what is the “right” decision? Which actions are easily reversible and which cause irreparable harm? In this session, Arquay Harris will discuss techniques that can aid you in making decisions at scale.

Do you talk about your achievements in a way that comfortably gives recognition to yourself and others while providing communication value to others? Self-promotion provides visibility around your specific impact at the company, which could grant you further opportunities and investment from leadership. Amplify your achievements (to your manager, department/team, and company), methodically share your intentions for growth, and leverage all possible feedback opportunities (from sponsors, executives, management, and peers) so they can advocate for you.

Frustrated with the tech industry status quo when it comes to hiring? Learn from Camille Tate and Elyse Gordon as they discuss how Strava rewrote their engineering hiring playbook to support the company’s antiracism value and build a diverse team. They will cover the process changes that were implemented as well as how they brought their teams along.

Are you considering a transition from Individual Contributor (IC) to Manager for yourself or know someone who is? In this panel, Slack engineers and managers discuss both whether it’s the right choice, how to do it successfully and how to do leadership if you don’t transition to manager.

Artificial intelligence, 5G, edge, and cloud computing are four superpowers that will change the way everyone lives and works. That’s why diverse representation is so important. Studies have shown that companies with diverse workforce are more innovative and have an edge in recruiting and retaining talent. Intel and its partners have invested in diversity from grassroots educational initiatives through career development. Executives from Intel will share their first-hand experience about the value of diversity and inclusion in technology from ensuring more bias-free AI to designing consumer and business products and services that consider the broadest possible set of perspectives.

Have you ever had a day with a big presentation or deliverable at work, but your mental health was just not cooperating? With a mental health condition like bipolar disorder, you tend to have a lot of these bad days and often at inopportune times. There is hope! In this session, Ashu Ravichander will share how to mindfully build a scaffolding with five techniques to hold you up through your highs and lows so you can bring your best to work, every day that you need to.

You’ve got a great idea for a large impactful project you’d like to lead, but you don’t know how to make it happen. Izzy Clemenson and Tracy Stampfli, both lead engineers at Slack, will talk about what they have learned from their experiences heading cross-functional projects and initiatives. We’ll discuss how to get buy-in and resources from engineering leadership, techniques for managing the project while it’s running, and how to ensure its success.

Women at MosaicML will talk about the decisions that led them to where they are now. You’ll hear the unique journeys of Julie Choi (Chief Growth Officer) and Laura Florescu (AI Researcher) through several tech companies (8 total), including a few unicorns and bluechips, and their reason for joining forces at a new startup focused on making ML training better, for everyone.

Come hear from two awesome White House tech leaders about the gnarly challenges of government tech, and how they are building a team that is transforming government services for millions by putting people at the center of everything they do.

Often the only woman in the room for many years, Reeny Sondhi and Susanna Holt will talk about what it takes to forge your unique path to leadership with consistent and focused work. How do you tackle the subtle constraints? How do navigate the important yet challenging role of allies? How do you recognize your worth and learn to own it? How do you do keep honing your voice? We’ll hear from them on these topics and more – their stories will inspire you to become your own guiding star.

GraphQL allows consumers to get exactly what they need, with a significant performance boost. In this session, Maria Lucena and Divya Mahajan will cover some GraphQL fundamentals and AppSync, AWS’s implementation of GraphQL. Next, we’ll explore a Vue.js SPA that leverages the Apollo-Client to connect to AppSync with Cognito. Finally, we will examine how a mixture of AWS services, including S3, Route53, CloudFront, can be leveraged to serve the application safely and reliably.

Work is central to our lived experience (for better or worse). On our best days we can feel fulfilled and productive, but other days we may feel triggered or insecure. It’s time we had a different discussion about what work offers us so that we can maximize the meaning in our day-to-day. Let’s look at how we can create human-first experiences at work; redefine what it means to be successful; and, as a result, open the door to (tech) careers that celebrate and affirm our humanity.

The 2022 International Women’s Day campaign theme is #BreakTheBias; what does that mean to you?  Tune into this rare interview, with Jiahan Ericsson, to hear from Leyla Seka, a leader who evolved her work into a mission to break the bias. Whether it’s raising awareness, smashing stereotypes, challenging prejudice, effecting change, or championing equality, in this session, Leyla Seka will highlight her extraordinary professional journey and inspire you.

When senior women leaders are interviewed, they often note that new roles and opportunities can have a disproportionate impact on their careers. On balance, women are less likely than men to make these career moves. Is this pursuit of perfection preventing women from taking on tasks they won’t nail 100%? Despite launching over a dozen products in her career and building several new multi-billion dollar categories, Tiffany To has learned more from her failures than her successes. In this talk, she’ll explore ways to embrace failure in small and big ways in our current roles, how to be open to new “failure” opportunities, and how to identify the best environments for professional growth and career progression.

For women looking to make a mid-career change into tech, even fewer know that sales engineering is a great way to make that move. In this session, Melissa Andrews will introduce you to the sales engineering career and provide tips for those thinking about entering the field.

Front is on a mission to make work happier by meaningfully connecting teams and customers. One place it gets truly reflected is in the way Engineering, Product and Design operate as one team. Jill Schweitzer, Kaitlin Fink, and Vrushali Patil will talk about how they use Front’s company values around collaboration, low-ego and transparency in their day-to-day interactions, hiring process, driving decision-making and collectively owning outcomes.

Creating inclusive spaces for people of all abilities will ensure accessibility is not the reason why they have trouble retaining employees or customers while showing all stakeholders that accessibility is vital for all. Erin Perkins, a deafblind woman, will share personal experiences, challenging us to think about how we can step outside of our own comfort zone, and make small, easy changes to improve accessibility across the board. We will have live caption enabled for Elevate conference livestreaming on March 8, 2022.

This is a panel of engineering leaders sharing insights on how they set and execute engineering leadership strategy, plan their careers, and effectively manage their teams to deliver high quality products on time. Don’t miss Jenn Clevenger (Etsy Senior Director of Engineering), Kamilah Taylor (Gusto Head of Financial Products Engineering), Sukrutha Bhadouria (Salesforce Director of Engineering) and Willie Hooykaas-Baldwin (Salesforce VP of Engineering) as they discuss all things engineering leadership!

Hear from women technologists who decided to make the big move from their tech company to forge a new beginning with a bigger role. In this session, learn the elements to consider when planning your next move, the importance of applying the principle of running to something (versus away from something), and panelists will share thoughtful techniques in searching.

Many women are shy of accepting praise, or highlighting their professional achievements to the detriment of their own career success. In this talk, Shailvi Wakhlu will highlight specific ways you can reframe negative perceptions of advocating for yourself, and become comfortable sharing wins effectively and authentically. Everyone deserves to be rewarded equitably for their amazing achievements!

Are your goals accelerating your career or holding you back? While intelligence, creativity, and hard work are key components of success, they will only get you so far. In order to make the most out of your career and serve your organization well, you need to set savvy goals – for what you can learn and what you can do. It will make all the difference in your career. In this fireside chat, Heather Natour will sit down with Raji Subramanian to discuss ways to set the right goals for yourself, deconstruct common career roadblocks, and share approaches to deliver measurable impact that will get you noticed as you rise toward the top.

In the ‘data first’ era, many invest significantly to collect data, and many struggle to realize its value (the resulting data silos and messy tech stacks). Data scientists and developers spend up to 80% of their time finding data, cleaning data, and collecting business domain knowledge rather than modeling and gaining insights. Harnessing knowledge and data together leads teams to faster modeling and insights, enabling teams to ask questions – and get answers – data alone can’t provide. In this session, Michelle Yi will show relational knowledge graphs in action.

Cryptocurrencies have the potential to facilitate a massive redistribution of wealth. What opportunities are there to leverage this change for economic justice? We’ll be talking about how motivated justice-minded artists, engineers, and strategists can make a huge difference.