Mode Girl Geek Dinner 2019

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📺  You can watch the YouTube video!
📖  Prefer to read? Here’s the full transcript.
🧠  Check out Mode talks & speaker details below:

“Limitless Success: Influencing without Authority” by Nishi Patel, Senior Product Manager

How can I hold someone accountable or get buy-in from someone that doesn’t report to me? The ability to influence others without relying upon positional authority is vital to leadership success in any organization today. With today’s companies transforming into flatter management structures that depend on cross-functional and remote teams, it’s important for everyone to develop strong relationships, establish their credibility, and learn about the goals and values of others to form the basis for future influencing strategies. In this talk, we’ll learn a bit about how to influence others for successful outcomes – no matter your title or tenure!

“Constructing Feedback Loops for Fun and Profit” by Max Edmands, BackEnd Engineering Manager

Feedback loops are a super effective way to make any kind of work more meaningful, impactful, and fun. Good feedback loops can turn complicated, gnarly problems into simple, straightforward processes. They can also encourage states of flow, in which we’re completely engrossed in the thing we’re doing, engaging way more of our brainpower and providing a sense of joy. In this talk, we’ll discuss how to build feedback loops – in which we are creating and responding to high-bandwidth signals that are deeply related to the thing we are trying to accomplish.

“How To Ruin Your Team’s Effectiveness in 5 Easy Steps: A Guide To Eliminating Psychological Safety” by Josee Smith, People Operations

Are you interested in learning how to make your team less effective, less successful, and less diverse? In this talk, we’ll discuss some steps you can take to really drive your team into the ground, such as: giving feedback once a year and referencing a mistake made six months previously; taking feedback from team members and then never doing anything about it; and only hiring people who look like you.  If, like me, you are interested in effectiveness, and know how awful it feels when your company doesn’t listen to you, then we’ll also dive into some ways that psychological safety, a concept coined by Amy Edmondson, a professor at Harvard Business School, is critical for growing teams. We’ll look at how psychological safety leads to more diverse teams and the ways we foster it here at Mode.

“Sales is Life, The Rest is Just Details” by Kaitlin Hart, Senior Enterprise Account Executive

Often times people say “I’m not in sales” because it’s not distinctly in their job title. In reality, everyone is in some type of sales whether they realize it or not. So as they say, the rest is just details.Let’s explore some of the key “sales traits” that have a history of unlocking limitless career & relationship opportunities and learn ways that we can apply these to our own lives.

“Limitless Growth: Practicing Inclusion in Performance Reviews” by Ushashi Chakraborty, Director of Backend Application Engineering

Every engineer is different. A performance review that is not multi-dimensional will often incentivize engineers with only one type of strength which produces a weaker team that can only solve one type of problem. Inclusion in performance reviews means having a framework that allows one to grow with your uniqueness intact. The talk will cover Mode’s philosophies about engineering performance management, how our current framework recognizes engineers with diverse strengths, and why it works so much better than any rubric in the past.

“R, Rice Chex, and Re-usable Frameworks” by Sam Novak, Senior Product Designer

What do a box of cereal, a statistical programing language, and design frameworks have in common anyway? In this talk, we’ll look at one of the most ingenious, delicious, and nostalgic examples of repurposing an existing framework to make something truly inventive and new, talk about how Mode redesigned its notebook interface in preparation for R, and discuss what it really means for great designers to steal.

“Ops, Table for 1” by Christin Price, Senior Manager, Business Strategy & Operations

Startups are full of recurring themes that transcend funding, traction, and industry: that noteworthy transition from one free lunch to 5 days a week, that time when cash burn gets a little out of control and the subsequent course-correction, and the chronic under-resourcing of the Operations team.  This talk discusses approaches to navigating the catch-all and often misunderstood world of “Finance and Operations,” from influencing high-level business strategy to simply keeping the lights on, and everything in between.

Join Mode at our San Francisco headquarters on October 22nd for our first Girl Geek Dinner. At our office in the heart of the Design District, you’ll find an evening of delicious food, engaging talks, and an opportunity to connect with the incredible Girl Geek community.

Mode is building a world-class platform for data scientists, analysts, and everyone else who needs to ask and answer questions with data. Our product is an integral part of data science workflows at Lyft, Twitch, Shopify, and thousands of other data-savvy organizations.