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More than 100 Girl Geeks gathered at Zendesk HQ in San Francisco to hear Engineering and Product leaders share how they build technology that champions the customer service experience.

At age 40, Akilah Monifa stopped practicing law to do what her younger self had wanted to do: become a full-time writer. She received an Amazon Echo as a gift and made another pivot at age 60. This time, she decided she would learn to build for voice. Her motivation: give voice to a subject dear to her heart and build an Alexa skill called Black History Everyday.

Over 200 Girl Geeks came together at Poshmark HQ in Redwood City on June 13, 2019. Speakers included Tracy Sun (Co-Founder & Senior Vice President of New Markets), Barkha Saxena (Chief Data Officer), Vanessa Wong (Senior Director, Product Management), Angela Buckmaster (Associate Director, Community Operations), Camille Forde (Senior Manager, New Markets), Adrienne Hamrah (Software Engineer, Cloud Platform).

The tech industry is full of misfits. Contrary to the myth, not everyone has a computer science degree and went to a fancy university. Hear from ambitious women who built tech careers on their own terms by leveraging their strengths and creating opportunities for themselves to succeed in roles from sales and engineering to product management, from entrepreneurship to corporate ladder climbing. Girl Geek X CEO Angie Chang speaks with Farnaz Ronaghi (NovoEd CTO & Co-Founder), Rosie Sennett (Splunk Staff Sales Engineer), and Shanea Leven (Cloudflare Director of Product Management) at this exciting panel discussion at Elevate 2019.

Over a hundred girl geeks gathered at Palo Alto Networks to hear from Liane Hornsey (Chief People Officer), Nir Zuk (Chief Technology Officer & Founder), Citlalli Solano (Director of Engineering), Archana Muralidharan (Principal Risk Analyst), Meghana Dwarakanath (Manager SQA Engineering) and Paddy Narasimha Murthy (Senior Product Manager) on April 25, 2019 at the beautiful Palo Alto Networks campus in Santa Clara! Palo Alto Networks is making the world a safer place — These speakers talk about how they design, build, maintain software with a security mindset in every function and capability. Get inspired and armed with Palo Alto Networks’ security-first mindset (vs security as an after thought).

Quick experimentation in your application can turn feelings-driven development into data-driven wins. Beyond blue buttons or red buttons, A/B testing can answer key questions on how best to serve your users by offering sometimes surprising insights into how they interact with your product. In this talk, Dena Metili Mwangi will get the first experiment up and running with PlanOut, a Python-based open-source framework. It’s cheap & easy to be A/B testing with open source.

Shawna Wolverton is a self-proclaimed nerd for good product design. Starting at Salesforce in 2003, Shawna worked her way up to SVP Product Management, influencing $30M/yr in revenue before she left to do it all over again as CPO at Planet and now SVP Product Management at Zendesk. Don’t miss this session as Shawna shares the lessons she learned both personally and professionally in her 25 year career.

Girl Geeks gathered at SurveyMonkey HQ to learn about career development and self-advocacy, as well as find out first-hand what the women immersed in SurveyMonkey’s research, product design and engineering initiatives are working on. The evening also included a panel of senior female leaders who provided insights on career path-related topics such as how to make deliberate career decisions, when to change jobs or careers, and how to ask for promotion, among other topics. Speakers included Robin Ducot (Chief Technology Officer), Shilpa Apte (Engineering Manager), Erica Weiss Tjader (Vice President, Product Design), Jing Huang (Director of Engineering, Machine Learning), Sarah Cho (Director of Research), Sarah Goldschmidt (Product Design Manager), Mala Neti (Software Engineer on the Web Platform Team). Recorded at SurveyMonkey HQ in San Mateo on May 29, 2019.

At the Homelight Girl Geek X dinner, HomeLight girl geeks talked about how they use data and human emotion to empower decision making. Speakers included Tina Sellards (Facilities & Administration Manager), Sandy Liao, (Head of Talent, Culture & People Operations), Vanessa Brockway (HomeLight Senior Manager of Business Development & Strategy), Molly Laufer (Director of Offline Marketing), Sam Ryan (Product Manager), Jenn Luna (Senior Software Engineer), Mary Remillard (Talent Operations & Culture Specialist), Ames Monko (Product Designer). Recorded at HomeLight HQ on May 23rd, 2019 in downtown San Francisco.