Category Archives: career

career, hiring, management

career pivot challenges

In a previous role, I hired Parker[1], who was pivoting from a successful career as a front-end software engineer to a career as a user researcher. Parker had learned about user research when they left a small bootstrapped startup. They got a Senior Engineer role at a big tech company and started meeting their colleagues in functions that their small startup didn’t have. Feeling the pull of user experience, they started learning about user research in their spare time, reading books and articles, and spending as much time as possible with their new user researcher colleagues. They decided that they wanted to pivot from their successful role as a Senior Engineer, and applied to my Associate Junior Researcher opening.

I was excited to hire Parker. I was working on complex enterprise products whose primary users were system administrators and other technical people. Parker’s engineering work was for another enterprise software company, so they understood our complex domain. They had conducted some of their own usability studies in their previous role, and had built a good foundational knowledge of user experience and research methodology. My team was excited to have them join us.

For junior roles, we’re often not looking for a lot of evidence of professional skills like mentoring, managing conflict, or influencing without authority. Those skills usually come later in someone’s career. For those making a career pivot after a successful professional career in another discipline, this can actually represent a challenge. A career switcher who does have those professional skills can be at a disadvantage if they have a short-sighted manager who doesn’t leverage or even value those skills in someone at their level.

I didn’t fully realize this when I hired Parker, but Parker had lots of strong professional skills like mentoring, managing conflict, and dealing with difficult stakeholders. That helped cement their role as a trusted and valuable member of my team because others saw how effective they were. Since then, I’ve mentored other career switchers who, after 3 or 4 years in their new role, are trying to decide if they should stick it out because they feel like no one cares about anything other than the new technical skills that they have built.

However, once the career switcher gets over the hump of proving their foundational technical skills in their new career, which often comes with getting that first Senior title, they often have an accelerated path. Because they have a much stronger foundation for the professional skills needed to differentiate them at the higher levels, they are now at an advantage compared to their similarly-leveled peers. In this case, Parker quickly built their technical skills and earned a Senior title on a fast track. We have both moved on from that company and continued our career trajectories. We caught up recently, where I learned that Parker has recently been promoted to the Principal level at their current company.

In an ideal world, a company will have a robust career ladder that recognizes both technical and professional skills for all levels of their career ladder, and gives managers tools to appropriately evaluate their skills. When a manager only evaluates and values the technical skills and undervalues professional skills, they reduce the ability of individuals and teams to be more effective and more satisfied in the work that they do. They run the risk of losing a career switcher like Parker who brings more to their role and team than just the new technical skills that they’re building.

[1] To maintain privacy, Parker is a pseudonym.

career, leadership

the work you love and the work you don’t

In the current tech jobs market, I’ve talked to a lot of folks who were looking for their next role. Instead of simply diving straight in and looking for something very similar to their previous role, I think it’s worthwhile to take a step back and be thoughtful about what that next role should be. Besides analyzing your day to determine what gives you energy, an exercise from the book Never Search Alone sets out a thoughtful framework for considering what’s next.

In this exercise, you write out the things you love doing at work, and the things you hate doing at work. I think that it’s important to write this out and then let it percolate for a few days. I’ve found that additional items on both lists arise later on, or that I come up with a different way to express something. If you also did the exercise from my previous post about what gives you energy, you might have already identified some of the things you love and some of the things you hate.

For example, here are some items from my list of things that I love doing:

  • Having a deep understanding of our users and our market to create innovative products and services
  • Meeting and exceeding the expectation that a design executive will influence and contribute to product strategy, engineering strategy, and business strategy.
  • Coaching, mentoring, and upskilling my organization in their technical and professional skills. Creating cross-functional mentoring and coaching opportunities.
  • Having processes that work in our environment to make our jobs easier without adding onerous overhead

And here are some items from my list of things that I hate:

  • Working in a feature factory where the only measure is on the number of features we spit out. 
  • Working with people who are jerks: antagonistic, not respectful, not accepting of other backgrounds or experiences, creating unnecessary conflict, unable to give or receive constructive feedback.
  • Decision-making by committee.
  • Working on something that doesn’t make people’s lives better.

The book then has you analyze these two lists and coming up with two more lists: what your next role must have, and (just as importantly!) what your next role must not have.

Here are some of my must-haves:

  • I must work for a company that appropriately invests in its future through product discovery, a deep understanding of its users, and engineering excellence.
  • I must work for a company that understands the value of design as more than just “making things pretty” and expects design to have a role in crafting business strategy.
  • I must have a manager who respects me and the disciplines that I represent, understands how we contribute to the business, and creates opportunities for growth.

And some of my must-nots:

  • I will not work for an asshole again.
  • I must not work for a company that does not value the craft of management.
  • I must not work in a field or on technology that I think makes the world worse.

If you’re searching for a role, these lists are a framework to help you evaluate the opportunities that come your way. You’re probably not going to find a role that meetings all of your must-haves and your must-nots. You can use this to help you decide whether it meets enough of each of them to be worthy to consider. It also can help you negotiate for more things on your must-have list and reduce the things on your must-not list. This is an especially good input into the evaluation of job descriptions that I describe in this post.

I’ve found that I have to pay close attention to my must-not list. I am prone to only looking for the items on my must list, but ignoring the items on my must-not list. Having a complete picture of how well any given role fits what I want and what I don’t then gives me the ability to decide what trade-offs I want to make. It also gives me negotiating points: I can say that I’m really excited by this role, and I would like to work on a way to incorporate something from my must-have list that it’s currently missing so that it’s an even better fit for me.

By doing this reflection, I’m better prepared for interviews about a new role. I can evaluate job descriptions against my lists of must-haves and must-not-haves. Then I can also identify open questions about whether it has additional items on those lists. That gives me prompts for what I should be looking for during the interview process.

career

what gives you energy?

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I’ve had some conversations lately with folks who are feeling stuck and not sure how to move forward. They are getting great feedback from their peers and their boss, and yet they are still feeling exhausted and unable to see a future in which they’re not feeling this way. They might think that they’re flirting with burnout, or are already there.

One of the ways that I have found helps me when I’m in this situation and need to get unstuck is to consider how I am feeling. At the end of my day, do I feel energized or depleted?

The book Designing Your Life outlines a great exercise where you deeply consider how you’re spending your time and how those activities impact your energy. In short, evaluate your calendar. For each meeting or other event that you have on your calendar, think about how you feel before, during, and after it. Some meetings give you energy, while others sap it. Additionally, how you feel about what you’re doing can be impacted by the time of day, your physical body, the seasons, and more. Analyzing what augments your energy and what depletes your energy can help you identify trends that you can then use to help you better manage how you feel overall.

You can complete this exercise by simply doing a retrospective at the end of the day. If that doesn’t feel sufficient, or you think that you need a higher level of granularity, you can do it on a meeting-by-meeting basis instead. If you’d like some more guidance in completing this exercise, the Designing Your Life Workbook walks you through it and all of the other exercises in the book.

For example, if you know you’re not a morning person (hi, that’s me!), you can work to schedule meetings where you need to be fully engaged and in the best possible mood for later in the day. If you realize that there’s a meeting that you dread every week, you can consider whether you might be able to make changes to the meeting itself to make it less dreadful. Alternatively, if you can’t make changes to that meeting, you can brainstorm ways to do things around that meeting so that it’s not combining with other energy-draining meetings or activities. Perhaps you can schedule a meeting that gives you energy immediately before or after it to mitigate its impact. Or maybe that’s the day that you make sure that you go to the gym and burn off your frustration on the treadmill. I have a close friend who struggles in the winter, so they put extra attention on activities that give them energy like planning upcoming milestones.

Overall, this exercise is one in self-awareness. This is information that you can use to better manage yourself and how you spend your time. You can use this information to structure experiments for yourself to help you feel better about the work that you’re doing. You can experiment with new goals that will help you grow. You can set yourself up so that you have many activities that augment your energy. You will probably never get to fully do away with the activities that deplete your energy, but you can learn how to manage that so that you don’t become overwhelmed.

If you find that your time is being disproportionately spent on activities that drain your energy, or that you’re so overwhelmed that everything feels like it is sapping your energy, you might realize that you need to make a bigger change. You might already be burnt out and need to take some time off to start to address that. You might need to find a great coach or therapist to help you find your way through. You could realize that maybe you don’t love your current role even if you’re doing a good job at it. You could learn that, while you have a great team and company, the role you’re in doesn’t give you the growth that you need right now.

Discovering what gives you energy and what depletes your energy gives you better knowledge so that you can move forward from feeling stuck today. In the future, knowing this might help you from getting stuck in the first place.

career

identifying what you want in your next role

Finding your next role is a difficult but important challenge. How do you know what you’re looking for? You could simply look for your current job title, or maybe the next job title on the ladder, but that doesn’t help you know whether that’s a good job for you.

When I’m trying to figure out what I’m really looking for in my next role, I spend some time doing a deep review of job descriptions. Here’s my process:

  1. Search for jobs with relevant titles. I like to cast a wide net and look for different titles, different levels, and different size companies. LinkedIn is a great place to start for this search. Collect a good set of JDs. Don’t worry if they don’t look amazing, that’s going to be the next step.
  2. Collate the JDs into a document. Copy the text of these JDs into your favorite word processor. I insert a break or line between them so that they don’t all run together.
  3. Evaluate a JD carefully.
    • Highlight everything that you like about this JD with one color. I use yellow for this.
    • Highlight everything that you don’t like, or that raises a potential red flag for you, about this JD with another color. I use blue for this.
    • Review your good-highlighting and write out a list of what you like.
    • Review your bad-highlighting and write out a list of what you don’t like
    • Write out a list of open questions that you have after reading this JD.
  4. Repeat this process for the rest of the JDs that you’ve created.
  5. Evaluate your lists. What themes do you see emerging in each category?

When I’m first starting a job search, this exercise helps me hone in on what I really want to do in my next role. If I’m considering a role that is somewhat different than what I’ve been targeting, it helps me evaluate whether the role might still move me towards my career goals. This also helps me know what I don’t want in my next role.

After you’ve identified the themes of what you really want and don’t want in your next role, you can use that to help you rank which roles are most interesting to you. For those roles that are most interesting, you can prioritize looking through your network to see if you have a close connection to that role who you can leverage. For those roles that are the least interesting, you can decide whether you want to spend your time on pursuing them at all. Being more focused in your job search will help you manage your time and your resilience better.

career, leadership

the goal-setting conundrum

Setting career goals is hard, especially when it’s time to do it as part of the usual performance review cycle. As I’ve coached my teams through goal-setting, I’ve observed several different reasons why it can be hard to set goals. These reasons include:

  • Analysis paralysis. “I could work on any number of things, but which ones are the ‘right’ ones to work on?”
  • Future hazy, try again later. “I really don’t know what I want my future to hold, so I’m not sure what goals I should have when I don’t have a three- or five-year plan.”
  • Too much happening right now. “I’m already in a period of personal or professional upheaval and I feel like I am only barely holding on. I can’t think about the future because the present is already too much.”
  • Impostor syndrome. “I don’t think I’m actually any good at what I do today. I can’t set goals to help me address my perceived deficiencies because that would be revealing to someone else that I’m an impostor.”
  • Dreaming about leaving. “I think I want to do something different with my career that isn’t available to me here. I do have goals, but I don’t want to talk about them with you for fear of repercussions.”
  • In the zone. “I’m happy with where I am right now. I do not want to get promoted. I just want to come in, successfully do my job, and get paid fairly for that.”
  • No role model. “I have no idea how to do this because I’ve never seen anyone do it well. I’ve not really tried to do it myself.”
  • No point. “This is just HR bullshit. No one pays attention to my goals. I’m going to write them down today and then no one will look at them again until my next performance review.”

Once you understand the root of what makes writing goals feel difficult, you can use that to help craft the type of goals to set. Here are some strategies to unlock the goal-setting conundrum for the reasons I outlined above:

  • Analysis paralysis: You could make finding the “right” focus your goal. To do this, choose one of your potential goals and work on it for a set period of time, up to a month. If you really can’t choose one yourself, ask a friend or colleague to help, or even pick one randomly. At the end of the month, evaluate your progress, how you’re feeling about it, and what impact it has made. If it’s particularly impactful and you’re feeling great about it, you’ve got your goal. If not, you can choose another goal to try for a time boxed period.
  • Future hazy, try again later: You could make figuring out what you want to do your goal. Outline a handful of options for what your future might hold. Don’t be afraid to dream big! From there, you could have informational interviews with people who have followed that path to leverage what they learned along the way. Or you could create a payout matrix to help you think through which path you might want to take. You could create a set of experiments to help you decide what you want your future to hold.
  • Too much happening right now: Depending on why you have too much going on, you could set a goal to reduce the number of things on your plate. What can you offload so that you’re not so overburdened? If you simply can’t offload things, you could instead set a goal to reflect on your situation and what you’ve learned from it. These types of retrospectives can help you and those around you avoid getting into situations like this, better handle those inevitable times when it feels like everything is going wrong at once, or even simply recognize that this happens and sometimes all you can do is keep on keeping on.
  • Impostor syndrome: Setting goals to help overcome impostor syndrome requires vulnerability and support. You have to be vulnerable in admitting that you feel this way, and you have to have support from a good leader who will help you move past it. If you aren’t sure if you’ve got a good leader or you’re not ready to be vulnerable, one way to sidestep this is to leverage your career ladder. Look at the competencies for the next level. They’re probably the same competencies as your current level, but they have broader scope and impact. You can frame your goals in terms of growing to that next level. You could also set a goal about getting in-depth 360-degree feedback from those around you to help you better understand what you’re great at and what you’re not, if that’s not already part of your performance review. That might help you combat your impostor syndrome, or at least help you decide where to focus your energy.
  • Dreaming about leaving: This is another one that requires vulnerability and support. If you’re ready to be open that you’re thinking about doing something else, you can set goals to make that decision. If you’re certain that you want to move on, you can set goals that help you and your organization be ready to move on, such as ensuring that you’ve wrapped up a key project and fully documented all of that great knowledge that only lives in your head. If you’re still exploring options, you can follow the strategies above for “future hazy, try again later”.
  • In the zone: You could make your goals about cementing your place as a solid contributor. Potential goals include improving documentation, improving processes, or mentoring.
  • No role model: Ask others to share their goals with you. Personally, I like sharing my goals with my team so that they can see what I’m working on.
  • No point: You can choose to treat this exercise as only an HR exercise, or you can choose to treat this exercise as something that you do for yourself. Setting goals is about your professional growth. You have to reframe the exercise for yourself and not let poor implementations of goal-setting get in your way.

As you’re framing your goals, you can use strategies such as SMART goals to help you create meaningful goals that you can make progress on. After you’ve done that hard work, the next step is to create an accountability structure to help you make progress. I like to set up monthly check-ins on my professional goals with someone such as a manager, a coach, or a colleague. That external accountability helps remind me to invest time in my goals, and reflect on what I’ve learned as I’ve worked on them.

career, leadership, management

climbing the leadership ladder: from manager to director to VP

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Recently, I’ve been asked several times what I’ve found to be the difference of being a manager, a director, and a VP. Each of those roles is an interesting one with its own challenges. My thinking on this is heavily influenced by this blog post from Peter Merholz. In his post, he introduces what I think of as the three distinct modes of management: managing down, managing to the sides, and managing up.

Managing down is managing those who report to you, or through you if you’re managing managers or directors. Managing to the sides is working with your peers to communicate information, resolve issues, and make decisions. Managing up is the skill of giving your manager, whether they’re a C-level or a senior manager, the tools and information that they need to help you, your team, and your company be successful.

As a first-line manager, where you’re only managing individual contributors (ICs), almost all of your time is about enabling them to be happy and productive. About 60% of your time is directly managing them: keeping them on track, giving feedback, coaching them, making sure they’re working well together, etc. Another 30% of your time is managing to the sides: ensuring that you’re aligned with your peer managers, resolving conflicts, communicating status information, and removing roadblocks. The remaining 10% of your time is managing up: working with your boss to manage priorities, identifying additional resource needs, communicating status, managing the budget, asking them to remove roadblocks, and setting the strategy within your area of focus.

As a second-line manager (for simplicity, I’m going to call this “director”), where you’re only managing managers, your focus shifts. You’re no longer the one directly responsible for enabling a team of productive and happy ICs. That’s the job of the first-line managers who report to you. Now your role is to ensure that the teams who report to you are happy, productive, and working on the right things. For a director, I’d estimate that 40% of your time is managing down to the team: ensuring that your managers are being effective in their roles, coaching your managers in how to be effective coaches and leaders, communicating needed information, resolving issues, setting direction for your team, setting your team’s culture, and removing roadblocks within and for your teams. As a director, managing to your peers is more important than it was as a manager. I estimate that managing to the sides is about 40% of your job. This is ensuring that you and your cross-functional peers are aligned on strategy and prioritization, that you’ve got the right folks working on the right problems across your teams, and that you are removing roadblocks for your teams and for your peers’ teams. The last 20% of your time is managing up: working with leadership to set strategy, communicating needed information, advocating for your teams, identifying roadblocks that need leadership intervention, and so on.

As a third-line manager (for simplicity, I’m going to call this “VP”), where you’re only managing directors, your focus shifts again. Now your directors are the ones responsible for having their teams be happy, productive, and working on the right things. You are accountable for all of that, plus be part of the team responsible for setting corporate strategy, and delivering on the commitments that you are making on behalf of your team. This means that much less of your time is managing down, maybe 20% of it. Managing down involves is communicating strategy, coaching your directors, resolving conflicts within your organization and between your organization and others, setting your organizational culture as part of your overall company’s culture, and ensuring that your directors are aligned amongst themselves. Managing to the sides is still about 50% of your job. Now that it’s at another level higher, it is even more cross-functional. Now you’re setting strategy across the entire company, identifying opportunities for your company, setting policies, removing roadblocks across your org and for your partner orgs, and communicating needed information across the company. The last 30% of your time is managing up: working with the senior executive team on setting strategy, communicating, making decisions, representing the company, and so on.

Looking back at Peter’s original post, the percentages that he lists don’t match my experience. I think he’s underestimated the amount of time needed at each level to manage up and to the sides, especially at the lower levels. While Peter frames his thoughts in terms of design orgs, I’ve found in my conversations with other leaders as well as my own experience in managing engineers and product folks that it’s held generally true cross-functionally.

If the things that you love are communicating, unblocking, and coaching, you must do more of that at higher levels. The shift that you’re making at each level is that you’re more abstracted away from your core discipline, and that you’re seeing and making decisions on a much broader swath of the company and the business. You are responsible for making a lot more decisions, often with less information than you  would like. I’ve found it to be a lot of fun, and a lot of responsibility.

career

the discovery problem in your career

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A long time ago, I believed that merely doing great work was sufficient to get promoted, and that it was my manager’s job to not only know that I was doing great work but also to ensure that I got promoted for it. This is not true. As your career advances, and this is doubly true when you’re leading a team, the more that your success is measured in terms of others’ perceptions of you. You cannot wait for recognition to come to you. You have to tell others why you deserve recognition.

I know that this is not easy. It’s hard to know where to start. It’s sometimes hard to know when you’re being successful. It feels like getting people to understand the impact of your great work is taking away from you being able to do more great work. Not being able to concentrate on doing more great work makes you worry that you really are selling snake oil. But that’s not true. What you’re doing is enabling people to discover your great work and build on top of it. Help them understand why it’s great. Help them understand how it contributes to them doing great work.

In user experience, we know that one of the common challenges of any product or service is discoverability. I’ve experienced this many times. You get user feedback that says that the one way that you could make your product or service better is to do this thing really awesome. “But it’s already there! I spent months delivering that feature!” Not only is your user frustrated that they think they can’t do what they want to do, but also you’re frustrated that you spent all that time and energy developing the very feature that they need and they’re not actually using it. You’ve got a discoverability problem. You’ve got to figure out how to fix it so that your engineering effort isn’t wasted and your user can accomplish what they want to do. Fix your discoverability problem, and you’ll fix two different frustrations.

And it’s the same with your great work. It’s not enough to do great work. You’ve got to make it possible for other people to discover your great work, to understand it and how it’s a contribution, to be able to build on it. Don’t think of the time that you spend changing perceptions as a waste of time. Think of it as solving the discoverability problem in your career.

career, Grand Rounds

10 Lessons learned about job hunting

Joining Grand Rounds has been an educational experience in so many ways. In the 16 months that I’ve been here, I’ve interviewed more than 200 candidates across all levels of user experience, product management, and engineering. In doing so, I’ve learned a lot about the hiring process that I want to share to help folks who are looking for a job.

As a result of all of these interviews and conversations with my colleagues about these interviews, I’m sharing my top lessons learned about looking for a new job.

  1. Looking for a new job is frustrating, time-consuming, and difficult. Find or create a support system as you look for your new role. You need folks who can hear your frustrations, give you feedback, and help you keep your morale up as you’re trying to find the right next role for you.
  2. Don’t treat the job description as a list of absolute requirements. Under the best of circumstances, it’s written to describe the most ideal candidate. There is no real human being who actually matches that entire list.  If you meet ~50% of the requirements and you think you might be interested in the company, apply for it. 
  3. Get feedback on your resume and LinkedIn profile. If you’re in design or product management where portfolios are common, get feedback on those too. There are a lot of different resources for resume feedback, such as professional groups and mentoring circles. Many of the professional Slacks that I’m on have channels for resume and portfolio feedback. If you’re still in college (or boot camp) or a recent graduate, your college might offer resume and portfolio reviews through their career center or alumni association.
  4. Have appropriate expectations for each part of the job searching process.  Cold applications to a job through LinkedIn or their careers website have the lowest rate of responses, whereas an internal referral often gets more attention.
  5. If you can find find someone in your network who works for a company you’re interested in, check in with them to tell you more about the company and the culture. They might be able to give you an internal referral, too.
  6. Practice your opener: what’s your short (~60 second) response to “so tell me about yourself”? Say it out loud. Preferably say it to an audience and get feedback about it, but at least say it out loud to yourself often enough that you feel comfortable saying it.  I usually start by writing it down so that I remember all the points I want to hit, then reading it out loud a few times. I edit it as I practice it. Then I give it to someone and get feedback. As I say it more, I learn how to riff on certain parts of it, depending on the context where I’m giving my opener.
  7. Take some time after an interview to reflect on your performance.  What went well?  What didn’t go well?  If you feel like you answered a question particularly well, jot down some notes about it so that you can reproduce that great answer in the future.  If you feel like you didn’t answer a question very well, come up with a better answer for it, and then practice saying it out loud. 
  8. … but keep yourself from spiralling into shame or frustration or worry or any of the other negative emotions associated with job hunting.  Don’t beat yourself up if you flub a question, or even flub a whole interview.  Interviewing is a skill.  You get better at skills through practice. Flubbing a single question in an interview doesn’t necessarily remove you from the running.  Flubbing a whole interview, as painful as it is, is probably a learning opportunity for you to determine what went awry and how you can prevent that from going awry in the future.
  9. The job interview is a two-way street. You are evaluating the company and the team to see if you want to work there. Make sure that you gather information to help you determine whether you want to work at that company, with that team, and for that manager.
  10. Finding a job is difficult in a normal situation. Finding a job during a worldwide recession is even harder because there is a much larger candidate pool. You have to find a way to keep your morale and self-esteem up through this process. Job hunting can test your resilience, so know some ways to help recharge yourself as you find the next great role for you.

Now that I’ve dusted off this blog, perhaps I can make some writing momentum and share more here!

career, women

Systers at Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing

I am a long-time Syster, and I have attended and spoken at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing a few times before.  This year, I’m speaking again, and wanted to support my fellow Systers as well.  To that end, I have compiled a list of Systers who are speaking at GHC.  Come see us! (Last updated: 2017-10-03 13:02 PT)

Wednesday, 04 October 2017

1:30-2:30pm
Panel: The Engineer’s Journey: Choose Your Own Adventure
Panelists: Cindy Burns, Pi-Chuan Chang, Leor Chechik, Mary Dang, Nadyne Richmond
Panel discussion of engineering career paths and important decisions along the way

1:30-2:30pm
Panel: The Myth of the Unicorn: Perspectives of Native American Women in Computing
Speakers: Amanda Sharp, Kylie Bemis, Nicole Archambault, Squiggy Rubio, Sarah EchoHawk
These extraordinary women in the tech industry identify as members of indigenous tribes from across Northern America. They will discuss their experiences, what it means to be a unicorn— a “mythical” or “non-existent” figure in tech—and what the tech communities can do to increase support and visibility.

1:30-2:30pm
Panel: Navigating Change: Ride the Waves of Change Without Feeling Underwater
Speakers: An Bui, Indu Khosla, Ariel Aguilar, Vanessa Hernandez, Alex Riccomini

1:50-2:10pm
Interactive Media Research Presentations: Inverse Procedural Modeling for 3D Urban Models
Speaker: Ilke Demir

3:00-3:20pm
Demonstrating Value Presentation: Managing Up: Managing Your Manager with Compassion, Humor, and Data
Speaker: Steph Parkin

3:00-4:00pm
Panel: Systers Celebrates 30 years Supporting Women in Computing
Panelists: Angel Tian, Danielle Cummings, Laura Downey, Neetu Jain, Dilma Da Silva

3:00-4:00pm
Workshop: Consciously Tackling Unconscious Bias
Speakers: Lilit Yenokyan, Amala Rangnekar, Saralee Kunlong

4:30-5:30pm
Panel: Navigating Change: Ride the Waves of Change Without Feeling Underwater (repeat session)
Panelists: An Bui, Indu Khosla, Ariel Aguilar, Vanessa Hernandez, Alex Riccomini

4:30-5:30pm
2017 Systers Pass-It-On Award Winners

Wednesday poster session, 1-4pm

Framework to Extract Context Vectors from Unstructured Data using Big Data Analytics
Presenter: Sarah Masud

Race against Troubleshooting: Predictive Maintenance for Data Protection
Presenter: Dhanashri Phadke

Thursday, 05 October 2017

11:30am-12:30pm
Panel: Why and How to Prepare for Hackathons?
Panelists: Bouchra Bouqata, Rose Robinson, Sana Odeh, Shaila Pervin, Xiaodan (Sally) Zhang

11:30am-12:30pm
Panel: Virtual Humanity
Panelists: Erin Summers, Jenn Duong, Gemma Rachelle Busoni, Elisabeth Morant, Charity Everett
In this panel, industry experts will share knowledge building and creating virtual reality (VR) experiences, games, and tools centered around the human experience.

11:30am-12:30pm
Panel: Hello, It’s Me! Differentiating Yourself With a Multidimensional Career
Panelists: Jenna Blaha, Vidya Srinivasan, Kelly Hoey, Ilana Walder-Biesanz, Cassidy Lara Williams

11:30am-12:30pm
Speed Mentoring with Systers mentors
Organizer: Zaza Soriano
Mentors and attendees sit at tables, each of which has a topic. For 15 minutes, attendees ask questions for the mentor to answer. Then attendees change tables and select a new topic, and the Q&A starts again.

11:30am-5:30pm
OSD Code-a-thon for Humanity with Project Jupyter
Organizers: Carol Willing, Jamie Whitacre

1:30-2:30pm
Panel: Get Out of Your Own Way!
Panelists: Mayoore S Jaiswal, Carolyn Rowland, Maybellin Burgos, Lilit Yenokyan, Lulu Li

1:30-2:30pm
Panel: Navigating Social Impact as a Techie
Panelists: Sharon Lin, Yada Pruksachatkun, Daniella Cohen, Gwen Wong, Gemma Rachelle Busoni
This panel will tackle approaches to creating social impact with technology, from eliminating social stigma of ‘civic technology’ to merging product paradigms from tech startups and philanthropic work.

1:30-2:30pm
Speed Mentoring with Systers mentors
Organizer: Zaza Soriano
Mentors and attendees sit at tables, each of which has a topic. For 15 minutes, attendees ask questions for the mentor to answer. Then attendees change tables and select a new topic, and the Q&A starts again.

3:00-3:30pm
Career Success Presentation: Negotiation Tactics to Make Your Manager a Strategic Career Partner
Speaker: Amy Yin

3:00-4:00pm
Panel: How Male Allies are Supporting Women in Computing through the Local Community
Panelists: Natasha Green, Anthony Park, Edwin Aoki, Evin Robinson

3:00-4:00pm
Speed Mentoring with Systers mentors
Organizer: Zaza Soriano
Mentors and attendees sit at tables, each of which has a topic. For 15 minutes, attendees ask questions for the mentor to answer. Then attendees change tables and select a new topic, and the Q&A starts again.

3:20-3:40pm
Career Success Presentation: Communicating, Promoting, & Developing Yourself Professionally: A Peer’s How-To Guide
Speaker: Rucha Mukundan
I will discuss key takeaways and lessons learned from her experience joining the workforce, and how professionals in their early career can use this information to position themselves for success.

4:30-4:50pm
Career Success Presentation: Negotiation Tactics to Make Your Manager a Strategic Career Partner (repeat session)
Speaker: Amy Yin

4:50-5:10pm
Career Success Presentation: Communicating, Promoting, & Developing Yourself Professionally: A Peer’s How-To Guide (repeat session)
Speaker: Rucha Mukundan
I will discuss key takeaways and lessons learned from her experience joining the workforce, and how professionals in their early career can use this information to position themselves for success.

Friday, 06 October 2017

9:00-9:20am
Open Source Presentation: Getting Started with Your First Open Source Project
Speaker: Mandy Chan

9:00-10:00am
Panel: Highlight and Recognize Your Organization’’s ‘Hidden Figures’
Panelists: Tamara Nichols Helms, Mona Hudak, Rachel Shanava, Larry Colagiovanni, Yolanda Lee Conyers

9:00-10:00am
Workshop: A Hands-on Dive into Making Sense of Real World Data
Speakers: Xun Tang, Jamie Whitacre

9:00-11:00am
Workshop: Learn to Negotiate And Stop Holding Yourself Back
Presenters: Karen Catlin, Poornima Vijayashanker
Learn how to discover your true value, leverage it to craft an ASK for decision makers, and handle common concerns and objections of decision makers. You’ll be able to practice your ASK and receive feedback on it.

9:00am-noon
Student Opportunity Lab: From Passion to Product: How a LEGO Fan Learns Data Science
Presenters: Xiaodan (Sally) Zhang

9am-noon
Student Opportunity Lab: Importance of Internships and Strategy to Get One!
Presenters: Deveeshree Nayak, Mayoore S Jaiswal

9am-noon
Student Opportunity Lab: You were hired to be you!
Presenter: Angela Choo

9am-noon
Student Opportunity Lab: How to Successfully Apply to Graduate School
Presenter: Laura Dillon

10:30-11:30am
Workshop: Designing Intelligent Hardware: A Day at Nest
Presenters: Jung Hong, Lulu Li, Soja-Marie Morgens
Hands-on experience of the decisions we make to build IoT intelligent hardware with close integration of cloud services, data pipelines and algorithms.

10:30-10:50am
Security Operations Presentations: When a Picture is Worth a Thousand Network-packets and System-logs
Speaker: Awalin Sopan

11:10-11:30am
Finding Your Fit Presentation: Finding the Right Fit: Discovering a Job You Love
Speaker: Kelly Irish

noon-12:20pm
Putting Yourself First Presentation: A Stay-at-home Mom’’s Guide to Continuing Your Career
Speaker: Adina Halter

noon-1:00pm
Panel: From Here to Internity
Panelists: Melissa Ann Borza, Kelly Irish, Marissa Alexandra Schuchat, Jenna Blumenthal, Chang Liu
Panel discussion of current/former interns and hiring managers on how to succeed in your internship

noon-1pm
Panel: Wonder Woman and the Amazonians: Build Your Local Community
Panelists: Bushra Anjum, Abigail Shriver, Melissa Greenlee, Maigh Houlihan, Marian Tesfamichael

noon-1pm
Workshop: Getting the Glass to Half-Full: Managing Your Moods at Work
Presenters: Mamta Suri, Beth Budwig, Harika Adivikolanu
Are you stressed out or negative at work? Do you react to situations at work impulsively? Being positive and well-balanced is a learnable skill. In this workshop, you will practice mindfulness and learn to apply techniques from Cognitive and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy to the workplace. You can use these tools daily to help manage your stress, stay calm, and improve your mood.

12:30-2:30pm
Workshop: Learn to Negotiate And Stop Holding Yourself Back (repeat session)
Presenters: Karen Catlin, Poornima Vijayashanker
Learn how to discover your true value, leverage it to craft an ASK for decision makers, and handle common concerns and objections of decision makers. You’ll be able to practice your ASK and receive feedback on it.