5 and a Half Ways to Support the Other Women in Tech
Thrilled to see my previous post, The Other Woman in Tech, hit a nerve with so many. I want to follow up with another post because even though I’m all for “think pieces”, I've always been more drawn to “action pieces”.
Note: I may use the title “other women in tech”, but I recognize there are many men in these positions, too. We can stand to use gender diversity in all roles.
Here are my top tips for getting the most out of your community, customer support and other non-tech teams.
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Example: In Etsy’s all-hands (originally called Waffle Meetings — truth be told Rob Kalin only made us waffles once, but, man was that a great meeting) engineers were expected to presented Code as Craft talks to the entire company. Having an audience with a range of knowledge on the topic you are presenting on is important, it allows you to create a simple and digestible presentation. These talks often shared universal learnings that fueled my own work. Continuous deployment (pushing around 40 code changes a day at Etsy) inspired me to push myself and my team to be just as prolific and it really allowed us to understand how special our engineering team was.
After writing my last post, an engineer I worked with wrote me a touching email, explaining that soon after he joined the team, a talk I gave at an all-hands meeting was the moment he knew he made the right decision taking his current role—he knew he wanted to work at a place that inspired the kind of passion I had shown.
These structured presentations allowed us to clearly craft messages in a universal language, providing the perfect way to inspire and educate each other.
2. Avoid treating your non-tech teams like the clean up crew.
Often the non-tech teams have a lot of cleanup work, and it can be easy to feel like a community janitor. Because startups are constantly evolving, even tiny mistakes or unknown updates can create big waves within the community. This is “part of the job” but this work is not marked off in our schedules, and often this work doesn’t show up in our job descriptions or account for much in performance reviews. (But it should, oh how it should.)
Transparency between teams is important. Internal communications should be as thought about as external ones. Changes need to be communicated. I repeat, changes need to be communicated. And you can probably deduce that a team that ships so many times a day, could not only forget to think about a communication plan for some of those changes, but may not foresee an issue that a community or support team member can spot miles away.
Let me also mention this, your customer-facing teams should always be prepared to clean up messes. When I hire and train new members this is something I’m sure to never sugar coat. We’re the supporting structure that allows product and engineering to innovate, to make mistakes that can lead to ever bigger, better solutions.
3. Respect Gender Intellegence
Just read this book, Gender Intelligence: Breakthrough Strategies for Increasing Diversity and Improving Your Bottom Line. TLDR version.
Gender intelligence allows us to not only acknowledge our differences in a positive light but appreciate them as well. We’ve made the wrong assumption about why women are leaving the workplace. Our surveys with women found that they’re leaving because they don’t feel valued — they feel excluded. — Barbara Annis and John Gray
4. Give us Freedom
In my last position at BarkBox, I was given a clear runway to be as innovative as the product and engineering teams were. Often we want our community and customer support teams to justify their existence, account for what we do all day. Hire great people you trust and believe in, wind them up with big goals and let them go.
One night, at 11:30pm, I received a group text message from the BarkBox founders. They told me they were impressed with my work that day. I never was inspired to work harder for a company than in that moment.
4a. Let us fail, too.
Our fails can be much more public, but it’s important to allow us to learn from them and not hide them or feel so shameful that it stunts our future performance. There is value in failing honestly, and I learned that from John Allspaw, who introduced me to blameless post mortems, and you’ll hear more about him later.
5. Celebrate consistent awesomeness, not just big wins.
Tech founders can have a blind spot when it comes to community management. We often aren’t coming up with brand new solutions that call for company-wide emails containing celebratory gifs. Big wins get all the love.
Be a cheerleader for all teams — show random acts of kindness.
Set up an anonymous Twitter account reminding team members they are doing a great job. Order ribbons that say, “You are killing it.” and pass them out when you see a coworker being consistently awesome.
Ok. It’s time to name names. I once stood at an elevator, having a particularly rough day, and John Allspaw, Etsy’s SVP of Technical Operations came walking towards me.
“I just wanted to say,” he started, and of course my heart fell into my stomach with the immediate thought, “Oh dear, is this going to be bad?”.
“I read your newsletter today and it was really great.”, he finished.
My heart shot right back up to where it should be. I’m tearing up right now thinking about this, it still touches me.
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Have any other tips? I’d love to hear them. I feel I could write more on this and at least three more posts around hiring, reviewing, and motivating non-tech teams (many times with their help!). Want to hear more from me? Let me know!
