Inspirational Women in STEM and Tech: Slack’s Risa Stein On The 5 Leadership Lessons She Learned From Her Experience

Don’t forget to celebrate the small stuff: A big piece of being an effective leader is making sure your team stays motivated. And one great way to do that is through not forgetting that, every time you’ve shipped something, that’s impactful. Especially in Integrity, every time we put a product out there, we are helping to keep people safe.

As a part of our series about “Lessons From Inspirational Women in STEM and Tech,” we had the pleasure of interviewing Risa Stein, Director of Product, Integrity at Slack.

Risa Stein is a Director of Product, Integrity leading teams focused on protecting customer safety, privacy, and security. Risa and her team are responsible for setting and enforcing policy, investigating and stopping bad actors who try to abuse Slack, and developing new product features to protect Slack’s customers. Prior to joining Slack, she led Transparency and Safety Experience products at LinkedIn and worked on product at Twitter.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

It’s funny but I actually didn’t intend to go into product initially. I’m a lawyer by training and did my JD and MBA together. But coming out of graduate school, I knew that I really wanted to help people. I knew that access, inclusion, equality, and safety on the internet were really important to me. Integrity is a relatively new field, but once I heard about it, I knew that’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to focus on helping individual users of platforms feel safe and I realized the best way for me to do that would be through a product role. Truthfully, I had no idea product management even existed before I started working in the field. But having stumbled my way into trust product, I absolutely loved it.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began at your company?

After Russia invaded Ukraine, governments around the world passed a sweeping wave of new sanctions. Government mandates restricted us from doing business with certain Russia-based individuals and organizations and, in some cases, we needed to block all access to our platform from a geographically embargoed region. I had the opportunity to lead the coordination of our overall response to, and compliance with, these new sanctions — spanning many different teams, from Legal to Customer Experience to Communications.

It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

This isn’t a mistake per se but a learning experience just the same. As I mentioned, I’m a lawyer by training. I don’t have a computer science degree. But when I got to Slack, I quickly realized that product managers here don’t have one-to-one data science partners. I had to do my own data pulls, and that meant I had to teach myself SQL (Structured Query Language), and fast. I was determined to learn but I was essentially Googling ‘how to do XYZ in SQL’ for everything at first. I’ve come a long way.

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

At Slack, our mission statement is to make work life simpler, more pleasant and more productive and we really live by that. I also think Slack is unique in that you don’t hear about a lot of companies, especially enterprise software companies, talking about psychological safety at work openly. We spend most of our waking lives at work, so it makes sense to treat psychological safety as a foundational building block which in turn makes teams feel supported and powers productivity. Slack’s investment in building a culture of psychological safety for its employees and building it into the product shows just how much the company honors its values.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

It’s an unfortunate reality of the internet that spammers are tireless and they are everywhere. We need to make sure Slack Connect stays free of the annoying, distracting noise of spam so that our customers can focus on getting work done. Recently, my team worked on rearchitecting our internal defenses against spammers, so that we could more effectively catch them earlier in their journey on Slack — before they start trying to send spammy invites. Moving defenses up-funnel in the user journey means we don’t just respond to spam or remediate it after the fact — it enables us to prevent the bad behavior before it impacts our customers. Less time dealing with spam means more time to focus on the purpose of the platform, getting work done.

Ok super. Thank you for all that. Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview. Are you currently satisfied with the status quo regarding women in STEM? What specific changes do you think are needed to change the status quo?

I think it would be irresponsible to feel satisfied. I already have a significant relative privilege as a white woman in STEM and as an American woman and as a woman who had the opportunity to seek higher education. So recognizing my comparative privilege, I think it would be irresponsible to stop striving for greater inclusion. And not just inclusion, but equity in the pursuit of these careers. I also recognize that it’s my responsibility not just to advocate for myself, but for others who have not had the same degree of privilege I’ve had. I think we have a responsibility to bring one another up.

In your opinion, what are the biggest challenges faced by women in STEM or Tech that aren’t typically faced by their male counterparts? What would you suggest to address this?

One common challenge, and this is one I’ve faced earlier on in my career, is the myth of who is or isn’t technical, and what technical means. I have an incredible depth of expertise in my particular product area, that I’ve worked very hard to develop over many years, inside and outside of my work life. That’s technical knowledge! But because I don’t have a computer science degree, I’ve faced this assumption in my career that I’m not technical enough. I think we just need to realize that there are many different types of expertise that are valuable and necessary to succeed in building a useful product.

What are the “myths” that you would like to dispel about being a woman in STEM or Tech. Can you explain what you mean?

One of the biggest myths is that the gender gap that exists in STEM careers, particularly in tech, is driven by women’s interest. Which is simply not true! The questions we really need to ask are what systemic barriers exist, including the perpetuation of myths and stereotypes, that are keeping women out. Stereotypes have a powerful effect on us, even from a very early age. We need to provide opportunities for girls to cultivate their interest, and myth bust along the way.

What are your “5 Leadership Lessons I Learned From My Experience as a Woman in STEM or Tech” and why. (Please share a story or example for each.)

• Don’t forget to celebrate the small stuff: A big piece of being an effective leader is making sure your team stays motivated. And one great way to do that is through not forgetting that, every time you’ve shipped something, that’s impactful. Especially in Integrity, every time we put a product out there, we are helping to keep people safe.
• Give substantive support: People talk about mentorship a lot but for me, it’s more about sponsorship. It’s one thing to give great advice, but giving support is much more important. To actually take the extra step and leverage your network, your position, or your resources to help create opportunity for others and to pull them up alongside you is much more powerful than giving advice alone.
• Do what fuels your fire: I’m incredibly passionate about my role and the impact that integrity work can have on the world. I hope that my passion motivates those that I lead. I think it’s critical to show up fully every day and give 100% effort to your work as a leader. Your team is watching you and if they see your drive, it’ll inspire them too.
• Keep learning: Being open to new ideas and perspectives not only helps you grow as a person but also as an effective leader. I always have at least one nonfiction title relevant to my subject area open on my nightstand and closely follow work from academic leaders in the space.
• Listen: Being open and aware is crucial to being a true leader. It’s critical to be self-aware of yourself as a leader but also have a keen ear and eye open to the ecosystem of your organization and team. Don’t just observe, take the time to meet and truly listen to your team. Address their challenges, encourage potential, and motivate their ambition.

What advice would you give to other women leaders to help their team to thrive?

Invest in your team culture. When you have psychological safety within your team and when you have a positive culture, it’s a lot easier to retain and attract good talent. It also gives people space to make the mistakes necessary for growth and to grow outside the bounds of the position they came in for.

What advice would you give to other women leaders about the best way to manage a large team?

Similar to what I just mentioned — creating a positive culture is important but also supporting an open culture and empowering work environment creates truly dynamic and successful teams. An open culture gives your team the space to make the mistakes necessary for growth, and to grow outside the bounds of maybe the position they came in for originally. This expands the skillset of the team overall and makes for the conditions needed to innovate.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

While I was at LinkedIn, the VP of Trust, Equity and Privacy was Tanya Staples. She was absolutely fearless. I really admired that. She could address a room of 1000+ people during an all hands meeting, off-the-cuff, like it was nothing. While working with her, she could sense that public speaking made me uncomfortable but she could always tell when I had something to contribute. In such a natural and intentional way, she would very intentionally make space for me to share, asking for my opinions. Over time this helped me build up that mental muscle of breaking in on a conversation with execs to advocate for myself and speak my mind. I could tell a million different stories of how Tanya shaped the way I show up everyday as a leader now — I owe her a debt of gratitude I’m not sure I could ever repay!

How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?

I hope that the work of every team I’ve been on has helped make the world a better place. That’s

why trust, security, and privacy professionals do the work we do. It goes back to what we were talking about earlier with Slack, we want to make your working life better. When you spend so much of your life at work, a safe, trust-worthy digital workplace really matters. No platform is perfect. But I think trying to make every product I’m working on a little bit more equitable, a little bit more secure, a little more accessible will add up over time to have a bigger impact for people, companies and the industry at large.

You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

I’d expect most people think about digital safety as an issue reserved for social media. It’s not. It’s important that anyone who brings people together online or any product that brings people together online is thinking about the safety of its users. It’s their responsibility to make fair and well-reasoned decisions. Just because you work on a B2B product doesn’t mean you don’t have a responsibility for the safety, security, and privacy of your users. You need to take that seriously and put time and resources behind it.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

When I was a little kid, my mom used to love saying to us, “if you’re not living on the edge you’re taking up too much space.” In terms of living on the edge, I don’t know that my life is that crazy or controversial. I’m a tech employee! But I think I work on those issues on the edge. I’m constantly thinking about things like, “How do we keep children safe online?”, “How do we stop abuse?”, “How do we prevent scams?”,“How do we keep people safe?”

We are very blessed that very prominent leaders read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them :-)

Daphne Keller or Evelyn Douek. They’re both women who are doing incredibly compelling work in trying to untangle the spaghetti that is global content, speech, and intermediary liability regulation, and the impact it is having on the way we interact online. They’re two absolutely brilliant women who now teach at Stanford Law, which is frustrating, because if I had just gone to law school six years later, I probably would have already had lunch with them!

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.