Quorum Founder Jackie DeJesse on Using Empathy as a Product Manager & Entrepreneur
If you look at Jackie DeJesse’s CV, you’ll see someone at the top of her game. She’s held product roles at several successful tech companies and is currently serving as a product manager for Google. On top of that, she recently started a side venture, Quorum (more on that later!).
Below, we explain how Jackie fell into product management and break down her thoughts on empathy, female role models, and the power of shared experiences.
On discovering product management
Jackie left college like many of us did, “I graduated without really knowing what I was going to do.” Armed with an entrepreneurial spirit and a degree in photography and biological sciences from the University of Southern California, she launched her own business as a photographer working with several startups in Silicon Valley.
Eventually, one of her freelance gigs turned into a full-time job. “This one company was on a mission to create a visual search engine for food.” Think: an Instagram specifically for foodies and restaurateurs. “I began working for them as a photographer, helping them develop their brand and their visual guides and was eventually hired on full time,” she says.
As the director of photography, Jackie had a unique perspective: She, like the users, was interacting with the platform every day. “It was through my work as a photographer with them that I realized, OK, these tools they’re giving to their photographers aren’t working.” Naturally, she went into problem-solving mode. “I just started brainstorming different user flows, asking ‘How can we improve this, how can we make this easier?’”
Having a bad user interface wasn’t just making life more difficult for the photographers, “it was also costing us money,” Jackie explains. “The more time the photographers had to spend navigating our content management system, the higher our costs were per shoot. It just wasn’t going to be scalable.” Working in tandem with the company’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO), they developed a solution that decreased the amount of time it took for photographers to manage their content on the platform by hours.
It wasn’t until the CTO approached her about joining his team as a product manager that Jackie ever considered going into a product role. “When I was at USC, I didn’t even know what product management was. It wasn’t something that was taught or even thought of when I went to the career office for guidance.”
Jackie began reading books on product management, going to meetups in the Bay Area, and getting exposure to the product side of business. “Because I was working at a very small startup, I had the opportunity to try things out. That’s really where I got my feet wet.” After moving to New York, her career as a product manager took off.
“The easier it is for you to connect with people, I think the more successful you can be as a PM.”
According to Jackie, the soft skills she had going into product management are a large part of what made the role such a good fit. “It’s the same set of questions regardless of whether your user is an elderly parent or a child — It’s all in understanding how folks operate and what motivates them.” But how do you crack that code? Empathy. “Something that has worked well for me is being able to empathize and build those human connections,” Jackie says. “The easier it is for you to connect with people, I think the more successful you can be as a PM.”
On strong women, being raised by them, and becoming one
Jackie believes her success is a result of having strong female role models. “I grew up surrounded by very, very strong women, who have seen many challenges throughout their personal and professional lives.” She continues, “I always felt that I could trust them to be there — they have enabled me to come into my own and feel confident in myself as an individual while being mindful of maintaining some sense of vulnerability.” Jackie has been particularly influenced by her grandmother, Consuelo.
Consuelo was raised by a single mother in Peru in the 1920s. As the eldest daughter, she took on a maternal role at a young age. As Jackie explains, “She was the right-hand woman to my great-grandmother, whether it was helping with the accounting of the shop that she ran or making sure her siblings were okay.”
Throughout her life, Consuelo continued to make sure her family was taken care of. “Before moving to the United States with my grandfather, she saved up enough money from her work at the British Consulate to build a house for her family in Peru so that they would never be homeless.” Eventually, Consuelo was able to reunite with her mother and siblings in the U.S., standing by them through the struggles of immigration.
As Jackie grew up, she learned more about her grandmother’s life. “She wanted to open a tea shop and a Parillada, but she dedicated so much time to running my grandfather’s business and raising her family, her dream never came to fruition.” However, Consuelo selflessness was not in vain. “Her love and stability to her family enabled us to become independent women and go after our own dreams.”
On starting Quorum and embracing shared experiences
Jackie started her latest business venture, Quorum, a candle company, as an ode to her grandmother. “Each of these candles has a theme that groups together a bunch of different stories from women that are meant to be shared,” she says.
“With women as 51 percent of the U.S. population, and 50 percent of the entire world, we have quorum, we have the power to collectively change the way our societies are run.”
“Quorum means the representation necessary to make a decision,” Jackie explains. She wanted a name that reflected the company’s underlying mission: “At the heart of Quorum is this desire and this need to reclaim power. With women as 51 percent of the U.S. population, and 50 percent of the entire world, we have quorum, we have the power to collectively change the way our societies are run.”
Quorum’s candles, which are currently in the testing phase, will be phthalate and paraben-free and made with scented coconut soy wax. While the candles are not yet in full production, Jackie says they will feature artwork from female artists.
Jackie put a lot of thought into choosing candles as her product. “I wanted something physical that people could hold onto.” These aren’t your usual pastel-colored candles either. “Design-wise, these candles are loud, they’re making their presence known,” she explains. “It all ties back to Quorum’s mission that these are things to talk about. By having that physical object in the room, I hope it will inspire conversation.”
While Quorum is starting by highlighting women’s stories, Jackie thinks its mission is universal. “Quorum, I think, has the potential to be something that can support anyone who is underrepresented.” When explaining who these candles are made for, she continues, “You don’t have to be a woman; you can identify in a lot of different ways — there are a lot of people who are disenfranchised with our current power structure.”
There is power in numbers. “We all have these stories. We all have these experiences,” she says. “The more that we can share, the more that we can get validation from one another, the more we can reclaim that power.”
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