Making Space for Others
Based on an episode with Valerie Villarreal 🇲🇽
Welcome to Latinx in Power, a podcast aiming to help to demystify tech, the way we do that is by interviewing Latinx and Caribbean leaders all over the world to hear their perspective and insights.
We talked with Valerie Villarreal, a Product Manager who has worked on the biggest social platforms of our time, Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat. As an intern at Amazon in 2011, she got her first taste of building and growing user products that scale to millions (and billions) of users globally.
Valerie came into Product from a non-traditional, non-technical background, starting her career in management consulting at McKinsey and Company, where she advised executives as her first job out of school.
She earned her MBA and her B.A. in Political Science from Stanford. Valerie is a Latinx in Power because she’s successful on paper, but more importantly, because she has worked to find her authentic voice in spaces where she was one of the few, the only, or didn’t feel she belonged.
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With my parents’ story. My dad immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico, along with nine siblings. He came from a road town, lived in a small house in East Los Angeles. He met my mom, and both of them live in the working class, paycheck to paycheck reality of the working poor. I remember as a kid, I had an awareness of survival and poverty since I was like five or six.
I remember the concept of rent and counting the dollars in my mom’s wallet to see if we would have enough money and helping her write letters to families to ask for money. I used to eat mustard sandwiches with no meat. I got free lunch at school and was a little bit bullied for it. I had a tough upbringing.
We lived in a small apartment. It was on a very busy highway, and I remember there were so many cars driving fast that people were run over in front of my house. It was very traumatic. I couldn’t really play outside as a kid, so I grew up being hungry, ashamed, and stressed, and I hated those feelings. That was also the greatest gift of a tough upbringing. It gave me an intense drive to get away to earn. The important point was when at the age of 10, I started to sell goods for money at the swap meet. I used to take my mom’s old makeup samples and sell them. The first time that I earned 100 bucks, I thought I was really powerful.
So that was the catapult for me to realize I had earning power. Then I could do that for my family and maybe for my community. That led to the leaps of getting into education and technology so that I could break away from that poverty.
Where did you find your voice?
My parents didn’t teach me to speak up, and in fact, they lived in fear. I remember being five years old and learning that my dad wasn’t a U.S. citizen. He wasn’t in a position to defend his rights in this country, and still really isn’t today even though he is a U.S. citizen.
My mom passed away. She worked long hours, she worked uncompensated overtime, and weekends, and didn’t get paid for that overtime, which is illegal. But my parents were both afraid to demand their rights as workers or with society really. I was the opposite just because I wanted to be different from them. I think all of us want to be different than our parents in some ways.
I remember finding my voice, actually in religious education. The teachings of some of the things that the nuns would tell me just didn’t feel right. Why can’t gay/lesbian people get married? Why can’t a woman become a priest? I asked all these questions and to some degree, I wasn’t totally respected, but the more that they pushed back, the louder that I got.
I learned how to speak up for myself, especially in high school. I got motivated to run for school president, and I was president for three years. That’s the first breeding ground where I learned to have a vision, bring people along, and try to disrupt the status quo so that other people who are oppressed wouldn’t be silent. I think it’s a service to society. It’s not that we’re just trying to make it better for ourselves. If we have a bunch of people that are silent, we’re missing out on other people’s ideas, other people’s richness, and it’s a shame that everyone’s voice isn’t heard.
What does it mean to you to be a Latina?
Being a Latina is an important part of my identity, but it’s not everything. I grew up in a largely Mexican-American community, most of the kids in my high school were first-generation American like me and spoke English mostly in school because our parents were immigrants. We didn’t know our identity. In college, I first started to have a real identity when I went to Stanford, which was predominantly white and also very international, that’s where I had a strong sense that these people were different from me. Who am I? It was only when I found people that were from a similar first-generation, Latino background that I really got to latch on to my identity because I needed to know where I fit.
I found a Chicano community at Stanford, which is like the Latino student group, it’s called M.E.Ch.A., but it’s like this Chicano student activism group. It’s where I found my first real sense of being a Chicana, which is how I would identify myself. That’s a term for Mexican Americans who grew up in the Southwest. It’s a bit of a regional term, and of course, that Latino identity has evolved. I respect all of the contributions of Latinos to society. Of course, I recognize the importance of the Shakiras, J Los, and all the passionate, loud Latina women out there, but I also have an identity as a mom, as a wife, as a progressive, as a yogi, and as a cat lover.
There are so many different labels, but I think in tech for me being a Latina means outspoken, passionate, hard-working, but oftentimes underestimated. I think Arlen Hamilton, the founder of Backstage Capital, has written a book about how underestimated women of color are as it relates to VC funding. While a dismal 0.2% of all venture capital goes to Black women, a mere 0.4% goes to Latinx women. I once pitched a startup for VC funding, and I got some traction but they wanted to pay me a ramen salary, and I couldn’t afford that because I wanted to have a family. I hadn’t gone this far to live in poverty again.
There are a lot of barriers to getting on with Latinx-backed founders. Latinas are not well represented in tech. We hold less than one or 2% of technical and leadership roles in our industry. That’s a problem. In addition, Latinxs in tech are poorly compensated. While the average woman in the U.S. makes 80 cents on the dollar of a man, that number drops to 61 cents for black women and 53 cents for every dollar for Latinas. So Latinas have to work twice as many hours in order to earn what her white male counterpart does. That is unfortunately the Latina story today, and it can’t be the story going forward.
You found your way into many hot companies in Silicon Valley. You worked at Amazon, Snapchat, Facebook, and Instagram. How did you find your way there and into the role of product management? Was that always your dream job?
This was not my dream job, I had no idea what this was because I had no exposure to it. You only know what you see, and I didn’t know anybody in tech. I was at Stanford when the biggest companies were coming to hire us, but I had no friends in computer science. How would I have known that technology existed? It wasn’t until a decade later in college my dream was actually to get into politics. I always wanted to be an advocate. I wrote my college senior thesis on critical science and corporate diversity. I advocated on campus and spent internships in Washington, DC working for a U.S. Senator, working for nonprofits.
I saw that those people that were working in politics or activism were either broke or living off of their parents. I couldn’t do either, because at that time I was still sending money to my mom to help her pay rent. Every week or month, she would call me, and we would negotiate how much money I could give or lend her. It was a tough situation so I had to earn money from day one.
I started focusing on how I could increase my earning potential like that 10-year old girl selling makeup. I didn’t know anyone in business, but I got involved in the undergrad business club. I was intimidated. I was the only Latina, but I forced myself to attend the corporate recruiting events that were big on campus.
I was lucky, I was at Stanford. Everyone wanted to recruit at that time, which is not necessarily the thing right now. I went to these events, and my Latinx friends mocked me. That was tough because they were like “you’re gonna be a sellout, you’re not helping the community,” but you need to put on the oxygen mask, take care of yourself first. I needed to provide for myself, my family so I was unapologetic about it, I was going into business.
I ended up joining the most exclusive consulting firm, McKinsey, partially because I was rejected by the others. It was good training to get into McKinsey. I transformed myself from a rough-around-the-edges, 21-year old, fresh out of college into this polished, corporate environment where you’re working with executives. I really enjoyed that. It was great exposure. I had to learn how to understand business models, finance and strategy, marketing, organization, and design. It was a boot camp for business.
I finally found the ideal role of the product manager. I think it’s because they focus on what is a user problem, what is a customer problem, and work with everyone who has the skills to build a solution. It’s the bridge between engineers, data scientists, and designers, to make the product come to life. There are a lot of qualities associated with being a Latina that made me well suited to be a product manager, for example, empathy and passion for users. Latinx are very community-oriented, we think about the user’s pain, their experience, how the system fails them, and how we make it better? How do we move the chess pieces in order to advance our objective subject to constraints? That’s product management, and that is what Latinx do best, then the drive and hustle. I mean nobody gets it done like immigrants. We have the adversity and resilience muscle to turn a no into a yes and make something happen despite the odds, to shoot for moon shots.
That’s how I came into product. I specifically focus on a type of product called growth, which is how do you acquire new users, how do you get them to download your app, how do you get them to activate to unlock the best product benefits of the product, and then how do you get them to retain? How do they keep finding value over and over again? It’s easy to launch an app, to have people downloaded, but it’s really hard to get it to stick. That requires finding what the industry calls a product-market fit which is how do you find the right pain point and the right solution that continues to add value over time?
So few products hit that mark. I’ve been lucky to work and learn from platforms that have that product-market fit and help them scale to the next level. This can be expanding to new international markets, expanding to new demographics, or helping users learn and engage with new features that will help them continue to find value in the product. That’s my profession now, and that’s my journey.
Being an underrepresented Latina gives me the superpower of empathy to connect with users who feel isolated, who feel left out, who feel they don’t get it, or that the product doesn’t get them. I love to help everyone feel like the product was built for them. That’s my desire, and that’s actually the personalization that all businesses want. I have that ability to see around the corner, to anticipate where the user is, and then work with my team to try to get as close as possible to that expectation and exceed it.
We know that culture innovates from the edges of society. Culture innovates from the youth culture, from immigrants culture, and from people that are outside of the core box. I love seeing our products used by real-world people on the street. I remember when I was working at Snapchat on new lenses. Some people call them face filters. The rainbow poo the Snapchat lens was very popular then. I would see kids on the street using it, and I was so excited. Then I would like to go to the bar, I would literally go up to strangers at the bar while I was waiting for my drink, and I would say, “have you tried the Snapchat lens”? I would make them download it, so I could see the delight on their face. I was so passionate about it.
At the same time, being a Latina in tech a lot of time involves working with largely male-dominated engineering teams. It’s pitching your ideas to largely white-male-dominated executives to find support for your idea, and sometimes it feels like a battle to defend myself and my ideas and to do my job, but it’s also exhilarating to be one of the few representing. If I’m not there, who is going to be there to ask the tough questions. That is my calling.
What’s your favorite thing about your experiences in tech?
I think it is calling out the user who’s left out, the user that others haven’t thought about because everyone’s focused on the power user of today. I’m thinking about the power user of tomorrow. I feel like I have a special capability to connect with them and figure out what is keeping them from being included in our service. What I hope to do over the next few years is really integrate inclusive thinking into part of development. We’re not there yet. But that’s a good practice for which I want to build muscle.
In your article about Inclusion and Diversity on LinkedIn. You wrote that even companies who are horrendous on diverse representation can still have inclusive managers and colleagues.
Let’s break this area down because there’s so much talk and hype around diversity and inclusion. I just want to explain it in really concrete, no-BS terms. For me, diversity is, you think of the pie chart, who’s represented in the company, how many of your engineers are diverse, how many of your team is diverse and how many of leadership is diverse? The second part is inclusion. For all those people that are on that pie chart, do they feel they belong? Are they supported? Do they stick around?
We talk about the retention curve, in product management, it’s people that churn out. What is the churn-out rate for diverse employees in this industry, or do they walk away? And finally, there is equity. Everyone talks about equity. What does that mean for me? It means getting paid your fair share, and it’s about being leveled fairly? Are you awarded competitively? Are you evaluated fairly without bias? Those are the three components of diversity inclusion and equity that I would like to start as a ground context for a conversation.
You talked about inclusivity and diversity being the job of everyone in the company not just the managers and diversity committees. Can you share with us your thoughts about what people can do to help to create a more inclusive environment?
This concept coined an inclusive mindset. It’s a play on the growth mindset, which is based on research by Carol Dweck out of Stanford. It’s very hyped up right now. Everyone has a growth mindset. Your capabilities are not innate, you have to reinvent yourself to flex and build new muscles through perseverance and practice. I think inclusion is the same way. It isn’t innate, no one is born able to understand others.
I didn’t really have a manager or a senior leader in my organization who shared my Latina identity, but there were a couple of people that helped me level up. I remember in my first job, there was a senior partner at McKinsey, and he was very traditional, an older white guy who looked the part of an executive. In my first performance review, he said, “Valerie, you’re really different than everyone else here, but you could be a partner at this firm, and you would be incredible because your customers would love you and you would be great at developing business.” This was a boost to my confidence. I am a short person, and I stood like a foot taller that day. That was an inclusive mindset.
There’s also my undergrad professor from one of my first college classes. I was super intimidated because I was a first-gen kid, I went to a not-so-great high school, and I was with all these other kids who had gone to fancy prep schools. I felt my essays weren’t as good as theirs. The professor saw that and created time in his weekly office hours to give me extra feedback and validate me. I needed that. He gave his time and that was having an inclusive mindset.
Finally, here’s another example of how you can be inclusive despite the company culture. I was in a different company where the company culture was rough for a woman, rough for a Latina. There was one colleague, a white guy actually, he saw that in meetings I was sometimes undermined or overlooked. He took the time to listen to me, and then eventually defended my work when my manager didn’t.
These are examples of white male allies. They were very powerful micro-actions. For me, it’s about allies showing up and taking micro-actions versus downplaying the microaggressions, and that’s the spirit that I want to promote.
Another example is people who are really insecure and awkward to talk about diversity and inclusion. I had one teammate who is really thoughtful, powerful, and influential on so many other projects. When I brought up some of these ideas and proposals, they froze. They are so afraid, they get petrified, and that’s not helpful for them or for the organization. To claim that we’re in a colorblind society, that everyone’s the same and there are no issues, that’s a state of denial, which is not helpful. Of course, we don’t need to talk about all the microaggressions or difficult things that come up if we don’t have a safe space to talk about them.
Is there one quote you love to live by?
The mantra that I’m coming up with is, “don’t ask where you are really from”. Instead, ask us, “where are you going”? I carry a good amount of privilege. I’m educated. I’m a light-skinned Latina. I’m mixed race, but as soon as someone sees my last name or they hear my accent, at least a quarter or half of the time in Silicon Valley, and pretty much anywhere I go, I get asked, so where are you really from? I say, “I’m from LA, that’s where I grew up.” They’re, “No, no, you can’t be, but really where are you from”? I answer with, “I’m American, I have papers, I can show you.”
This question triggers my insecurities so deeply back to when I was a five-year-old girl who was worried about my dad’s citizenship status. There’s an implicit assertion that where my family’s from is the most defining element of my identity, and it’s important, it’s my story, but that’s a lot of baggage that’s holding people back. The ideal is instead of asking, “Where are you from,” or assuming that you’re different, ask “where are you going”? I think that is a unifying question, it’s a forward-looking question, it’s an opportunity question, it’s about what your vision is. Where are you going is a much more open-ended question versus the one that’s unintentionally triggering.
Someone on your LinkedIn mentioned that you get things done, and I think this is an amazing quality to have. What recommendation would you give to someone to craft this mindset or even get more things done?
I think this is super important because there are so few of us, and because we really have to prove ourselves. There is an implicit expectation that we need to be better than our mainstream counterparts. The perceptions are stacked against us. The perception that I’ve heard from colleagues or back in college is that you only got here because you’re Latina, because of affirmative action, and that gives me an extra drive to constantly prove that I’m adding value.
Getting stuff done is about making sure that my performance review or my track record of outcomes is undeniable. So if there’s any bias in the system, I can defend myself. I remember preparing for performance reviews when I was young in my career. I had summaries of impact, growth accomplishment, milestone metrics, wins, all those things. I think without those, I would feel I don’t have any armor to defend myself.
It’s really important for any of you, Latinx, who wants to gain influence and be respected, to constantly keep a scoreboard of what you have achieved lately, what you’re achieving this week, this month, this half. I don’t define my personal worth by these professional accomplishments, but I think it does define my commercial worth. It does define my financial earning, and as a provider for my family, that matters.
We can’t just hope that we will be liked and rewarded for that. It’s also important to keep in mind that you can have certain periods of time to relax and not just think about getting things done. Grinding from a young age, working for money since I was 10, there have been moments of burnout. You’re not going to be good to the world if you’re not good to yourself.
There have been a lot of philosophers, spiritual teachers, and researchers that show that you need moments of stillness, of silence and inaction, of boredom, of rest, of occasional downtime, of unplugging in order to have creative, efficient, mental health and productivity. So I don’t want to be one of those people that romanticizes hustle at all costs.
What has been your proudest moment, personally or professionally?
I think that’s a good segue from what we were just talking about and what matters in life. The pride comes not with what I’ve achieved, but what I overcame. I remember surviving a pre-cancerous health scare when I was a teenager. I was dealt a tough blow of infertility, which is something that we don’t talk about in our community much. There’s a lot with that, but through great sacrifice and perseverance, I was eventually able to become a mom, and becoming a mom is my proudest milestone. Our son is now two years old, he’s a strong boy. We named him Benito in honor of the first president of Mexico, who was a poor, indigenous outsider, and the great Aztec Emperor. My son is our pride and joy, and that’s what matters in life.
I survived a lot of mental health challenges like anxiety, depression, and the PTSD of growing up in a hard immigrant life. It’s taboo in our culture to talk about some of these things. It’s just like, pray about it, don’t talk about it, don’t get professional help, don’t get medication, don’t do yoga. There are a lot of unhealthy taboos around mental health in the Latinx community. I’ve learned various spiritual, holistic healing, and meditation practices in order to feel whole again, and I’m really proud of not being afraid to talk about it. Hopefully, that helps one more person to open up and ask for help.
What tips would you like to share with other Latinx around the globe, especially the first-generation immigrants?
A couple of things we don’t know, we don’t see. No one has given us an apprentice guidebook. Unfortunately, a lot of us didn’t grow up around business people, around technologists, around professionals. These are some of the tips that I’ve learned in my experience that I hope to pass along. First, whatever you’re trying to do in your profession or your educational career, understand the decision-makers, the rules of the game. I see it almost like chess pieces.
If you want to get a job, or you want to move ahead, or you want to get accepted to a program, understand who’s deciding, who can be allies and sponsors to help move the chess pieces for you, because you may only be a pawn. I’ve felt that way many times. You need a knight or a bishop to help advocate for you.
Second, is the give and take of gaining political capital. This applies in the workplace or anywhere really in relationships, but you want to have the right balance of putting points on the board and adding value. Then the give and take of using that capital for things that you want to achieve. When I join a new job, I’m keen to make some quick wins, to show that I can advance the business objectives, and then when the moment comes for me speak up and advocate for things like inclusion or things that I feel are personally important, I have some leverage. If I go too far on that spectrum, I have to go back and double down on the business goals. It’s like chips in a casino.
The last piece is talking about money and focusing on money. There are a lot of taboos when talking about money, whether you’re a woman, whether you’re a person of color. Life is about love and family, but money is important too. So is talking about compensation and your goals with your manager and your teams I try to figure out if I am paid fairly? There are a lot of websites to help with that too. One is called LevelFYI, which gives pay grade compensation so you can have some data points to talk about money. Know where you’re going if you don’t have a safety net, you’ve got to think about retirement. How much money do I need when I retire, and how do I work backward from that? That’s like the financial education that is going to prevent us from having to work into our late 70s. Those are things that no one has taught me, but at 35, I’m just now starting to focus on.
You often talk about advocating within tech, and also about surviving the trauma of the immigrant experience, racism, and poverty in the U.S. How do you see the contrast of raising a child in the privileged Silicon Valley?
I think about it all the time. We’re in Palo Alto right now in a house that has a yard. Before the pandemic, I had some foresight and luck to get my son a swing set, a trampoline, a mini basketball hoop, a soccer ball, a big library of books, all of the things I didn’t have as a kid. I remember having one ball that I used to throw against the wall, and that’s how I spent my youth.
We’re raising a child that’s going to be more privileged than we were. He’s young, he’s just two years old, but as he gets older, a wise spiritual teacher once told me “don’t pray for an easy life, pray for strength and resilience for your child.” I think that’s right, I don’t want to be necessarily a tiger mother that says, okay, you need to go to Stanford as I did, you need to have a GPA like this, you need to study coding and math as a four-year-old. I see myself as what I’m calling a lion mother. For me, I value the ability to hunt, the ability to have pride, the ability to be aggressive and wrestle with others in order to survive. As we’re now in 2020, that generation is going to have immense challenges that nobody knows how to solve like climate change, economic disruption, migration patterns, social strife, public debt, there’s so much. I want my kid to be a survivor, I don’t want a kid who’s only an achiever.
I want to finalize this episode, first by thanking you. And I also want to finalize with kindness. How important is it to be a positive influence for your stakeholders and team?
I will admit that sometimes I’ve failed at this, to some degree, before I talked about what works, and it’s not that I’m a mean person, but I think especially with the pandemic and working from home, sometimes we don’t have a lot of patience, and we want to be very efficient, very transactional. There is a project to get done. You are working on it and not being very relationship-oriented. Just being efficient, especially with the work chat at the beginning of the pandemic, I was over-reliant on being task-oriented.
I think now we need to be the opposite because there’s so much going on between the fires that we’re having, not having air quality, not being able to take care of ourselves and see our family and friends it’s a very hard time. For me what kindness means is taking an interest in what is most important to that person, and being present for that. Even if you can’t necessarily do anything about it, I’ve tried to have more conversations that are relational to say what’s important to you right now. Is it getting promoted? Is it being less lonely? Is it finding meaning? Is it being closer to your family? Is it getting a puppy? Is it finding peace?
I think kindness is a curiosity in the other person for who they are and just being there for them. 2020 has taught us that life is short, so we should all be asking what matters and telling each other what that we can work towards if there’s no tomorrow. I’ll just close by acknowledging that and the time that we’re in, we’ve learned a lot from the Black Lives Matter movement this year and a lot around confronting the status quo, the anti-black, racism in our own community, listening to our Afro Latino voices, knowing the unique challenge of the bias and the harm against our black friends and community members so being there for them.
We’re also stepping into Latino Hispanic Heritage Month, when people, companies will try to throw salsa parties and toggle mixers, but more importantly, is a time to talk about the real issues of where we are as a community; how we’re doing right now with COVID, economic harm, and equity; and then also the vast potential that the growing Latinx community brings in the future. As a young population with huge economic power, we have something to be aware of and to celebrate.
I hope you enjoyed the podcast. We will have more interviews with amazing Latinx leaders every first Tuesday of the month. Check out our website Latinx in Power to hear more. Don’t forget to share comments and feedback, always with kindness. See you soon.
Additional Reading Mentioned in the Interview
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