Exploring Digital AWS Leadership
Based on an episode with Walyce Phillip 🇧🇷
Welcome to Latinx in Power, a podcast aiming to help to demystify tech, the way we do that is by interviewing Latinx leaders all over the world to hear their perspective and insights.
We talked with Walyce Phillip (she/her) is a leader in digital media products and operations with extensive program management experience. She excels in driving product strategy by setting priorities and guiding products through the execution cycle, with a focus on enhancing customer experience and engagement.
In this episode, we’ll uncover the key milestones in Walyce’s career and how technical documentation has shaped her journey. We’ll explore her experiences crafting a course with Udacity and delve into the significance of mentorship in her career, as well as how she balances professional responsibilities with her commitment to mentoring and community involvement.
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What does it mean to be a Latina for you?
I’m a first-generation Brazilian American. I grew up in a typical Brazilian family. But something unique about my family was that I grew up in a church community in Miami, Florida, and we had Spanish language services and congregants from all over Latin America and the Caribbean.
By the way, my parents, my siblings, and I were all fluent in Spanish, English, and Portuguese. We’re a trilingual family because of that. I’ve always felt connected to the Latinx community from being steeped in all these different cultures.
Seeing myself as a Latina, that identity became much stronger when I actually moved to New York City after college from Miami. For the first time ever in New York, I had the experience of feeling othered, and being a token, that token Latina in the workforce, which wasn’t great.
Instead of hiding my multicultural background, I just owned it. I make it a point to contribute to the greater Brazilian and Latino communities, and I see that as a strength.
What drives you personally and professionally?
I remember when I was at Miami Dade Community College as a young teenager. I went to a counselor to ask about how I could transfer to an Ivy League university. So you go to community college, you get your AA, your first 60 credits, and then you transfer to get your undergraduate degree. She quickly glanced at my thin transcript and looked at me, saying, “You would never be accepted by those schools. Don’t even try to apply.” And I kind of believed her.
I had no idea at that time what I brought to the table, but I brought a lot to the table. I had a radio show when I was a teenager. I learned how to manage the soundboard and the mixer. Before podcasts were a thing, I was the editor of my college paper. I volunteered in my community, sang in choir, and tutored immigrant kids. All of this before the age of 18. I just didn’t know how to tell that story. But I did manage to transfer to a good school. I went to the University of Miami. Go journalism.
Through that career, I got better at asking questions and felt allowed to practice my curiosity. The Latinx community struggles with economic inequality and lack of representation in careers. A big question for me was, why is it that my parents and a lot of Latinos in the community work so hard but struggle to achieve economic stability or upward mobility? Recently, because I had to look into this, I learned that the Latinx community struggles with economic inequality and lack of representation in careers that are in demand.
On average, Latin Americans in the US make about seventy-three cents to every dollar that a white non-Hispanic makes. And that number goes even lower for women. I hope that’s not your case, but it’s about fifty-two cents to every dollar.
Now, we could try to go into higher earning jobs that pay more money, like in the tech field, but I saw this Pew research study in 2022 that found that Hispanic workers make up about 17% of the labor force, but we make up about only 8% of STEM roles, jobs that are out there.
I have always been curious about tech, and eventually, I made my transition into this career, into this field. It took reporting on people in the field to see that possibility for me. And what drives me now is I refuse to let personal or systemic obstacles stop me from learning, growing, and pursuing my dreams.
Women overcome those obstacles, too, and help them tell their stories. And access to the resources, not just to the higher salaries, but the skills that are in demand so that we can negotiate salaries and ask for more money.
How has technical documentation influenced your learning and professional journey?
Technical writers do tend to be introverted as well. Currently, I work on the AWS team that produces technical documentation for 200 plus services across AWS. This information is available online for free on our website, AWS docs, and it’s produced by hundreds of technical writers that are amazing people that I work with.
We also have decision guides for more business-making decisions that are out there trying to find the right solutions for a challenge or use case. We have a getting started resource center, a code examples library which developers really get into, and so many more resources.
It wasn’t until I joined AWS and this team that I really got to see how much I love working with technical writers. The technical effort that goes into giving customers accurate, useful, authoritative information. Now, prior to that, how documentation affected me personally. When I was studying journalism at the University of Miami, two of my favorite professors said something that has stayed with me forever. Our web development professor, he’s Brazilian by the way, said that the most valuable thing he could teach us was how to learn.
Then our media law professor said, most of you in this classroom will find yourselves in jobs that don’t currently exist. And that blew my mind. So while working as a journalist, I was always trying to learn new technology, getting my hands in there, reading documentation, watching videos, trying out code. And it gave me some cool opportunities to implement and develop some CRMs, content management tools, some SMS tools, some front-end sites, and micro sites that I got to build.
I didn’t really see myself as a tech person until the media industry laid me off. I know a lot of people are going through that right now, so I feel for you. I had to ask myself, what else got me excited. And that’s when the light bulb went off. I wanted to help build the technology that powers content creation, publishing, distribution, help communication, collaboration.
Even with all this information at my fingertips to learn what I wanted to learn, I still felt that I had two gaps in my skills and knowledge. The first one was making business-savvy, strategic decisions about what technology you’re going to use and why. And the second one was, well, how do you execute that strategy?
I went back to school. I graduated from Columbia University with an executive master’s in technology management and I got certified in project management with the PMI. Soon after that, I started working at Amazon. Ah yeah, the documentation kind of followed me through that journey, from beginning to end.
You created a digital project management course on Udacity. Can you share more about this experience?
For those of you listening, available now on Udacity, it’s an edtech platform, is my digital project management nanodegree. Udacity actually trademarked that term nanodegree. And it’s basically a set of two courses and a final project all about digital project management.
Building that nanodegree was really amazing. I worked with a curriculum designer, so someone with an education background, a program manager, video producer, graphic designer, and researchers. Working with the researchers, we identified our target audience and kind of narrowed down what were the most in-demand skills and careers, the demographics, and sort of realized that with my experience and the course material, I could focus on people in the digital marketing, digital media, and software development spaces.
That’s kind of who I’m mostly talking to throughout the course. I co-designed the curriculum, created the course content, recorded videos, selected assistants to help me grade, and of course, I marketed the program. So it’s the whole go-to-market journey right there.
And definitely, a big takeaway from building the digital project management course on Udacity was the value of project management as a vehicle for execution in any industry. I’ve used it in every field that I’ve worked in, and we even used the principles of project management to execute that nanodegree in a timely manner.
I strongly believe that digital project management is a great entryway for people looking to transition into a technical field. Because not only can you use that skill set to negotiate, like we were talking earlier, for a better salary, but you can use project management to enhance your knowledge of any field.
So, for example, project managers have to coordinate subject matter experts on a particular project. By the end of that project, when you complete it, you now know more about that technology than you ever did before. So it’s a good learning mechanism as well.
How have mentors played a role in guiding your path? How do you approach mentorship yourself?
In my life, just thinking back, I didn’t know many people, let alone women, with careers in STEM. There were even some members in my community, a kind of conservative community, who believed in traditional gender roles. In my opinion, the consequences of some of that sometimes is not enough investment in educating girls in, quote unquote, boy majors.
For example, my friend’s brother took apart a computer, and everyone would say he would become an engineer, and he was really into that and into Sci-Fi shows and things like that. I messed around with my dad’s computer and the engineering board at the radio, but no one ever said to me that I could be a computer scientist.
There were a couple of moms in my church community who played a pivotal role. They weren’t formal mentors, but they showed me what mentoring could look like. One mom, she told me when I was about 15 years old that my writing was on a college level, and that’s when I enrolled at a community college through this program that helped cover tuition costs.
My best friend’s mom tutored me in math so that I could pass the college entrance exam. If it wasn’t for her, I don’t know how much algebra I would know right now. So, these moms put me on the right path, but I could have used some role models to further explore what I was capable of. Someone to say, hey, you could be a computer scientist.
Currently, I am a vice chair on a board of a wonderful nonprofit called Pineapple Women. It was founded a few years ago by a colleague of mine, Andrea Chavez. She’s Colombiana, a public school teacher. And we offer Latinas, ages 14 to 24, professional development and mentorship. A big reason why it’s important to reach these amigas of ours at that age is because we want to equip them with understanding and ability to articulate the skills that they have and its value in the market.
We do that because we’re working on their self-confidence so they can advocate for themselves, tell their story, pursue their dreams. So, if there’s anyone out there listening who would like to support Pineapple Women, visit our website.
Mentorship helped me to be able to build my self-confidence, to understand what kind of value I bring to the table in the workforce. And I am just passing that on to whatever students I work with. It does take being connected through your community, being connected to people, and not being afraid to say, hey, look at this paper I wrote, or, I’m thinking about going to this college. What do you think?
Then, as I mentioned before, sometimes people will tell you, don’t do it. That’s a bad idea. Don’t consider, or you can do it, you can’t make it. So it also takes a little bit of resilience on people’s end, but the people who love us and support us, they helped fuel that resilience.
How do you balance your professional responsibilities with your commitment to mentorship and community?
That’s a good question because you’ve recognized accurately that it can be tricky sometimes, but my community work feeds my professional development and vice versa. When I applied to be a mentor at the Intrepid Museum, I did that for a couple of years. The program director, in her interview, asked, why are you applying? I was so honest. I said, I have a selfish reason. And that made her laugh because I was being brutally honest. I said I wanted to practice leadership, and I believed that leading a group of students in a STEM project would be a good way of practicing that and building my career.
So as I learn something new, I pass it off to our students. When I learn something from those community experiences, I apply it at work, like how to collaborate with diverse people and have empathy. And teenage girls can really teach you to have empathy. So, of course, mentoring and volunteering does require some sacrifice and excellent time management.
I’ve learned to delegate tasks, which is very important, having clear goals and deadlines, time boxing your work. And currently, I’ve been loving using these AI tools like ChatGPT and Grammarly to help me produce materials and communicate clearly. They just put things together for me at a much faster rate so that I can do my Pineapple Women work, my mentoring work, a few hours on the weekend and don’t have to sacrifice too much time for it.
Mentoring and working in official programs inside our Pineapple Women or the Intrepid Museum was a wonderful resource. Some other nonprofits that I volunteered at, there is room to experiment, and it’s actually part of the mentorship. It is good for the younger people to see you say, I want to learn this thing. I don’t know what it is or how to do it. Let’s learn it together.
I was learning. I had been doing a lot of data analytics with web traffic at one job of mine, and I wanted to learn a little bit more about how to analyze the metrics and understand what it means. So I did a presentation to the students, this group of students that I was working with — they were high school girls in New York City — and they asked so many challenging questions about, wait a minute, you can get that kind of information on people? Asking questions about privacy and security, things that I had to implement in my work, like compliance and GDPR.
Then a few years later, the girls were already graduating high school. I was no longer with that particular group. I was someplace else. But one of these girls who watched that presentation messaged me on LinkedIn and said, I got into, I think it was Brown University. I decided that I’m going to study data science because of your presentation. It helped me refine my skills a bit at work, but it also resulted in this amazing career for a bright young woman who I think is going to be a leader for us in the future.
Which resource helped you in your journey that you want to share with us today?
I’m going to reiterate, get into documentation. So even if you’re not a computer scientist or an engineer, but you want to learn an AI tool or software, there is almost always official documentation by the company or the people who produce that thing. Get into that first, because it’s almost always free.
An empowering story that I read is in this amazing book by Dr. Rana El Kalubi. She’s an AI scientist and founder of Affectiva. She wrote a book called Girl Decoded. I’m going to read you the full title. This is long. So it’s, Girl Decoded: A Scientist’s Quest to Reclaim Our Humanity by Bringing Emotional Intelligence to Technology.
What I loved about reading this book is that she does have a religious upbringing, which there were some aspects of that that I kind of related to. She had been through war, had marital issues — so many things that I think most girls would be inspired by hearing. How is it that Dr. Kalubi was able to overcome that and all while building an amazing AI company called Affectiva? So, I love that book. Recommend it.
I also always try to encourage people to get with the community and learn with other women through one-on-one mentoring or attending conferences like Tech Up for Women. For those times that I didn’t have money to go, I would volunteer at the conferences to be able to get in for free and connect with affinity groups. I connect with Brazilian women inside of Amazon and also outside of the project management club, women in product events. It’s, I guess, the modern way of making new friends.
Then finally, I would be really impressed by anyone who got to this point in the podcast. They’ve listened to the whole thing. So if you are that person, DM me on LinkedIn. I got to know who you are. Follow me. Follow Pineapple Women on LinkedIn.
I want to mention that talking about the hurdles and obstacles, when I first speak to students about it, I was a little nervous to do that, especially mentioning my conservative religious background. I don’t want anyone to be offended because it was just my experience. It’s not everyone’s experience, but I learned to be confident in telling that story over time because it does no favors to other people of any age to sugarcoat things.
We have to talk about some of the challenges and struggles that we go through. And then, what did you do to overcome those struggles? So people can see that. Oh, that’s what you did. Well, I have that capacity. I have that capability. I can do that, too. So if money is the issue, I overcame that with higher education. If confidence is the issue, I overcame that.
Whatever it is. There’s so many aspects of our story that we may not realize will be relatable to students. So it’s a matter of getting it out there, telling people what you went through, and letting them tell you whether or not they relate. And you’ll be surprised. The students are not shy to come up to you and say something or ask a question about it.
I hope you enjoyed the podcast. We will have more interviews with amazing Latinx and Caribbean leaders the first Tuesday of every 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.
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Additional Reading Mentioned in the Interview
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