Meet our newest Actionite, Tramale Turner

From the Keyboard of ActionIQ, featuring the Title Gentleman, Tramale Turner, SVP of Engineering

It’s been a month since we welcomed our new SVP of Engineering, Tramale Turner and Actionites had the chance to get to know our new leader via a Slack AMA (Ask Me Anything). Here’s what we learned.

Tramale kicked off the Slack #ama with a some data on his background:

• I was born and raised in Detroit, MI (where’s his Mitten Army at?) until I left for university at the ripe old age of 16. A cool fun-fact about my high school is that it adopted a university-like pedagogical approach where students had to choose a major and take core courses in that major to graduate. My major was Computer Programming.
• I have many interests, and a few of them include cinema, art, travel, food, literature, technology (go figure) and music. One of my first contributions to ActionIQ Slack was #music-makers channel.
• I studied Computer Science and Engineering at PENN before dropping out at 19 to live and work in Japan. I’ve worked in Japan, Canada, Germany, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and South Africa. Computer Scientists will see the TSP in my travails.
• LinkedIn will show you all of the places I have worked, and — fun fact — if you play a Nintendo Switch and have a Nintendo Network Account or have bought something from the eShop, then that’s my fault. Sorry. :)
• I currently live in Brooklyn, NY, and love it. I have a library card, and I am not afraid to use it.

As for the questions, here are a few of our favorites:

What’s the advice would you give to someone starting out?

For folks just starting out I often like to remind them that there are many things that your environment can challenge you on, and you can lose a lot. You can lose your job, your faith, your confidence, even your reputation. Still, the one thing you can never lose is what you know — what you’ve learned. Always be learning, always keep growing.

What do you look for in an adventure?

Always a traveler, never a tourist. Pretty sure that’s paraphrasing something by the late Anthony Bourdain (RIP). I have mentioned being a flaneur a few times herein, and that’s how I find my happy place. Immersion is the best way to quickly acclimate. Change can be high-friction and painful. One of the best pieces of advice l have heard, which may sound counterintuitive at first, is to disappoint people at a rate they can absorb. The true meaning being that you can’t make everyone happy all the time, and attempting to do so is a failure mode. You also don’t want to perturb everyone simultaneously. You need to optimize for the best possible outcomes whilst realizing not everyone may be initially happy, but if your results are positively impactful, they’ll hopefully eventually come around.

Of all the places you’ve lived, where had the best food?

Without a doubt Japan. Japan and Singapore both have meals that I remember every single detail of. Hong Kong is a close third. Still, my personal bias makes Japan win out every time.

Having lived and worked in such diverse cultures, how do you think this influenced your approach to work (or life in general)?

I am thankful for the many opportunities I have had to date. I feel humbled by the things I’ve been able to see, but I also feel inspired by what I know to be some axiomatic truths about the world…

• We are all very much alike under the surface. We’re just trying to exist and create a reasonable existence for those most important to us, and…
• We are also very different, and it’s important to acknowledge and celebrate our differences. We should try to understand another’s perspective — not in an attempt to be complicit, but more for the opportunity to be cohesive.

Yes, it’s an oxymoron, and that’s the beauty of life. The complexities and complications are what make it worth living. It separates the mundane from the absolutely extraordinary.

What’s the best advice you’ve received?

I have been lucky enough to learn a lot of lessons early on, but one thing I believe I’d share with my younger self is to be even more of a risk taker with regards to opportunities. There were several times in my life where I could have had outsized personal gain if I had more risk tolerance (I know this sounds silly given some of my background, but believe it or not I am quite conservative when it comes to my job and location selection.)

We cannot wait for all that’s ahead for AIQ with Tramale on the team!

Tramale comes to ActionIQ with a passion for seeing outsized outcomes driven through quality software delivery, most recently as CTO of TaxBit. You can follow Tramale on LinkedIn here.

ActionIQ is a leader in the massive and fast growing category of Customer Data Platforms (CDP). Our product brings order to customer experience (CX) chaos. ActionIQ’s CX Hub empowers everyone to be a CX champion by giving business teams the freedom to explore and take action on customer data, while helping technical teams regain control of where data lives and how it is used. We are backed by top-tier VCs Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, and March Capital. Enterprise brands such as Autodesk, Bloomberg, The Washington Post, Hertz, Atlassian and many more use our CX Hub to achieve growth through extraordinary customer experiences.

Learn more at https://www.actioniq.com/

Read our product blog at https://www.actioniq.com/blog/

Explore our career openings at https://www.actioniq.com/careers/

Want to get in touch? Contact us: https://www.actioniq.com/contact-us/