Get to Know: Suzanne Fei, Engineering Manager
Since Suzanne Fei joined Thumbtack in November 2015, she’s helped grow the fledgling Customer Experience team (formerly the Project Completion Experience team) from a scrappy group of four to a high-impact team of twenty-plus. In the process, Suzanne — who grew up in France and holds advanced degrees in finance, statistics, and economics — transitioned from the role of individual contributor to engineering team leader. Today she manages a team of five, putting her problem-solving skills to use in helping each team member reach their potential. Here’s what Suzanne told us about why she chose Thumbtack, what she’s learned since joining, and why she loves Thumback’s company culture.
What does Thumbtack do, and what do you do at Thumbtack?
Thumbtack enables everyone to easily find and hire the professionals they need, be it a piano teacher, plumber, or wedding caterer. We also help countless entrepreneurs find the clients they need to grow their business at the pace they want.
I’m an engineering manager on the Customer Experience team, which focuses on making it easier for customers to use Thumbtack to find local pros. When I joined Thumbtack, the company was just starting to put engineers on this new problem of polishing the customer experience and there were a lot of exciting opportunities to break ground as a member of the team. I had the opportunity to pick from a handful of teams to join, and I’m definitely glad I chose this one.
What were you were doing before joining Thumbtack?
I grew up in France and received degrees in Statistics, Economics and Finance from European universities. When I finished my studies, my plan was to take a post-graduate position at the European Central Bank. Instead, I decided to come to Silicon Valley and transitioned from economics into tech. The first company I worked for here was very small, and I started by applying my statistics knowledge to data analytics and data science. On the data team we did a lot of our own coding and built our own data pipeline. Over time I became more and more interested in how the data was stored and processed, and how to build out the backend to support data-driven products.
What made you decide to join Thumbtack?
It was two things, really — the mission and the people. I love Thumbtack’s mission of making the local services market more transparent, and helping skilled professionals establish and grow their business. And I continue to be impressed every day by the humble, down-to-earth, open leadership team here, as well as the wonderful, smart team of engineers I get to work with every day.
How has the Customer Experience Team changed since you joined in 2015?
I was one of the first two engineers on the Customer Experience team — which was called the Project Completion Experience team at the time — and we were joined by a new PM and designer a couple of months later. It was a really fun time, just the four of us, and it’s been just as exhilarating to watch how the team has grown; there are over twenty of us now across different functions like engineering, design, analytics, user research and more.
“At Thumbtack, we invest a lot into tools that make life easier for developers.”
Engineering at Thumbtack as a whole has also grown, and we’re working hard to tackle each new challenge as it comes up. From a technical perspective, we invest a lot into tools that make life easier for developers. For example, when I first joined we were still doing manual deployments to production. Last year we successfully migrated to continuous deployment, which allows us to push code out automatically at an ever-faster pace and volume. Right now we’re transitioning from using developer machines to a locally-hosted version of our website and backend, which reduces infrastructure costs while providing a much faster and interactive experience for developers.
Tell us about the transition from individual contributor to managing a team.
I didn’t join Thumbtack with the intention of becoming a manager, and only warmed to the idea progressively. I had a lot of respect for the managers who joined Thumbtack before me. Almost all of them have years of leadership experience from bigger companies like Google and Apple, so they know how to manage people within complex, growing organizations. I’ve learned so much from them. As a first time manager, it’s an amazing team of engineers to be supported by.
As an engineering manager, my role is about clearing roadblocks for my team, making sure they’re achieving the impact they’re capable of, and ensuring that each person on the team is realizing their potential and progressing. I don’t code as often now as I did as an individual contributor, but I’m still involved in technical discussions and scoping projects, and I don’t miss coding as much as I thought I would. The greatest thing for me — outside of growing people and watching my team succeed — has been learning to exercise my problem-solving skills in a totally different dimension.
What else have you learned during your time here?
My managers at Thumbtack have been among the best I’ve ever had. Watching them lead taught me a lot about giving clear and consistent direction, and challenging your team to move beyond their comfort zone while giving them the support they need to succeed. I also took part in the career mentorship program at Thumbtack as a mentee during my first year, and my mentor Nate — who was a manager on the Data Platform team and now runs our Technical Infrastructure team―was amazing and helped me figure out next steps for every problem I brought to our meetings.
“My managers at Thumbtack have been among the best I’ve ever had.”
I think the best piece of advice I ever received was from our CEO Marco, just a few months after I joined. He told me, “You have a lot of great ideas, but you have to pick the one or two most impactful things on your list and focus on solving them.”
What would you say is unique about Thumbtack’s culture?
There is a real willingness to take big bets around here. We’re encouraged to think about our work and reason from first principles, but at the same time there is this call to action: #go. And we view “failures” as learnings.
Have you used Thumbtack as a customer?
I hired a yoga teacher for private lessons. I’d never tried yoga before and never had the motivation to attend a class. Taking ten private lessons helped me develop the basic understanding I needed to get started. Now I’ve graduated to taking two to three group classes a week. I love it!
Interested in learning more?
Check out open roles or get in touch at recruiting@thumbtack.com.
