PWiC Seattle : Breaking the Glass Ceiling Panel discussion
On Wednesday, March 16th, 2022, PWiC Seattle chapter kicked off their first in person event post pandemic with an esteemed panel of women leaders consisting of Fatima Kardar, Mona Akmal and Muneeza Zaid, in collaboration with OPEN Seattle. The session was focused around the journeys of these inspiring leaders in the industry and their challenges and learnings around breaking the barriers and building a successful career in technology.
About the Panelists
Fatima Kardar — Vice President, COO & Chief Technical Advisor to CTO — Microsoft
Fatima has over 20 years of experience in the technology industry bringing together strategic perspectives and extensive experience on technology and product strategy. She is currently working as the Chief Technical Advisor to the CTO for Microsoft , helping formulate and drive technical strategy for Microsoft.
Muneeza Zaidi — VP Product Management at Splunk
Muneeza has over 12+ years of experience in the technology industry across the Cloud and Enterprise. She has been responsible for revenue and strategic growth initiatives, facilitating decision making through investment frameworks for organic resourcing, M&A, strategic partnerships. She drives business planning decisions for pricing & packaging, sales programs, product launches with a view to maximize growth opportunities across the portfolio and is currently VP Product Management at Splunk.
Mona Akmal — CEO and Co-founder at Falkon
Mona moved to the U.S. at age 20 with a CS undergrad degree, an engineering job at Microsoft, and zero network of people. 20 years later, she has helped build many products, businesses and teams from 0 to scale. As a product & engineering veteran, she loves building elegant solutions to technically hard problems. After working at leadership roles focused on product management at Microsoft, code.org, Zulily, Amperity she is currently the CEO of Falkon, a startup that she has Co-founded.
Event Highlights:
This was an in-person event with livestreaming to enable people to join virtually. Being the first in-person event for 2022, for PWiC Seattle, there was enthusiastic participation by the local community. The event started with a short networking session, followed by our moderator Aisha Bashir introducing the Panelists, and then asking each of the Panelists, questions about their journey and what learnings they would like to share with the audience. This was followed by a Q&A session and a post event networking session.
Key Takeaways:
On mentorship and networking: Build relationships and see how you can add value organically. Build your credibility by delivering and that is how you will build your network where people would like think of you, when they have new and exciting opportunities.
On excelling: Find your super power, know your peak performance mode and pick an environment where you are able to execute on that.
On growth: Take up tough challenges, be fearless in tackling hard problems since that helps create bigger opportunities.
On failure: If things are not working, take a step back and evaluate your situation and current process to identify the underlying cause. Be willing to change your environment to create opportunities or change your plan of action to achieve different results.
On imposter syndrome: Get over imposter syndrome by embracing being uncomfortable and learn since that really is when you are growing, practice and you can rewire your brain to turn the anxiety into anticipation
On Career: Have allies, don’t hold yourself back and think big. Standup for yourself and be your best advocate. You own your career, so take ownership of creating your path. Be selfish!
The event attracted over 30 participants from the Seattle region and provided an opportunity to network and connect with industry veterans. We would like to thank Educative for graciously providing us with the venue for the event. We would also like to thank the newly appointed Seattle chapter leads (Sana Khawaja and Rabia Daud) as well as the OPEN Team for planning and executing the event. Also a special shoutout to our Vice President, Ayisha Bashir, who is also a charter member of OPEN Seattle and helped bring both the communities together for this event.
Future Events:
Watch this space for future events: https://pwic.org/events
Thankyou for reading!
About the author
Sana Khawaja is an accomplished SaaS Leader with over 15 years of industry experience with high levels of determination and passion towards Customer Centricity, a strong focus on Delivery and Data-driven decision making. She has garnered a variety of experience working in both Top-Tier companies and nimble starts-up environments and is currently working as Principal Engineering Manager at Microsoft.
