Your voice matters in tech, and I want to help you amplify it

To kick off 2020, I’m inspired to lean into an objective that I believe will strengthen the technology industry, broaden its future impact, and help ensure that the superpower of innovation is directed toward the right set of problems.

This powerful objective is to bring more diverse voices to the decision-making tables in our industry.

Before I tell you a little bit more about why this matters to me, let me cut to the chase: I’m offering ten 45-minute career advancement conversations to individuals with non-traditional technical backgrounds, who are actively trying to transition into or advance within a technical role (e.g. PM, Engineering, UX).

Interested? Fill out this form, and read on.

I started my career at Google, navigating roles that ranged from sales, to strategy, to product operations. In the span of seven years, I launched two teams, helped establish a new market, and developed a business planning framework for one of the largest global organizations within the company. As I reflected on how I want to direct my career after taking time away for business school, I chose to pivot toward Product Management.

This was no easy path: I hustled to network, taught myself to code, and pushed through recruiter after recruiter who couldn’t look beyond my “non-technical” background. Though I knew that my empathy toward users, ability to connect across functions, and holistic problem-solving approach could make me a good Product Manager, pursuing my first PM role was an uphill battle. Here’s the north star that kept me going:

I wanted to have a say in what problems we get to solve with technology.

Today, as Group Product Manager at One Medical, I lead talented PMs who have made it their mission to transform healthcare. My team builds digital experiences that help patients access the care they need when they need it, develops algorithms to ensure consistency in mental health screenings, and empowers patients by putting their own health record at their fingertips. Through all the complexities inherent in healthcare, this simple question guides our roadmaps: what are the problems we want to be solving?

Our life experiences shape our choices. Having built my career in the tech industry, I’ve been trained to look to data to inform my decisions; I truly believe in the power of data to take impulse out of the equation. There’s an obvious asterisk, though: I’m still the one deciding which questions to ask, and any data I may look to will carry inherent biases. So, the promise of data-driven decisions is not enough to unleash the power of technology at the right subset of the world’s problems. We need a broad set of life experiences to inform the questions we ask.

If we want a broader spectrum of voices choosing which problems our industry solves, we cannot rely on traditional pipelines for technical talent. Today, only 18% of computer science graduates from American colleges are women — a figure that has been dropping from a high of 37% in the 1980s (source). A similar percentage of CS bachelor’s degrees go to non-white students (source). Lack of socioeconomic diversity in technical fields isn’t well documented, but I can say this much from experience: few in my “starting class” at Google could relate to the experience of having worked since age 12.

Empowering our industry to solve a broad range of problems requires empowering candidates from non-traditional backgrounds to enter and thrive in our field.

And that’s why I want to talk to you. If you don’t see your educational background, gender identity, professional path, ethnicity, or other lived experience adequately represented in our industry, I’d like to offer my help. Let’s take 45 minutes to map out a strategy for your next career goal, practice for an interview, workshop a professional challenge, or have a general mentorship-style Q&A.

Your voice matters; and I want to help you amplify it.