10 Questions with Gaby Peña

Senior Product Manager at Twitter

Gaby Peña (@gpena) is a senior product manager at Twitter, currently working on building and scaling @TwitterMoments at Twitter New York. Before moving to New York, she spent four years at Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco working in the Growth and Consumer product teams. Prior to joining Twitter, Gaby completed an MFA in Design and worked at Facebook as an international analyst. Originally from Peru, Gaby graduated with a degree in Government from Harvard University in 2008. She is an enthusiastic lover of dance, travel, literature, languages, world music, banter, and urban strolls.

When did you know you wanted to be in tech?

While it may not be as apparent these days, I was a bit of a rabble rouser and a crusader in my earlier life. I was very politically engaged from very early on — sometimes to my parents’ chagrin — and while advocating for a number of social justice and human rights issues, I got to experience first-hand how social movements came to be.

From the get-go, I recognized and was fascinated by how online networks and communication technologies, however rudimentary, were key in organizing strategies. My interest at first was ethnographic and quasi-academic. Seeing activists in Lima manage protests against Alberto Fujimori’s unlawful third term using IRC channels or students in Brasilia set up basic email groups to communicate about and coordinate marches to support the Landless movement — I felt compelled to write about a phenomenon that, to me, seemed really special.

At some point though, my interest shifted to wanting to be part of building these technologies that were letting people everywhere express and stand up for themselves in new, unprecedented ways. Enthralled by tech’s role in enabling human revolutions, I felt the need to learn from within, so onto tech I went.

2. Who’s your role model?

I admire and seek to shape myself after many people — people whom I find excellent in many different ways. There are folks who, for instance, I consider to be my career role models; others, whom I deem to be my resilience or generosity role models.

One individual who I feel truly embodied how I hope to holistically lead my life is Oliver Sacks. I obviously never met him in person, but it’s hard not to feel as though I knew the genuine, unalloyed him through his writing. I was — and still am — in awe of his radiant mind and unstoppable energy. I can only wish to lead a life with as much unbridled intellectual curiosity, human openness, and caring empathy, as his had. I aim to be as unashamedly wide-eyed and full of life as he was.

3. What technology gets you excited?

Like most people in Silicon Valley, I become immediately excited by the kinds of technological advancements that are so bold that they seem otherworldly (so, basically, anything Elon Musk dreams up). At the same time, though, I’m equally enthralled by the more quietly audacious innovations that are very tangibly changing human lives for the better — think, the Thinx period underwear and the BlindSquares of the world. If relatively less glamorous, these products will lead to step-change improvements in the quality of life of swaths of people around the world.

4. What’s a big challenge you’ve faced in your career journey, and how did you deal with it?

This is no longer a problem, but when I was first starting out in product management, the fact that I didn’t have a “traditional background” (i.e., a Computer Science degree from a feeder engineering school) was a very real issue. I jumped many (in retrospect unnecessary) hoops, before I finally joined the official product ranks. I was lucky in that I had an indefatigable advocate pushing for my being given a chance at product-managing (thank you, @techno!), but the sad part is that way too many talented, passionate, and capable product managers in potentia are not that fortunate.

For the betterment of our industry, we need to do away with arbitrary heuristics that limit whom we groom to become product leaders. The list of outstanding product managers with “non-traditional” backgrounds is too long to warrant maintaining a fiction that people with Computer Science degrees are somehow more suited to build products people love.

“For the betterment of our industry, we need to do away with arbitrary heuristics that limit whom we groom to become product leaders.”

5. What’s a time you felt immense pride in yourself / your work?

I’m fortunate to live in a constant little cloud of hope-filled pride, working at Twitter. Every day, I’m inspired and fueled by the manifold ways that our users utilize Twitter to change their realities, engage others, and express themselves. Literally not one day goes by without an example of human triumph on our platform. It’s so incredibly humbling to take part in the building and growing of a service, which people use to advance personal, local, national, and regional revolutions.

6. What’s something you want to get better at?

People. As I see it, every effort and investment I can make in improving my understanding of and appreciation for people, both within personal and professional contexts, is well spent.

7. Outside work, what keeps you up at night?

I have a restless mind and notoriously bad sleeping habits, so the bar for things that can keep me up at night is actually not very high — both drudgery and passion may easily compel me to avoid falling asleep. Still, it is the (healthy kind of) obsession that definitely brings me the most joy. I tinker with drawings with some regularity, and I very joyfully preoccupy myself with discovering new poems, stories, places, flavors, and songs.

Then, there’s a less regular, rotating cast of things that prey my mind. Most recently, I’ve been obsessed with re-reading Nabokov’s love letters to his wife Vera and watching every episode of Keeping Score, Michael Tilson Thomas’ educational mini-documentaries on canonical classical pieces.

8. If you could live anywhere else in the world, where would it be?

It’s funny: my answer to this question always used to be New York, but I guess that no longer applies, since I made the move this way! Other than in this wonderfully complex, ever-fascinating city, I could see myself living in places like Berlin, London, or Mexico City. (While I love recharging and finding peace in quieter, more bucolic places, I’m definitely an urbanite at heart and couldn’t imagine living in non-big cities for extended periods of time.)

9. If you could give your 18-year-old self any advice, what would it be?

At the risk of sounding new-agey, I’d advise my 18-year-old self to breathe. I love to constantly learn, do, and discover, so since early on, I’ve had a tendency to over-extend myself. At 18, I barely slept — so consumed and galvanized I was with my freshman year of college. Today, though, 11 years later, I am very aware of how critical it is for me to periodically take time to slow down and recharge. I’ve realized it’s not a good idea for me to sustain a mad dash for too long, lest I burn out. I’m grateful to California and the salutary influence of my friends there for teaching me to take better care of myself over time. I sometimes wish that, at 18, I had been more cognizant of my limits.

10. Best book you’ve ever read?

Can I offer a list of fifteen formative books, instead?

Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory
John Berger’s Ways of Seeing
Nayyirah Waheed’s Nejma
Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking
Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Marge Piercy’s The Moon is Always Female
Denise Levertov’s Collected Poems
Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems
James Joyce’s Ulysses
Waslaw Nijinsky’s Diary
J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians
Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Daniel Alarcon’s War by Candlelight
Cesar Vallejo’s Trilce
Quino’s Toda Mafalda