Women in Enterprise: Teresa Dietrich at McKinsey New Ventures
This series features profiles of some of the top women leaders within our enterprise technology community here in NYC. We hope by highlighting their terrific work, stories, and career trajectories within some of the top venture-backed startups and operating functions will encourage more women to consider careers in enterprise software.
Join us on February 28th, 2018 at our first-ever Navigate 2018: Women in Enterprise Tech Summit here at Work-Bench with Salesforce Ventures in New York City to meet and connect with these impressive women and more.
Teresa Dietrich is the Global Head of Product & Engineering at McKinsey New Ventures.
What were you doing before your current role in enterprise technology? How did you get to this role?
I have spent 20 years in various roles focused on expanding the breadth and depth of my technical knowledge and experience. I spent nearly 10 years at AOL in Engineering and Architecture roles. I spent nearly 9 years at WebMD in expanding Technical Leadership roles. My last role before McKinsey was as CTO of Namely, working to build the best HR, Benefits and Payroll system for mid-size companies and their employees. I found my current role through an Executive Search Firm as often happens at certain level of Technical Leadership. I had never heard of McKinsey New Ventures before they reached out but was both impressed and intrigued by their current impact and big plans for the future.
What pain point is your company solving, and what gets you excited to go to work every day?
We have built more than 85 solutions that combine technology, data, advanced analytics, and subject-matter expertise to help our clients address their most critical strategic priorities. These products are helping us to deliver impact for our clients quicker than ever and to sustain it for the long term. I love that everyday I am building and influencing so many different products, solving different pain points, impacting so many clients and learning about a variety of industries. By building a technology organization that focuses on delivering user value, intuitively usable interfaces and high quality products, we accelerate the process of imagining, building and launching new solutions for the firm and our clients.
What do you wish you had known earlier in your enterprise career?
No one knows with absolute certainty that they are making the right decisions or how to handle the situations they find themselves. I always believed that the people around me with more experience or higher level positions had it all figured it. Being there now, I can say we are all doing the best we can to understand the problem we are trying to solve, then apply our knowledge, experience, and what we can learn from our network to make the best decisions within the time given. The world, our career and our positions are constantly evolving and changing the game board. We need to stop feeling like we aren’t qualified or prepared to go after our ambitions; go after your dreams and believe that you will figure it out along the way.
Give us one piece of tactical advice (small or large), as a page from your enterprise tech playbook — that you would give to another woman considering a career in enterprise tech?
Find people that you really want to work with everyday. The problems you are solving and the technologies that you are using will change, but your team and the people surrounding you daily are the biggest variable in your job satisfaction and career development. Product Development is a team sport, and high functioning, diverse teams can solve a multitude of hard problems.
What do you love about enterprise tech?
Enterprise technology allows you to really learn about and empathize with the users you are building products for everyday. I feel that you can truly define who your users are, what their pain points are that you want to solve and measure the value that you deliver through your products. Everyday in our positions, we use a number of tools to make us more efficient, reduce manual error and access insights and learnings to allow us to focus on the meaningful parts of our jobs and expanding and accelerating our impact. We are all both builders and consumers of enterprise technology, which allows us more opportunity for empathy and understanding of how to continuously improve.
What do you wish would change?
I wish women were not so intimidated or discouraged by technical studies and career paths. Women make up over half the population entering Medical Schools and 40% of the population entering MBA programs so we know we can understand and solve hard problems. We have to work to overcome the obstacles keeping more women from pursuing and staying in technical careers to meet the demand for technologists and build the diverse teams need to solve the challenges of the future.
Connect with Teresa on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Our inspiration for this series comes from Digital Currency Group’s terrific profiles of Women in Blockchain — thank you!
Join us on February 28th at Work-Bench for our Navigate 2018: Women in Enterprise Tech Summit in NYC and get your ticket here. #navigate18
Know a woman leader in enterprise technology whose story we should feature?We’d love to hear from you.
