Being human.
Aligning values in my next career move.
First and foremost, I realize it’s a huge privilege to have a job, a home to work from, and to be with a company that can support remote work. The following is solely to share my experience, learnings and excitement in transitioning to a new company and role during COVID.
I believe in bringing your whole self to work (and actually, to everything.) For those of us that work from home, our personal and professional lives are intimately intertwined, and this approach to work is likely here to stay. It’s been impossible to not bring all that we are to the virtual office, especially given many of us are going through something. Although bringing your whole self to work can bring about deeper connections (and sometimes outfit changes) — it doesn’t come without its challenges in experiencing all the feels. It’s worth it however, as through it we learn more about who we are and what we value, which in turn brings more purpose to what we do.
This belief led me to Slack. Slack not only embraces its mission and values inwardly by hiring some of the most empathetic, courteous and talented folks I know, but also outwardly in how Slack has consistently worn its ❤️ on its sleeve, and kept things simple and real. Slack has actually humanized enterprise software through being hyper focused on human experience and intuitive design, which created a much needed cultural shift to how we show up as our whole selves and collaborate at work. Slack’s Platform team has similarly taken a humanized approach to how they’ve worked with the larger developer community. In learning more about Slack’s Platform, Slack’s values, and the the vast opportunity still ahead for developers, it affirmed my decision to join.
Thank you Microsoft
How it started
I’ll never forget interviewing for my role at Microsoft. I was in SF for the holidays and childcare fell through, so I brought along my 3 month old son. I fed him a bottle while Prashant S and I discussed how Microsoft was evolving drastically. Under Satya Nadella’s leadership, Microsoft was transforming to become an open and inclusive culture; bringing my infant to the interview alone was a great example of this! Cloud and AI’s Developer Relation’s team was at the forefront of this cultural shift in transforming Microsoft’s relationship with Developers through authentically helping.
How it went
Over the past few years, I had the honor of building out Microsoft’s advocacy programs team around the 🌍 responsible for scaling advocacy to “go where developers are” online and in person via community, events and content. We did this in partnership with many teams, especially that of Microsoft’s Field. Microsoft’s Field is a massive organization spanning 14 subsidiaries worldwide and has been in existence for nearly 35 years.
This was no easy feat to evolve evangelism to advocacy across such a complex organization, and it didn’t come without its fair share of challenges and learnings.
My biggest takeaways were:
- Cultural change takes a long time, especially at a large company.
- Celebrate small wins and continuously reiterate what you’re aiming to convey in multiple mediums. Repetition is key.
- Every individual and company has their own method to the madness as it relates to information sharing and collaboration. Meet in the middle with how you share (i.e. PPTs, meetings, docs, chat, etc.) Be flexible, and persistent.
How it’s going
I’m proud of how our team kicked off a new era worldwide of threading diversity and inclusion as well as a “help first” approach to how Microsoft engages with the developer community. It was an honor to hire a talented team of developer community leaders and “helpers” — and when our larger Developer Advocacy team re-orged to align by technology, our team evolved to program manage Cloud Advocacy in its new form as well as Developer Relations broadly, which only further prepared everyone for the chaos of 2020 in moving from an online first strategy to online only.
As much as I enjoyed working at Microsoft and felt fortunate to grow and learn from some of the best and brightest program managers and advocates, I missed working on a smaller team and getting closer to the work itself. My long term career goal is to lead Developer Relations, which often includes Developer and Product Marketing in larger organizations. In order to do so, it’s important I continue to learn all parts of the business at different companies.
I want to thank Prashant S and Jeff Sandquist for hiring me, and my incredible team. I’ve learned so much from you all and am not far if I can ever be of help.
Joining Slack
Returning from maternity leave amid pandemic childcare challenges and then undergoing interviews at Slack was fucking hard,
but I did it.
As I step into my new role and onboard from home with 2 screaming kids outside my door; I’ve been experiencing a stupid amount of self doubt. My nature is to be very self deprecating and I am my own worst critic; it’s important I let go of this negativity. I share this as imposter syndrome has progressively worsened this past year due to the pandemic. It’s even more important that we lift each other up and to intentionally do the same with ourselves, too.
Today there are over 700,000 active developers of Slack apps, making Slack one of the most successful platforms for developers of enterprise services. In my new role, I lead developer marketing for Slack’s offerings that enable developers to build powerful apps and workflows in Slack. I do this in close partnership with DevRel and Product, some folks of which I had the privilege to work with back when I was at Twitter (Bear Douglas, Taylor Singletary, Helen Zeng, Roach 👀👋!)
My first job out of college was leading a teen program for Girl Scouts called “Challenge Yourself, Change the World” (yes, you can actually work there.) As cheesy as this sounds, I feel like I’m getting back to my roots and values in joining Slack. Slack is challenging the workplace and changing the world in humanizing enterprise software and creating a shift in how we work AS REAL HUMANS at a time that it’s needed most to stay productive (and sane!) in the virtual office. I experienced this first hand previously as my team initially collaborated via Slack. When we transitioned out of Slack, I believe we lost much of the human element to working together, and collaborations became less efficient and effective.
The Slack platform has endless possibilities ahead. When you connect your work to Slack via apps and workflows, you become more productive. We all lead busy intertwined work + home lives, especially now. These integrations improve the time and effort it takes to get work done in a super simple (and human) way so that we can focus on what matters, to each of us. 😜
I’m extremely grateful for the relationships and experiences I gained at Microsoft and am excited for this next chapter — both personally and for the Slack platform.
