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July 27, 2018
Career and Interview Tips
How to Keep Up with the Constantly-Changing Tech Industry
Partner Content
A version of this article previously appeared on Skillcrush, an online education program for creatives, thinkers, and makers that gives total tech newbies the tools to make major career changes.
Cameron Chapman, Skillcrush
Sometimes it seems like new technologies, techniques, and standards get released on an almost daily basis, making the tech industry dizzyingly fast.
For someone new to the industry, keeping up can feel puzzling—or nearly impossible. How do you stay on top of changes that happen all the time, especially ones that can directly impact the work you do and what your boss (or clients) expect?
I talked to web designers, developers, and other techies to find out what they do to keep up. The answers are more straightforward than you might expect.
Follow Influencers on Social Media
Almost everyone I spoke to said one of the best ways to stay on top of innovations in the industry is by following influencers on social media. Setting up custom lists (or following lists others create) on Twitter can take a lot of the legwork out of finding the news you need to keep up with.
Watching what influencers are doing in their spare time is a great way to know what might be coming next. "Things like 'Initial Coin Offerings' and AI seem like moonshots, but the smartest people I know work on those subjects in their free time. That makes me confident that some big businesses will emerge in these areas," says Philip Thomas, co-founder and engineer at Moonlight. Pay attention to what gets developers excited and you'll know where to look for the next big thing.
If you're looking for whom to follow on Twitter, try Skillcrush's Women in Tech list—our favorite influencers and experts.
Spend Time Reading Every Day
"Read. Read. Read." That's how Kate Chan, a full-stack marketer at BlueFox.io, stays up to date on changes in the industry. She sets aside time daily to read about tech, insuring she won't fall behind. James McCarthy, CEO and lead web developer at Boldtask, is specifically a fan of A List Apart for long-form articles that keep him up to date. We also love:
Staying in the Know Doesn't Mean Falling for Trends
Nathan Kontny, CEO of Highrise (a spin-off of the wildly popular Basecamp project management software), warns against the appeal of quick fads at the expense of staying grounded. "I think keeping up with changes is far overrated. We're better served by studying history and how companies that are decades old, if not older, have made customers happy. It's a fool's game to keep chasing fads and responding with knee-jerk reactions."
It's a fair point and one that's well evidenced. He uses Google Wave as one such example, touted as a revolutionary product that would change how we all work together. Instead, Wave was dead within three years due to lack of interest despite all the hype of its release.
The moral here: Focusing on user needs can allow you to create successful projects without falling for fads.
Skip the Four-Year Degree
As Erik Zuuring, a 10X programmer who dropped out of college, told Mashable, "One of the biggest issues with post-secondary education in the technology industry is its ability to keep a curriculum current and at the cusp of technology…Just in the web-sphere, trends and technology change on a monthly basis."
We see this proven over and over again at Skillcrush: You don't need a four-year degree to find success. What you learn in your first semester might be obsolete by graduation day. Learning in a faster-paced environment sets you up to actually start working in the tech industry in way less than a quarter of the time it would take to get a degree.
Want to get started in the tech industry right away? Check out the Ultimate Guide to Coding for Beginners for a step-by-step plan to launch your tech career.
January 20, 2021
Career Advice
Growing Your Career in Technical Support: 4 Tips for Getting Hired at Elastic from Support Director Heidi Sager
Heidi Sager loves math, but she also loves working with people.
She always has, which is why she enjoyed her part-time job working at the IT department of the University of Colorado while she was studying electrical engineering. (She'd started in computer science, but explains that it "wasn't for her" and switched her major.) She helped students and professors with word processors, basic programming, and software checkout, and took a full-time job after graduation as a UNIX system administrator.
<p>"I'm definitely not the kind of person who could be heads down coding all day or, you know, in a lab all day long," says Heidi, who is currently a Support Director at <a href="https://powertofly.com/companies/elastic" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Elastic</a>. "I really like personal interaction and helping people solve their problems."</p>
<p>The technical challenges and interpersonal opportunities of tech support were perfect for Heidi, who became a support manager relatively early in her career after a battlefield promotion. "Someone thought it was something I might be good at, and it turned out they were right!" she says. </p>
<p>At Elastic, Heidi explains that her number-one responsibility is making sure that their team of support engineers has everything they need to be able to support Elastic's customers. "We clear roadblocks and things for them so that they can do what they're best at," she says. Second to that is her responsibility to evolve the business of support at Elastic. "We're developing tools and changing processes and procedures to make sure that we're as efficient and scalable as possible," Heidi explains.</p>
<p>Heidi is also responsible for hiring support engineers for her team. She's hosting a <a href="https://powertofly.com/events/details/379982-meet-the-elastic-support-team-learn-how-to-get-started-with-elastic-cloud-a-virtual-networking-event/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">PowerToFly event on January 27</a> at noon EST to connect with other women in tech and talk more about open roles on her team (if you'd like to be considered for an invite, you can email us at events@powertofly.com!). Ahead of the event, we sat down with Heidi to learn more about what support at Elastic looks like, what she's hiring for, and what she loves to see (and not see!) in candidates.</p>
<h2>Support at Elastic is a team sport </h2>
<p>Her team works with internal teams like sales, while also interfacing directly with external customers, and it's Elastic's human-first approach that Heidi appreciates when it comes to customer interaction. "I've been at places where the customer's always right, regardless. And I've been at other places where it's 'we do the right thing' regardless of what that means," she says. "At Elastic, we're very much on the 'do the right thing' side, which is awesome."</p>
<p>That means that the support team often works together to solve issues. "There's going to be times when you make mistakes; everybody's human. As long as you did it with the right intent, that's all that matters. Somebody's got your back and they'll help you navigate, whatever that means," explains Heidi. </p>
<p>Heidi loves to bring new engineers on the team. It's when she really gets to see teamwork in action. "They always start off a bit nervous," she says, "asking a lot of questions and feeling like they are being a drain on the team. But then comes a point when somebody really senior asks a question and the new person is the one to answer it. It's the best! Not everyone can know everything. And we're very open to asking for help." </p>
<p>The team approach is supported by a culture of feedback. Heidi's engineers have regular 1:1s with their managers and every week, her team publishes all of the customer satisfaction surveys they've received for the company. "It goes out to the entire organization. All the details, good or bad, and what we're doing about it. It's great. Sometimes we mess up and we own that. We apologize and try to do better. Sometimes there's a product gap or a product defect or something that needs to be addressed. Sometimes the customer is just not aligned with what we can deliver," she says.</p>
<p>Along with regular check-ins and feedback on how they're doing in their day-to-day responsibilities, Heidi also hosts quarterly conversations focused on her team's broader career and personal goals. She's developed many career paths within and outside of her team and helps each engineer find the path that's right for them. Those paths include becoming support developers who work on the internal tools her team uses, like an automated case assignment feature; managers on her team and others; consultants and trainers for customers; marketers; solutions architects who travel with the sales team to demo products; or developers and engineers on other teams. </p>
<p>For Heidi, the support team is the best long-term place to be. "It's new all the time. We have new products, and new services that are coming to us. Every customer uses our software a little bit differently, too. It keeps it interesting and not repetitive day after day," says Heidi. "I think most of the folks that enjoy support are problem solvers. They just love how it feels when you can solve that problem and move on to the next and do it all over again."</p>
<h2>What Elastic is looking for: 3 paths, 5 key skills, and 4 dos and don'ts to keep in mind</h2>
<p>There are a few archetypes of people that Heidi sees finding great success in support:</p>
<ol class="ee-ol"><li><strong>Developers who want more human interaction.</strong> Should we just call this the Heidi path?</li><li><strong>Customer support professionals.</strong> "Some people with a support background decide they really want to focus on the technical side; maybe they've gone back to school for some technical certificate or degree, but they still want to use their soft skills and customer support skills," explains Heidi.</li><li><strong>Managers who want to be "responsible for [their] own destiny."</strong> Heidi explains that she's had people who explored technical management but realized that they wanted to stay more of an individual contributor, and really ended up enjoying the support engineer role.</li></ol>
<p>And regardless of what track they're on or where exactly they come from, there are a few things Heidi looks for in applicants:</p>
<ol class="ee-ol"><li><strong>Potential over specifics. </strong>Don't have deep knowledge of the Elastic Stack? That's fine. You can learn. Though Heidi does suggest looking into the free download of Elastic's software and digging in a bit before your interview. "We love when we folks that come in can ask questions or explain what was challenging; it shows great initiative."</li><li><strong>A base of technical know-how.</strong> You don't need to be a developer, but you do need to have been in a technical environment before. "If you have an understanding of how distributed systems work, that's great," says Heidi.</li><li><strong>Strong communication skills. </strong>Written is more important than verbal, since the team communicates through tickets, but both matter. "You need the ability to communicate to various levels of customers—very technical to not technical at all—and convey a message, ask the right questions, and be able to interpret the answers." </li><li><strong>Conflict management skills.</strong> While sometimes Heidi's team works with customers who are planning ahead and need some help, oftentimes they're called in for crises when something's not working. "There can be heated situations, so the ability to diffuse that and talk through it is key," says Heidi.</li><li><strong>Follow-through</strong>. "If you say you're going to do something, like get back to [a customer] in a couple of hours, you need to get back to them in a couple of hours," Heidi says. </li></ol>
<p>Heidi also has a few dos and don'ts for applicants to keep in mind:</p>
<ol class="ee-ol"><li><strong>Do:</strong> Review Elastic's <a href="https://www.elastic.co/about/our-source-code" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Source Code</a>. "It's the guiding principles for how we do the things that we do; it's what's most important to us," explains Heidi.</li><li><strong>Don't:</strong> Skip doing your homework. "My number one frustration is someone who is there for <em>a </em>job, but not for the specific job. When someone really doesn't know what Elastic is about or what our software does, even at a high level, I don't love that," says Heidi. </li><li><strong>Do: </strong>Be yourself. "I love when somebody is really, truly being themselves, when you can see that they're showing you what they're all about and not trying to fit a certain mold. We really don't want a hundred of the exact same person," says Heidi.</li><li><strong>Don't:</strong> Disqualify yourself. "Don't assume that we're looking for someone who has been running the Elastic Stack for five years and knows everything there is to know about it. There's a lot more in support then than just that technical side and we're open and excited to bring in junior people all the way up to senior people," says Heidi.</li></ol>
<p><strong>If Elastic sounds like the right place for you, <a href="https://powertofly.com/companies/elastic" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">learn more about their open roles</a> and ask for an invite to their <a href="https://powertofly.com/events/details/379982-meet-the-elastic-support-team-learn-how-to-get-started-with-elastic-cloud-a-virtual-networking-event/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Jan. 27 event</a>.</strong></p>
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January 19, 2021
Career Advice
3 Women, 7 Lessons: What These Relativity Leaders Learned in 2020
Working at Relativity—the global tech company that equips legal and compliance professionals with a powerful data-organizing and discovery platform—looked different in 2020. The highly collaborative environment of their Chicago headquarters transitioned to a virtual setting, and just like companies around the country, Relativity adapted their goals and major projects to a completely remote environment.
<p>For three women with very different roles across the company, that meant leaning into their strengths, staying adaptable, and finding ways to embody one of Relativity's core values—"enjoy and be great at your job"—in completely new ways.<br></p><p>We talked to Rebecca BurWei, Jaclyn Sattler, and Joy Ndackson about how their work at Relativity changed in 2020 and what that means for what's to come in 2021, both for their personal teams and projects, as well as for women at other tech companies looking to continue to make an impact. </p><h2>3 Leaders, 3 High-Impact Projects</h2><p><strong>Rebecca BurWei </strong>is a <strong>Senior Data Scientist </strong>at Relativity, where she works to build new analytics and AI features for Relativity's products. She builds on her academic expertise—she has a PhD from Northwestern—to build solutions at scale, and she joined the company for the opportunity to do just that. "Prior to Relativity, I built custom models by hand to solve problems for one client at a time," explains Rebecca. "However, Relativity Analytics builds hundreds of models every day automatically for clients with its AI capabilities. I was attracted to the challenge of solving problems that could help clients at scale, across the board." </p><p><strong>Jaclyn Sattler </strong>is the <strong>Chief of Staff</strong> to Relativity's COO, a role that has her focusing on cross-company projects and collaboration. She joined Relativity with a management consulting background because she wanted to be able to see the impact of the work she was doing. "I was searching for a place where I could dig in more deeply, work on interesting problems, and be the person to see them through to fruition," says Jaclyn. "Above all else, I wanted to work at a company where I was in awe of my peers."</p><p><strong>Joy Ndackson </strong>is a <strong>Security Project Manager</strong> at Relativity, and her suite of responsibilities is all about managing high-impact enterprise-level projects for the company, from scoping to rollout. She accepted an offer at Relativity after over a decade of experience in the project manager space because she was impressed by the company's positioning in the e-discovery industry and wanted the chance to work on many cross-functional projects. "I have enjoyed working with different teams throughout the company and can honestly say that I have never been bored!" says Joy.</p><p>Each of them overcame the challenges presented by 2020 to complete high-impact projects last year: </p><ul class="ee-ul"><li><strong>Helping medical researchers more quickly review data to help with the fight against COVID-19. </strong>Rebecca worked with her team to use Relativity AI and text-mining tools in order to review journal articles and medical literature to help in the search to understand, treat, and prevent COVID-19. "It was exciting to work on an important, time sensitive project with global implications," says Rebecca. "I also enjoyed collaborating with a diverse group of data scientists and public health researchers from around the world. It was satisfying to produce results that could be used right away."</li><li><strong>Supporting the fight for racial justice with data.</strong> Jaclyn helped launch Relativity's <a href="https://www.relativity.com/company/giving-back/justice-for-change/#:~:text=We%20created%20the%20Justice%20for,of%20a%20more%20just%20world." rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Justice for Change</a> program and the company's pledge of 100TB of its e-discovery SaaS product, RelativityOne, to reduce barriers in technological access for organizations committed to racial justice. "Many groups fighting for racial justice manage large volumes of data and must quickly identify key issues for litigation or investigations," explains Jaclyn. "Our technology can help. We created a program that leverages the expertise from our community and the use of our e-discovery SaaS product to help organizations organize data, discover the truth, and act on it." </li><li><strong>Developing and launching a new security training program.</strong> One of Joy's internal projects in 2020 was creating the Security Guardian program. "It entails training courses for Relativians to learn about our security posture. It teaches them how to incorporate that knowledge into their teams' processes and provides tools needed to communicate security best practices to our customers," she explains. "In essence, we are equipping everyone in our organization to be extended members of our Security team." In successfully seeing the project through, Joy got a behind-the-scenes look at how Relativity's learning and development team creates a course—from storyboarding to execution—and saw how the work she does adds value across the business. </li></ul><h2>7 lessons learned across the board</h2><p>Though Rebecca, Jaclyn, and Joy have very different sets of daily responsibilities and current projects, they all had similarly important takeaways from 2020 about the importance of community, connection, and balance. Here are the seven lessons they learned last year:</p><ol class="ee-ol"><li><strong>Balanced schedules don't happen naturally—they need to be built.</strong> Jaclyn realized that if she wasn't intentional about her schedule, she'd be in back-to-back video calls all day without a second to think. "By including time to work or think, time to connect or have discussions with my team, time to take breaks or take a walk, and time to sign off and enjoy my personal environment, I can control how I spend my time, in and outside of work, to make the most of it," she says. </li><li><strong>Always ask for feedback. </strong>With Joy's projects moving online, she had fewer chances to do real-time check-ins with her key stakeholders. That meant she needed to make sure she was asking them directly if they had concerns or feedback. "All projects are not equal so seeking feedback and being inquisitive has helped to confirm that I am leading the project effectively and adding value to it," she says. Her set of to-go questions include: "Is there anything I can improve on as the Project Manager? Do you have any concerns about the project? Are there any potential risks that I need to be aware of?" </li><li><strong>Changing pace is okay. </strong>Rebecca learned in 2020 that staying adaptable to changing personal and professional priorities means adjusting the pace at which you address them. "Sometimes life moves fast, and other times it moves slowly," she says. "I'm learning to adjust my own pace to match or complement the pace of life and work around me. Next year, I intend to disperse my time off in more regular intervals across the year instead of packing it all in at the end."</li><li><strong>Communicate more than you think you need to</strong><strong>. </strong>"There's no such thing as over-communication," says Jaclyn. "In fact, consider how much you talk to your project team, or share updates with the project sponsor, and then level up a notch. I've found that high-impact projects are fast moving and have a lot of energy surrounding them. This makes change happen quickly and strong communication crucial. Crushing communication on your projects will make you the go-to person to lead higher impact activities."</li><li><strong>"Focus is a muscle,"</strong> says Rebecca, who notes that you can build it over time. "Start small with little reps. Learning to say no in order to prioritize is also a muscle."</li><li><strong>Inclusive meetings take work.</strong> Joy says she's learned a completely new set of guidelines for moderating virtual meetings that she'll apply in 2021. Her top tips? "Ending meetings five minutes early to allow for a break between meetings, seeking feedback from project teams on the preferred method to get updates on action items (e.g., IM or email or meetings), taking longer pauses during meetings to ensure others have the chance to share their perspectives, and sharing screens during interactive calls."</li><li><strong>Informal space can be made virtually. </strong>As a Chief of Staff, Jaclyn needs to have a pretty rich understanding of what lots of different people are working on in order to set them up for success. In the beginning of the pandemic, she had a difficult time doing that. Then she got creative. "I started a few virtual coffee chats and phone calls while on a walk just to catch up with other Relativians. Yes, we would talk shop about work, but these separate-but-together activities created space to connect as people, too," she says. Jaclyn was meant to visit the company's Australia office in 2020, and while that couldn't happen, her virtual connections helped her get to know the team there and quickly bring the Justice for Change initiative to the Australian region after its U.S. launch.</li></ol><p>And one final bonus tip we love from Joy: take advantage of any opportunity to dance! "I love to dance, so oftentimes during a break, I put on some music and have a mini dance session. That always puts me in a good mood. I would not have been able to pull that off if we were still physically in the office!" she says.</p><p><a href="https://powertofly.com/companies/relativity" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><em>Learn more about Relativity's 100+ open roles and company culture.</em></a></p>
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January 18, 2021
For Employers
8 (Virtual) Diversity Conferences to Attend in 2021
As you set your personal and professional priorities for 2021, is a diversity and inclusion conference on your agenda? If not, it should be—particularly after 2020's pandemic and racial reckoning have brought D&I issues to the forefront for many.
<p>Conferences can help you learn from experts, connect with peers, find new inspiration, and get ahead of trends in your industry. And whether you're a hiring manager, an HR professional, or just someone interested in learning how to create a more inclusive workplace, D&I conferences are tailor-made to help you find the education, connections, and resources you need to succeed.<br/></p>
<p>Maybe the ticket price to attend conferences isn't such a factor this year—you probably saved a good deal of your 2020 diversity budget! But whether you're looking at free or high-cost diversity conferences in 2021, you'll want to make sure any investment of your time and resources is worth it. To help, we've gathered a list of 8 highly-regarded D&I conferences in 2021 for you to review.</p>
<p>Take a look, see what piques your interests, and get to registering! We'll see you there.</p><h2>2021 Diversity & Inclusion Conferences/Events Not to Miss</h2>
<p><br/></p>
Diversity Reboot 2021: The One Hundred Day Kickoff
<p><strong>When</strong>: February 1-5, 2021</p><p><strong>Where</strong>: Virtual</p><p><strong>Price to register:</strong> Free!</p><p><strong>Where to register: </strong><a href="https://summit.powertofly.com/" target="_blank">Here</a></p><p>We had to include our own Diversity Reboot on our list of the best diversity and inclusion events to attend in 2021 because we know firsthand how the quality of 100+ expert speakers, the enthusiasm of 10,000 participants, and the cutting-edge tech that enables meaningful virtual networking and job fairs combine to create a truly epic five-day experience. This year, the theme 100 Day Kickoff harnesses the energy of the new government's first 100 days in office to help jump-start personal and professional plans to build more diverse and inclusive workplaces. </p><p>Following the February summit, we'll have a monthly series of smaller virtual summits on topics spanning everything from returnships to LGBTQ+ advocacy, so be sure to stay tuned for updates!<br></p>The Future of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion 2021
<p><strong>When</strong>: February 3-4, 2021</p><p><strong>Where</strong>: Virtual</p><p><strong>Price to register:</strong> Free</p><p><strong>Where to register:</strong> <a href="https://www.hr.com/en/webcasts_events/virtual_events/upcoming_virtual_events/the-future-of-diversity-equity-and-inclusion-2021_kcxf8glq.html#detail" target="_blank">Here</a></p><p>This virtual conference put on by HR.com focuses on how social movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter have pushed DEI at work beyond legal compliance and into a major factor of any company or brand's culture, employee engagement, and performance. Topics include how to uncover and resolve pay gaps across your team and hire top-level diverse talent.</p>Workplace Revolution: From Talk to Collective Action
<p><strong>When</strong>: March 8-12, 2021</p><p><strong>Where</strong>: Virtual</p><p><strong>Price to register: </strong>$820</p><p><strong>Where to register:</strong> <a href="https://cvent.me/ZQ4BbE" target="_blank">Here</a></p><p>The Forum on Workplace Inclusion's 33rd annual conference includes 12 session tracks, from DEI Strategy to Social Responsibility, along with 59 workshops and daily networking sessions. This year's theme focuses on one question: "What will it take to start a workplace revolution that moves us from talk to action?"</p>Diversity: How Employers Can Match Words With Deeds
<p><strong>When</strong><strong>: </strong>May 19, 2021</p><p><strong>Where:</strong> Virtual</p><p><strong>Price to register</strong><strong>: </strong>Early bird registration is $49 and general admission is $149</p><p><strong>Where to register:</strong> <a href="https://hopin.com/events/may-virtual-conference-diversity-how-employers-can-match-words-with-deeds" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Here</a></p><p>From Day One is hosting monthly conferences in 2021 focused on different ways for companies to foster strong relationships with their customers, communities, and employees. May's half-day virtual event is focused specifically on how companies can make diversity promises that don't fall flat and features workshops, panels, and a fireside chat.</p>Hire with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
<p><strong>When:</strong> August 18, 2021</p><p><strong>Where: </strong>Virtual</p><p><strong>Price to register: </strong>$195</p><p><strong>Where to register:</strong> <a href="https://www.hci.org/conferences/2021-virtual-conference-hire-diversity-equity-and-inclusion-august-18-2021" target="_blank">Here</a></p><p>This conference put on by the Human Capital Institute is one of 12 virtual conferences that HCI has planned for 2021. This one focuses on fair and inclusive talent acquisition, including how to attract diverse talent, implement inclusive hiring practices, and addressing bias in employee selection. Other conferences will focus on optimizing talent strategy, engaging employees, and developing your workforce.</p>Virtual Grace Hopper Celebration 2021
<p><strong>When:</strong> September 26-29, 2021</p><p><strong>Where:</strong> Virtual, broadcast from Chicago, Illinois</p><p><strong>Price to register:</strong> Was $799 for regular access to the virtual conference in 2020; 2021 pricing hasn't yet been announced</p><p><strong>Where to register:</strong> <a href="https://ghc.anitab.org/attend/registration/" target="_blank">Here</a>, though 2021 registration wasn't live at the time of writing</p><p>Grace Hopper might be the best-known conference for women in tech. Through keynote presentations, networking sessions, job fairs, and community-building activities, vGHC reached over 30,000 women for their 2020 conference and are expecting even more in 2021! While not a conference focused exclusively on diversity and inclusion, many speakers plan to focus their talks on creating environments for women to thrive in the male-dominated tech field.</p>Inclusion 2021
<p><strong>When:</strong> October 25-27, 2021</p><p><strong>Where:</strong> Virtual and in person in Austin, Texas as of now</p><p><strong>Price to register:</strong> Hasn't yet been announced</p><p><strong>Where to register: </strong><a href="https://conferences.shrm.org/inclusion" target="_blank">Here</a>, though 2021 registration wasn't live at the time of writing</p><p>The Society for Human Resource Management's biggest conference of the year saw 1,200 DEI leaders participate last year; SHRM hopes to see even more come to learn, be inspired, and to walk away with a playbook of implementable strategies to create truly inclusive workplace cultures.</p>AfroTech 2021
<p><strong></strong><strong>When:</strong> November 8-13, 2021</p><p><strong>Where:</strong> Virtual</p><p><strong>Price to register:</strong> Early bird pricing is $149 for individuals and $249 for corporate attendees; regular pricing hasn't yet been announced</p><p><strong>Where to register:</strong> <a href="https://experience.afrotech.com/" target="_blank">Here</a></p><p>AfroTech is a conference hosted by Blavity, a tech media platform for Black millennials. It focuses on emerging tech trends, connecting Black talent with top tech recruiters, and providing networking and educational opportunities, with an overall goal of building a strong Black tech community. Over 10,000 people participated in 2020. While the conference isn't focused specifically on DEI, its main audience of Black tech talent is an important one to understand and to engage at work and beyond, and several speakers plan to focus on issues of race and inclusion at work. </p>
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January 18, 2021
Career Advice
Finding Her Sport: Being Part of the Team in a Startup Environment
A Conversation with Vouch's Lead Designer Carrie Phillips
Carrie Phillips was working at a healthcare startup when she connected with one of Vouch Insurance's founders, a friend of a friend from university. The idea he and his cofounder were working on: a way to solve the business insurance problem, piqued her interest. "I was pretty familiar with how broken insurance was," says Carrie, who was interested in the mission, as well as the chance to be their first full-time hire and help build the product from the ground up.
<p>She signed on as their lead designer, and in the two and a half years she's been at Vouch, she's worn half a dozen different hats, experienced a personal evolution in the way she strikes a work/life balance, and made inroads against the goal she shares with the whole Vouch team of creating a business insurance product that works for startups.<br/></p>
<p>We sat down with Carrie to hear more about why she became interested in design, why she joined Vouch and how Vouch's culture supports her design work, and what advice she has for others looking to succeed at a high-growth startup.</p><h3>Why design?</h3>
<p>Carrie's first few design projects were practical ones.</p>
<p>"I grew up with a little sister who has a bunch of disabilities, and my father and I spent a lot of time building things around the house and retrofitting really crappy medical equipment," she explains. "We were always sort of trying to make her environment work for her and her interests, like to play baseball or cello or go to school. So much needed to be adjusted that I developed a bit of an eye for problems to be solved."</p>
<p>Carrie credits her early experience seeing how her sister navigates the world and coming up with ways to help her as sparking her interest in product design. She studied industrial design at Ohio State University with the goal of working in medical products and technology to improve accessibility.</p>
<p>"I think when people say accessibility, they think of making sure the buttons on the screen are high enough contrast so that somebody with colorblindness can parse out the active areas or text hierarchy and screen readers and stuff like that," says Carrie. And while she notes that those are certainly important examples, larger impact in the accessible space stems from general innovations. </p>
<p>She gives an example of what she means: "Like my AirPods. I'm jazzed about AirPods because my sister wears hearing aids, and hearing aids are still clunky and ugly. AirPods are like a sneeze away from a hearing aid, they're pretty close, and that's really cool."</p>
<p>Other things that fit in that category? Google Glass, Siri, swipe keyboards, and Google Maps, says Carrie. Those are the kinds of projects Carrie wants to work on—projects that transform the way something is done or experienced and, in so doing, create a better product for people with disabilities. "When I think about accessibility, I'm almost thinking about it like, what are the most interesting innovations happening for the mass market that could then trickle into smaller niche markets and really change lives?" she says.</p><h3>Why Vouch? </h3>
<p>Carrie is still a team of one, which means she's done almost every kind of design work for Vouch at some point over the last few years, from mocking up onboarding funnels to branding to conducting user research and handling "QA bug bashing stuff." She has a practiced spiel she uses to explain her work to new hires at Vouch: </p>
<p style="margin-left: 40px;">"Design is intended to make things useful, usable, and beautiful. And each of those words routes to a different field of design. Beautiful is user interface, graphic design, and making it pretty. Usable is more UX—how can I organize this flow or label things in a way that somebody doesn't get stranded somewhere and confused? And useful is more product design. It's like, how do we actually answer the question in the first place? Not just how do we make the solution we've already chosen useful, beautiful, or usable...it's more, what should the solution be in the first place?"</p>
<p>It's that top-down, open-ended problem solving that Carrie loves most about the product design work she's doing now. "It's really fun, sort of the puzzle of unpacking the problem and coming up with a solution," she says.</p>
<p>The puzzle is a particularly big one for Vouch. "Vouch is rewriting policies. We're trying to solve [the business insurance problem] at the very bottom," says Carrie. "A lot of my most valuable time is spent trying to understand what it is we're building and how this tiny decision over here is going to cascade all the way to the customer experience in a year when this policy gets approved."</p>
<p>Carrie approaches solving that puzzle with what she calls her best "user-centric shot." For example, she'll design a button, including its text, in the way that would make the most sense to customers. "Then that does a round trip through insurance, ops, and legal and comes back to me. If it sounds too much like a robot lawyer rewrote it, then we put it back in the cycle. We are a no-lorem-ipsum shop because text is just too important for meaning," she explains.</p>
<p>It was Vouch's mission that initially inspired Carrie, but the reason she keeps going into work (or, in the last ten months, logging in to work) is the company's culture. </p>
<p>"It sounds very corny, but the team genuinely cares and gets to know each other, which produces an environment where everyone feels comfortable contributing really big, weird ideas," says Carrie. "Vouch isn't interested in just making insurance a little bit better. We really want to shake it up. So everybody has to feel safe throwing out some real ridiculous nonsense from time to time. And you only do that when you're amongst friends."</p>
<p>That focus on human beings is so important that it's one of Vouch's five core values and the one that stands out the most to Carrie. </p>
<p>"Put people first" can refer to users, teammates, and individuals, explains Carrie. "It means 'put your partner first, your kids first, your people first," she says. </p>
<h3>3 tips for succeeding at a startup </h3>
<p>Carrie has worked to bring accessible product design to every company she's worked at, from the small startup she founded with friends after college to Vouch. She's able to make the most impact in environments like Vouch's, where open collaboration between teams and a constant focus on learning is shared by all.</p>
<p>"What I care about with startups is the hustle and momentum," she explains. "I know a lot of people are really into the impact that they could have in Silicon Valley. But I don't care if thousands of people use what I made or just a few [do]. I really love being on a small team that is intimately aware of their competitors and is earning the respect of new customers and trying to win."</p>
<p>"I like playing on the team. It's like the only sport I've ever been good at is startups," says Carrie.</p>
<p>She's gotten better at her sport over time and has three key lessons to pass on:</p>
<p><strong>1. Do regular personal retros. </strong>Carrie used to have a 30-minute date with herself every Friday ("in the morning, 'cause if I did it Friday afternoon, it wouldn't be worth my time; my brain would be fried," she notes) to do a retrospective on the week. She's fallen away from the habit, she says, but is bringing it back as she keeps going deeper into the specifics of the insurance world. "I reflect on the week, what I learned, what I did, what changed, what produced a big emotional response for no good reason," she says.</p>
<p><strong>2. Organize pairing sessions. </strong>One of the key parts of Carrie's workflow is the "tweaking sessions" she has with engineers on her team. "Instead of peppering them with tiny, nitty-gritty feedback all along the way, I reserve some time at the end, like, 'We're going to get coffee together and you're going to share your screen and I'm going to angst over the spacing a little bit and it's going to be kind of annoying 'cause we're going to be nudging around pixels,' but it almost always ends with something that feels like 10 or 20% more polished," she says. "And it makes sure that I'm perpetually aware of the friction generated by my requests."</p>
<p><strong>3. Don't lose yourself.</strong> "Startups are just so fun. They move so fast. You can get kind of lost in the hustle or momentum of things," says Carrie, who says that she struggled to remember that in her first few years on the job. "I used to really let that hustle and momentum take over my life. It was too fun to stay late and get ahead and really sweat the details. I thought I was being a good designer by getting really amped on whatever teeny-tiny change needed to be made," she says. "Try to enjoy the momentum—relish the fact that your job is actually exciting and moves quickly and that you can see your change in production in the wild—but also, know that you will not ever regret closing your laptop at 5:00 PM or 6:00 PM," she reminds readers. "It'll be fine."</p>
<p><em><a href="https://powertofly.com/companies/vouch-insurance" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Learn more about company culture and open roles at Vouch Insurance.</a></em></p>
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