Two Tips that Helped SevenFifty’s Taylor Thompson Build Her Own Path to Impact
Taylor Thompson isn't afraid to try new things. Two of them led her to her current role as a senior software engineer at SevenFifty, a supply chain and communications platform in the alcohol industry.
The first new thing was ice hockey. Taylor had always wanted to play, but her parents weren't big fans of that idea, so she waited until she was in college at Columbia to try out for the club team. She faced a tough learning curve, especially because she hadn't been playing for years and years like her teammates.
"I got to the first practice, and it was bad; I wanted to quit," remembers Taylor. "But here we are, eight years later."
The second new thing was coding. Taylor says that computer science wasn't something she'd really heard about growing up in St. Louis. "There are some more tech companies coming here now, but 15, 20 years ago, that did not exist," she explains.
"CS was not on my radar," she says. It wasn't until she decided against being a doctor and to pursue applied math instead that she took her first CS course, which was a prerequisite for that major, and liked it so much that she changed her major to CS.
Fast forward to two years ago: Taylor was still playing ice hockey in her spare time, and she had a full-time role as a data engineer, but she was ready for a new challenge. When her hockey team went out one night after a game, she found herself chatting with her teammate Gianfranco, who also happens to be the CoFounder of SevenFifty. "He told me about the industry and the problems they were solving, and I thought it sounded really interesting. He was like, 'Are you looking for a job?'" she recalls, and shortly thereafter she found herself interviewing for and ultimately accepting a role.
We sat down with Taylor to learn more about her path to SevenFifty and the opportunity she's had to make an impact in a startup environment.
Defining her own career
Taylor wasn't sure what a CS career looked like when she started in the field. "I was in classes with people who went to coding camp, whose dads worked at Facebook, who had been coding since they were 12. And I'd been coding since three months ago," she says.
Her first professional experience was an internship with the Columbia IT department. It went well, and prepared her for a later role at a boutique consulting agency focused on consumer reports about companies' digital presence. There, she was a data engineer focused on building up the company's database of social and ecomm data.
When she got to SevenFifty, her first projects played off of that experience. As a pipeline engineer, she coordinated with the company's vendors to get their data loaded. "It involved writing custom code to read whatever files they sent us, because every distributor sends a totally different file. Some of them are really high tech and have IT departments we can liaise with, and other times they're sending us an Excel file from 1999 and we have to get it into our system and make it look the same," explains Taylor.
Just like she got more comfortable with hockey the longer she played it, Taylor found herself coming into her own at work, ready to share her experience.
But she quickly realized that not every work environment was ready to hear it.
Realizing where she could make an impact
At the boutique firm Taylor first worked at, she quickly recognized an imbalance in the work she was expected to do and the opinions she was allowed to have.
"It's tricky at smaller companies, because sometimes junior engineers do have outsized responsibilities placed on them, but depending on how the management structure works, your voice still might not be heard," says Taylor. "They're asking a lot of you, but they're not listening to your feedback on it."
She knew she wanted to grow her career at a place where her expertise would be valued and listened to, and she joined SevenFifty because it seemed like that kind of environment. As it turns out, her initial impression was right.
"Within the first six months, I felt a major difference in how senior leadership paid attention to everyone," she says. "I always immediately felt heard and like my input was always listened to."
Even in her two years there, as the company has grown from 50 people to over 100, Taylor says that the culture hasn't shifted away from that focus on individual impact. "We're more rigid about what goes in certain channels on Slack, for instance, and our processes have gotten better, but the culture hasn't become too corporate," she reflects.
Taylor is especially excited about the opportunity to make design choices for the products she's working on, instead of them just being handed down to her from on high. Of late she's been working on product search and ordering APIs, collaborating with the product team on prioritization.
Two pieces of advice for people at small companies looking to make an impact
Taylor has two key pieces of wisdom to pass on to anyone else wanting to make the best of their responsibility set at a growing company: learn to say no, and trust your instincts. Both things have served her well as she's built her own career (and life!).
- Get comfortable saying no. Just like she once assumed her parents knew what was best for her, Taylor started her career assuming that her boss was always right—that they knew her capabilities, the company's priorities, and how best to match them. "As you grow and you're working with other teams, sometimes you really are the only person in the room who is qualified to say, 'Actually, I don't think this will work' or 'I don't think this timeline or budget is feasible,'" she says. "Knowing when to say no is a skill in and of itself, and becoming able to say no is difficult, but also an essential skill for growing in this industry."
- Trust your own judgement. Part of being comfortable saying no, even to superiors, is having a strong sense of what is right. Taylor says she's felt that from her early days of being in CS classes where she was the least experienced one in the room, but still found ways to share her thoughts. Starting with that humility, she adds, makes it easier to speak up firmly but also constructively. "Now, when I speak up with a technical opinion, even if I'm afraid to say it, later on my boss is happy I raised it," she says.
It does help when the people you're saying no to and sharing your instincts with are people that you like and respect, which Taylor says is definitely the case at SevenFifty.
"SevenFifty is filled with people who really like their jobs, are passionate about their jobs, and have a ton of industry knowledge," she says. "I just feel like on top of wanting to do the work, I don't want to disappoint any of those people; I want to help all of them succeed in their goals."
If Taylor's work experience sounds like one you'd like to have, check out SevenFifty's open roles.
How to Find—And Foster—A Sense of Belonging at Work: Tips from GameChanger’s Siobhan Sabino
Siobhan Sabino's first introduction to tech was one she's since realized is shared by many women who grew up in the 90s: Neopets.
"It's HTML and CSS," explains Siobhan of the options to customize a user profile and shop on the virtual pet site. "It was a very curious thing, and that was how I got into tech."
Her early interest grew when she went to a specialized high school that focused on computer science. "Essentially the requirement was, 'Are you good at algebra? Come on in!'" remembers Siobhan. "Suddenly there was this explanation of the things I'd been seeing. Here's how the Internet, this crazy new thing, here's how this is working. Here's how computers are working."
Siobhan credits her high school education with preparing her well to study computer science in college—she was the only freshman in her C++ class, she remembers, having skipped all the basics that she'd covered in high school—but it was also the place she first felt unwelcome. "A lot of the guys in my math class thought they were going to go to the computer program and didn't get in," says Siobhan. "And they were very salty when they found out I had gotten in. They were like, 'You don't belong there.'"
Siobhan was shaken at first, and in those early days, she recalls spending some time crying at her terminal, struggling with a QBasic program. "It was the first time I was aware of this idea that girls aren't supposed to be good at math, that women aren't supposed to be good at tech, and I just remember thinking, 'I can give up, or I can just become the top of this pyramid of people who do tech in school.' And I never looked back," she says. "I was not raised to be a quitter."
Siobhan's learned to prove herself, which is something she's leaned on throughout her career as she's taken on new challenges, including in her current role as Lead Data Engineer at youth sports tech company GameChanger.
We talked to Siobhan about finding a company where she felt like she belonged, how to pay forward that feeling to others, and how job seekers can find the fit and the community that allows them to be their full selves at work.
Finding the right culture fit
Siobhan currently does the culture interview for GameChanger. One of the questions she always asks—if you're interviewing for one of their open roles, take note!—is "What's the best team you've ever been on?"
Her own answer to that question, she realized, was a team where she worked with all senior engineers. She was the youngest and the only woman. "There was no sense of 'I have to prove myself, and to prove myself, I have to put other people down,'" she says. When she interviewed at GameChanger, she felt like it was a similarly ego-free place.
At first, she took the interview at GameChanger just to practice. She was ready for a new challenge after being at her last company for four years, and wanted to ease her way back into recruiting. A company focused on providing scorekeeping, statistics management, recap stories, and live streams for youth sports didn't seem quite in line with Siobhan's self-proclaimed status as "not a big sports person."
"Non ironically, my favorite sport is muggle quidditch," she says, smiling.
But Siobhan got on the phone interview anyway. "At the end of this half hour, I was like, 'Oh my god, I want to work there. I want to work at GameChanger because the person I talked to was so excited about the job,'" she remembers.
That wasn't par for the course in the world of tech recruiting, Siobhan had learned. "I've done interviews with famous companies where I go in excited and I leave thinking, 'Well, you clearly don't want to work there. And you're the hiring manager! Why would I want to work there?' I've done interviews with big tech companies where I go in for an onsite and they'll have more than a thousand engineers and they can't find a single woman for me to talk to. For GameChanger, it was that feeling of it is about the culture."
For Siobhan, that culture was one that focused on people and on creating meaningful connections between them. That includes between GameChanger users—"I really felt like the company genuinely valued working in sports and helping to make people's lives better, helping coaches and volunteers, helping kids to learn how to work together, and I wanted to be part of that," explains Siobhan—and between the company's employees.
If you find yourself considering a role at a new company and wondering if the culture is for you, says Siobhan, make sure you ask about it. "I think sometimes people assume that if you have the tech part down, the culture will follow, when that's not the case. The culture part has to be actively worked on," she says. "And it's harder because it's soft skills. Tech people don't talk about the soft skills. They're like, 'Do you know Python? Do you know JavaScript?' Not 'Can you ask good questions? Can you be empathetic to what a junior engineer might be going through as a no-longer-junior engineer?'"
Here are some specific questions she recommends asking your interviewers:
- How does your team celebrate wins?
- What is the most fulfilling thing you've done that was hard at work?
- What is your day-to-day like?
- What is it that you say makes your culture special?
- What do you love most about your job?
Fostering belonging at work
Siobhan recognizes that a big part of feeling like she belongs at work is an innate sense of confidence—one she's fostered since her middle school experience—and that another is being in a supportive environment with a welcoming culture. Choosing the environment that's right for her hasn't always been easy, but as her career progresses, she's gotten better at identifying places she wants to be, like GameChanger. She's also recognized what she can do to pay that sense of belonging forward and help others.
Creating an inclusive, welcoming environment works both ways: it's more efficient from a workflow perspective, especially on a team of engineers, who will feel more comfortable bringing up problems, sharing interesting ideas, and collaborating on solutions. And it's also more enjoyable from an interpersonal perspective.
"I've had interviews where I asked people what's their favorite part of their day. And they're like, 'I love technology.' Maybe that works for other people. For me, I like other people. I like talking to people. I like getting their ideas. I like hearing what they cooked for dinner. And also, what do they think of this architecture?" she says wryly.
When it comes to what a company can do to support those two aims, Siobhan has a couple of examples of what she's seen at GameChanger:
- Creating a "one team" mentality. When one of GameChanger's co-founders stepped down, explains Siobhan, it was a tumultuous time emotionally, and other companies might've seriously floundered. That's not what happened at GameChanger, and Siobhan credits it to the deep sense that all teams, from data to product to design and beyond, are unified. "I remember the CTO and CFO both making comments that there'd be no work that would happen that day. That that's okay. As a company, we had to mourn that this was the end of an era, that that's fine, that they left us with the tools and the culture to reach out to each other and say, 'We're going to go through it together. Are you okay?'" says Siobhan.
- Truly caring for people. "We were one of the first companies sent home early in the pandemic and we'll probably be one of the last ones to reopen, because this is about the team. This is about everyone feeling comfortable, everyone being healthy," says Siobhan. "You're not a cog in a machine, you are a person who has a family and a life and we want you to feel good because we will do the work. That will happen. But we can't replace you."
And on what an individual can do, Siobhan shares two things she does as a leader and a teammate:
- Creating connections. When she first joined GameChanger, Siobhan reached out to the person hired right before her and the person hired right after her and made a cohort, and she continues to reach out to new hires today. "Then if you're having a bad day, you have someone to talk to. Maybe they're just someone to listen to your bad day. Maybe they'll actually have a solution," she says, noting that Slack has made it even easier to send low-stakes invites to new coworkers to help you get to know them.
- Sharing the unvarnished truth. "In my experience, what makes GameChanger unique is this sense that it's okay not to be okay. I try to be honest about my struggles with mental health and verbalizing it both so that I'm advocating for myself, and so other people can feel they can advocate for themselves as well," says Siobhan.
At the end of the day, says Siobhan, finding and creating a place where you feel like you belong and your ideas matter is the most important part of work, and it's worth investing time in figuring out where you can experience that. "There are places whose answers [to culture questions] make you lie awake at night and go 'No, no, no, no, no, you don't want to work there,'" she says. "It's not that you as a person failed. It's that this is not the right culture fit. And that's fine because it'll work for someone else. You find somewhere that works for you."
If GameChanger seems like a place that might work for you, check out their open roles.
“It’s A Balancing Act”: How This Head of Data Engineering Plays to Her Strengths as a Leader
Advice from Kensho's Susan Triantafillou on Leading Authentically & Advancing Your Career with a Growth Mindset
When Susan Triantafillou, Head of Data Engineering and Infrastructure at fintech company Kensho Technologies, finds herself contemplating whether or not a risk is worth taking, she always asks herself one question: "If I turn this down, will I look back on this moment five years from now and regret it?"
That was the question she asked herself in 2014 when faced, just one year into her career, with the opportunity to leave a very stable job as a software engineer and join data analysis startup Visallo as a founding member.
The answer was a resounding yes, so she quit her job to pursue the risks—and rewards—of startup life. Chief among them was the opportunity to test and grow her leadership skills. "As a software engineer, I was usually coding most of the time, but at Visallo, I had a much wider variety of responsibilities, including working with clients, contributing on the business side, and working with product development," Susan explains.
After nearly four years at Visallo, the company was acquired by Kensho, and Susan quickly took on even more significant leadership challenges; she advanced from an initial role as a software engineer to Head of Visallo Engineering, then to Head of Data Engineering and Infrastructure, all within two years.
We sat down with Susan to learn how her leadership style has changed and grown over time, how she identifies and leans into her strengths, and what advice she has for other women growing their careers.
Finding her own leadership style: balancing flexibility and a growth mindset
Susan's appetite for risk and new challenges has provided her with ample opportunities to test and develop her leadership style, finding an approach that is both effective and authentic to her.
"I've learned that it's a balancing act. I always want to be understanding, and I certainly want to be flexible whenever it's appropriate," says Susan. "I've learned to embrace those strengths especially while having hard conversations."
Overall, Susan's ability to put herself in her team members' shoes has served her well. When she became the Head of Data Engineering and Infrastructure at Kensho, she knew she needed to get to know the members of her new team. She began with asking lots of questions.
"I started with technical questions," she explains, "but I also asked them about their expectations of me. What everybody expects and needs from a leader is different, and understanding that up front was really helpful in structuring the role."
She recognized that her team needed two things: flexibility and a growth mindset. Both of those are core to Susan's leadership philosophy, so she was in a good position to make an impact.
"I want to help lay the foundation for success while giving people on the team the flexibility to use their unique skills to achieve our goals," says Susan. "Kensho really believes that an innovation mindset stems from embracing your mistakes and evolving from them. It's not a blame game."
That approach structures how Susan manages on a day-to-day basis, from how she encourages question-asking in group meetings to how she leads empathetic post-mortems focused on growing together. "I like to provide constructive criticism, because I think that that's how you help people grow," she says.
Susan stresses that she's able to provide that criticism because as a leader, she begins her interactions with a sense of mutual respect; she doesn't think that empathy and criticism are mutually exclusive, but rather, two key ingredients to helping others grow as much as possible. "I would say a lot of my leadership style probably stems from my ethnic background. In Taiwanese culture respect is embedded at the core. I respect my team's time, effort, dedication, and style to help achieve their goals. I respect their experience and their skills. It's a lot more efficient to gain their trust and respect, and then once everybody's on the same page, we can sprint rather than walk towards our goals."
3 key tips to advance your career as a woman in leadership
When Kensho acquired the company Susan was working for previously, she says that it was a smooth transition. "The team's flexibility and talent made it easy to get everybody up to speed very quickly," she remembers. "I have to credit Kensho's culture and values for that."
One of the things that Susan says she likes best about Kensho and its values is their focus on curiosity and learning. "We have 'knowledge days' where we don't work on our day-to-day jobs," she says. "You take that day to actually learn. And I think that's key for innovation, it's key in terms of employee growth, and it's key in terms for company growth as well."
That commitment to growth underlies three key pieces of advice that Susan would recommend for anyone looking to step up and manage bigger teams and departments:
1. Constantly be learning. That means approaching new problems and new areas with humility as you get up to speed, while trusting—and being confident—that you'll get there eventually. "My mind typically leaps to how I can do better next time, which is great for pushing myself to the next level, but not always great for building confidence, so I've been working on that," Susan explains.
2. Find mentors everywhere. "Understand that you can learn from anyone and everyone, regardless of their background or how much experience they have," says Susan. "Recognize that you're competing against yourself and not the people around you, and look to your mentors for help."
3. Embrace change and the unknown. Susan says that she owes her career to a willingness to take risks. "I left a stable job to go join a company without knowing if it would even exist in a year or two," she says. "You need to seize the opportunity when it's given to you."
If you're interested in working with Susan at Kensho, check out their open roles here.
An Inside Look at Our Event with New York Life
New York Life's headquarters is a gorgeous, gothic National Historic Landmark, located adjacent to the Flatiron District's scenic Madison Square Park. After over a decade of living in NYC, I was thrilled that my first time inside this legendary building would be for a PowerToFly event highlighting New York Life's data science and analytics leaders.
PowerToFly's event with New York Life was held on Thursday, October 25th, inside New York Life's Ben Feldman Auditorium. After guests navigated the ornate lobby, they were welcomed with delicious food and drinks and had the chance to network with both members of the New York Life data and hiring teams as well as their peers.
PowerToFly's CoFounder and President Katharine Zaleski started the night off by introducing New York Life's SVP/Head of Retail Life Alex Cook. "We are always finding ways to be collaborative because we know a diverse culture leads to innovative and new ways of thinking, which are critical to the future success of the company. I'm impressed that a company like ours that's been around since 1845 and is as large as we are, how quickly we're moving on multiple fronts. For example, in just the last two to three years we've built a 50-person Data Science Team We're also making a lot of investments in our infrastructure and our technology capabilities. We're now at a point where everywhere you look in the company, we're transforming something," explained Cook.
Alex went on to speak about how New York Life uses data in assessing mortality risk and the inherent challenges involved. "You don't know whether your calculations are accurate for 10, 30, even 70 years. It's a very difficult problem to solve and very intriguing from a data science perspective."
As Alex concluded, he introduced CVP, Advanced Analytics Rita Fuller who discussed New York Life's Data Science Academy which, as Rita describes it, "is a program with two educational tracks designed to increase knowledge of Data Science and Analytics for our employees.." The Data Science Academy is part of a cultural shift to generate greater understanding of data science and to create an environment in which New York Life data scientists can thrive. The program features two educational tracks. The technical track is for those who want to gain or improve your skillset in statistical modeling and machine learning. The business track introduces you to case studies involving analytic solutions to foster an analytical mindset. Rita then introduced an insightful short video that provided a better glimpse into a "day in the life" of the data team.
Next up, Katharine introduced our amazing panel of New York Life leaders which included Michelle Bottomley, SVP & Chief Marketing Officer; Glenn Hofmann, VP & Chief Analytics Officer; Mary Louie, CVP & Lead Data Scientist and Beth Schumacher, CVP Human Resources/Training. Our experienced panel discussed their latest projects, how they keep current on the latest tech trends and dove a bit deeper into their individual career journeys. The formal programming for the evening ended by opening up the floor to questions from the audience.
But the night wasn't over yet! Our attendees had plenty of opportunities to network with the panel, members of the New York Life team and each other before the evening eventually drew to a close. As they exited, our guests were greeted with a complimentary copy of a book to remember the evening by. All in all, this was a fabulous New York evening with an iconic New York company.
Follow New York Life on PowerToFly to learn more about their open roles.