Want To Build Partnerships In Remote Environments? Follow These Tips!
💎 Partnerships in remote environments is one of the most important aspects to construct in a company. Watch the video to the end to get good tips on how to do it successfully.
📼Wondering how to create partnerships in remote environments? Play this video to get three top tips that will help you to achieve it. You'll hear from Olga Shvets, HR Business Partner, and Viktoriia Litvinchuk, People Team Operations at Unstoppable Domains, who will explain the essentials of this process.
📼How to build partnerships in remote environments? Tip #1: Communicate Effectively. Communication is the key to enabling your remote team to be successful. Choose the channel that works best. For this, chat with your employees and see what they use to communicate, that's how you find the best solution. Also, make sure your team is on board with your internal tools and they know what, how, and where they need to use them.
📼A requisite for building partnerships in remote environments is Tip #2: Show appreciation. Appreciation is shown through your actions. Let your employees know that you value everything they do for the company. Create a special gratitude channel where everyone can share their appreciation for their colleagues for some contribution. Celebrate some wins, promotions, and everything that is important for the company. If you appreciate the employees, employees do the same for the company.
Create Partnerships In Remote Environments Using Trust - Tip #3: Give Honest Feedback
Use engagement surveys! They are a quick and effective way to receive honest feedback from your team and you can see what's working well and what needs to be improved. Your main priority is to create spaces where managers and employees can share honest, relevant feedback.
📨 Are you interested in joining Unstoppable Domains? They have open positions! To learn more, click here.
Get to Know Olga Shvets
If you are interested in a career at Unstoppable Domains, you can connect with Olga on LinkedIn. Don’t forget to mention this video!
More About Unstoppable Domains
Unstoppable Domains is bringing user-controlled identity to 3 billion+ internet users by issuing domain names on the blockchain. These domains allow users to replace cryptocurrency addresses with human-readable names, host decentralized websites, and much more.
By selling these domains direct to consumers for a one-time fee, the company is making a product that will change cryptocurrency and shape the future of the decentralized web by providing users control over their identity and data.
How Collaboration and Support Helped CU Direct’s Dulce Ruelas Launch Her Career in FinTech
Dulce Ruelas is a proud first-generation Mexican-American. “I was born in beautiful Sahuayo, Michoacan and when I was eight months my family immigrated to the U.S.,” she explains. “My parents always kept our Hispanic culture alive at home by imbuing us with the importance of cherishing family, working hard, and dreaming big.”
As the fourth out of five children, she’s been able to count on her family for support and encouragement in all aspects of her life. “My siblings always took care of me. They’re the first ones I go to for advice or help,” explains Dulce. Which is why she prioritizes recreating that sense of support and collaboration at work as a Development Manager at lending technology solutions provider CU Direct.
We sat down with Dulce to hear more about her background and career journey, as well as her best advice for women who may want to start a career in FinTech.
Getting Her Start in Engineering
Dulce was first introduced to the world of tech by her older siblings. “My brother saved all his money and spent it on parts to build his own computer,” she explains. While he was more into the hardware side of computers, Dulce was mostly interested in them for personal use. It wasn’t until her older sister encouraged her to take a newly offered computer science course at their local community college that Dulce really considered programming. “It was a C++ course and I thought it was really interesting. But something immediately stuck with me – I was the only girl.”
Undeterred by the lack of representation in her class, she completed the course and enjoyed it so much that she decided to study computer science as a major in college. “The first courses in college were tough. I failed a couple of courses and I started questioning, ‘Do I really want to stick this out?’” She turned to her now husband for advice, and he encouraged her to keep going. “Knowing that he believed in me, I started believing I could do it, too. Then it just clicked,” she says. “And then it became more fun. Everything was falling into place. It was still tough, don’t get me wrong. But it was more enjoyable after that.”
As she got further into her degree, she noticed a growing gender gap in her courses. “It was very lonely,” she explains. “There weren’t many other girls and there were fewer and fewer each semester.” That lack of representation fueled her fear that entering (and thriving) in the workforce might be difficult for someone like her. “I had heard so many stories about [women] in the industry, maybe being dismissed or just not taken seriously,” she elaborates.
So when it came time to look for a job post graduation, she knew she wanted to work for a place where people like her were thriving. “I was at a career fair and I saw a Hispanic woman who was the HR Director for CU Direct,” says Dulce. That woman encouraged her to apply to the company. “My sister and husband helped me with interview skills and [encouraged me through] the whole application process,” she explains. “I got an internship and became full-time after six months. And I've been here ever since!”
Dulce’s Journey at CU Direct
CU Direct aims to create an environment where employees can achieve their highest potential and career growth. And that’s exactly what Dulce has done over the past eight years. “I've been able to be promoted almost every other year,” she explains. “I actually just got promoted to Development Manager this last week!” She’s moved all the way from intern, to Software Developer I, II, and III, to Principal Software Engineer (PSE), to Development Manager.
This new role requires Dulce to take a broader approach to planning and strategizing her team’s projects. “I’m in charge of delivering quality software solutions to our clients. I’m looked to as a point of reference to give input based on my experience,” Dulce explains. Her team is currently working on a lift and shift effort, which involves moving software from on-site storage to the cloud. “There are so many components and it's not an easy effort. It's not something that we can just do in a day, so there has been a lot of planning and collaboration with other teammates.”
That collaboration and support from her team is what keeps Dulce coming to work every day. “At CU Direct, all of our projects are interdependent in some form or another,” she explains. “There are a lot of different perspectives, and everyone’s so passionate about what they do. It makes work that much better to come in and see what we can build together.” Collaborating and hearing other peoples’ perspectives also happens to be one of the most important aspects of working in tech, according to Dulce, and she wants to encourage other women to join her in those efforts.
“There are so many women at CU Direct, which is one of the reasons I love it. There’s just so much diversity,” says Dulce. “In HR, Product, and Customer Care — teams I work with — it's very rare where there's not a [woman] on the team. There are certain niche pockets where there's not as much diversity. We don't have as many [women] on the technical side,” explains Dulce. But she’s excited to see that shift — and to be a part of catalyzing that change. “I've felt so supported and valued here. I’ve seen so many women here in positions of power, but I haven’t always had as many examples to look up to in technical leadership roles, so that’s why I’m hoping to keep growing towards [those leadership roles]!”
Advice for Upcoming Women Techies
Dulce wants more women to join her in the FinTech industry, especially on the technical side. Keep reading for her advice for women interested in exploring the industry.
1. Take a seat at the table — there’s room. Dulce knows first hand how hard it can be to take up space in an environment when you’re new or different from those around you. “I used to think things like, ‘I'm just an intern, I'm just a one, I'm just a two,’” says Dulce. That’s why she wants to encourage other women to use their voice and speak up. “There is always something you can bring to the table and there is space at the table,” she says. “There are all these reasons for why not to [speak up], but you only need one for why you should.”
2. Be proactive about opportunities. The world of FinTech is growing, which means the demand for new, fresh perspectives is high. “There's so much opportunity to bring the knowledge you have from the technical side into credit unions and banks,” says Dulce. She advises women in tech to be proactive and learn more about opportunities in the field, even if they don’t have previous experience. “There are so many places where people will take a chance on you and that's all you need, one chance.”
3. Keep learning. One of Dulce’s most important values is continual learning. “There's always something to learn,” she says. And it doesn’t have to be through certifications — you can also learn from those around you. “Be open to others, even if you have different viewpoints.”
How Mentoring Junior Colleagues Can Level Up Your Own Skills: Insight from SeatGeek’s Katya Hott
Katya Hott, currently the UX Research Manager at SeatGeek, was a committed researcher long before she officially moved into the world of UX.
That set her up for success in the field in more ways than one, including to learn more about UX itself: when she was first starting out, she combed LinkedIn to find people who were working on the same things that she was. She cold emailed a few—and ended up with her first-ever mentor.
It wasn’t a traditional mentor-mentee relationship: it wasn’t arranged by a program or company, and both Katya and her “mentor” were at about the same places in their career.
“We didn’t treat it as this formal mentor partnership, but we started meeting regularly,” says Katya. “We were growing our teams at the same time, and we’d share advice over email or coffee.”
Experiencing great mentorship from an industry peer made Katya wonder if she could pay it forward by mentoring someone else. Even if she was just a few years into her career, she had insight to share, right?
Thus kicked off Katya’s homegrown intern mentorship program—and a long history of learning by helping others.
We sat down with Katya to talk more about her experience, from how she got into UX research in the first place and how mentorship has influenced her approach to management.
Language and Learning, Together
Katya has a thing for languages. That includes learning them, making them up, and studying them.
“I knew from when I was little that I wanted to be a teacher,” says Katya. “I was just very interested in words and how language shapes reality, or the other way around.”
That led to studying linguistics, which introduced her to technology. “A lot of what we can do with language study is totally enhanced by technology,” she says.
Katya got hands-on experience working at the intersection of language and technology when she worked as a teacher in Boston and New York. “I was always the youngest teacher, the techie teacher,” she says, referencing the apps she built into her lesson plans. When her principal told her about a grad program at NYU that combined learning and digital media design, she looked into it—and ended up enrolling.
“I was researching what makes a good learning game and how people learn through game play,” she says. “So much of that tied back to what I had learned about how people learn through language and communication.”
She got an internship writing content for an educational games start-up. When she realized no one on the team was doing formal user testing, she offered to bring the game to her teacher friends to get their feedback.
“They were like, ‘Sure, we're a 10 person startup, do whatever you want,’” remembers Katya, smiling. She went out into the field to get feedback, then developed a simple framework to convey the different types of feedback she was getting. The design team was immediately impressed, and Katya realized she’d found her next career pivot. “I loved being the bridge between people who use technology and people who design it,” she says.
Katya then spent a year in edtech doing “playtesting,” the games word for user research, along with some project management.
Along the way, she realized that all the learning she’d done throughout her career, from being in the classroom to writing game content to researching how users used it, was something she could pay forward.
Embracing Mentorship: 3 Key Lessons
When Katya joined that edtech startup full-time after her internship, she knew she had limited experience. “I had training from grad school, and that was about it,” she says. Thus the LinkedIn research and the informal mentorship.
When the next class of interns joined her company, Katya realized she could be a really helpful resource to them.
“I knew exactly what classes they were in. I knew who their professors were. I knew what things they were studying. It became very clear that for each intern that came after me, that I should be involved,” she says.
So she set up weekly meetings to coach them. She did the same thing when she moved to a different company, this time helping to set up their internship pipeline to her grad program and again making the space to help them. Along the way, she was continuing to build her own pool of mentors.
“I was reaching out to people who are more junior than me and to people who are more experienced than me, and realized they must be doing the same thing. There's this whole chain of people who are just learning from each other without being direct managers or teammates,” she reflects.
In mentoring others, Katya learned a few key lessons:
- How to give feedback. As a mentor, Katya found herself in a great environment in which to practice giving feedback. Since she wasn’t the person making the final decisions on whether the interns would get offers back or not, giving them feedback was lower stakes. “It can be a little rattling to give feedback to a direct report, because it feels like it’s so tied to eventual performance reviews. With a mentee, there’s no agenda behind it,” she says.
- How to break complicated ideas down. “I found myself explaining things that I knew inside and out in a way that I didn’t have to do on a regular basis with [my peers],” she says.
- How to maximize productivity as a player-coach. “One-on-ones can be extremely productive,” explains Katya. “I just had a meeting with a more junior team member on our design team who was interested in helping out on a project I’m leading, and instead of giving them homework, I said, ‘We have 20 minutes left in our meeting—let’s do some work.’ If I had said that I didn’t have time for that kind of check in with someone who's not even on my team, that would've never happened.”
All of that experience set Katya up to be a great manager of people when it came time for her to do that. “Everything I needed to do to be a good manager, I’d been practicing for years,” she says. “Becoming a new manager became less scary immediately once I realized I could draw upon my years of experience mentoring.”
A New Challenge at SeatGeek
During the pandemic, Katya’s feelings about working in edtech changed. “The blurred lines of what it meant to be a parent and a teacher were fuzzier than ever,” she says. “It all felt too close to home. I saw the world was pivoting, and thought it was a good time for me to pivot as well.”
She started looking for a role where she could build out a research team (because she’d loved doing that in her past position) in a new, challenging setting. When she saw a UX research role at SeatGeek, she was immediately curious.
“I thought, ‘This is a live event ticketing company in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic—how is this job even posted?’ It piqued my interest,” she says. She reached out, and in her conversations with the SeatGeek team, Katya found herself impressed.
“They were so smart, so resilient, and so creative, steering a company through what could have easily been the end of the organization and figuring out ways to come out much stronger,” she says.
Katya was intrigued by working in a brand-new industry with a brand-new set of challenges, and when they offered her the role, she took it. She spent her first year embedding herself within the organization, learning about what she calls the “research appetite” on different teams, and showing the value that user research and data could add to different parts of the process.
This second year, she’s ready to start setting up her team. Katya is currently hiring for several roles—meaning she will have plenty of opportunities to apply the management approach she’s honed through mentorship.
Go Pay it Forward
Katya has found her mentees naturally, including via people who reach out to express interest in her work. If you’re looking for people to mentor, she recommends leveraging:
- Employee resource groups
- Internship programs
- MeetUp and Slack communities
If you think that you might have something to offer as a mentor, even if you’re earlier on in your career, Katya has one message for you: make the time and do it.
“Don’t be afraid to add more meetings,” she says. “I always make space for mentorship. Doing this work is one of the highlights of my job. Being that open door is so incredibly gratifying, and makes me feel like I’m still learning and growing soft skills. Make the time for it.”
If working at SeatGeek—including on Katya’s team!—interests you, check out their open roles!
An Evening of Tech Talks + Networking with Women Tech Leaders
Join us April 16th from 6pm to 8:30pm at Work-Bench in NYC
If you are a New York-based tech professional who is interested in attending this event, please email hi@powertofly.com to be considered for an invite.
Join PowerToFly and women tech leaders from Bloomberg, Peloton, and TodayTix for an evening of illuminating tech talks and networking.
This invite-only evening will include tech talks and product demos from women tech leaders at each of our featured companies followed by audience Q&A. Whether you are looking for new job opportunities or just want to network with your peers over complimentary food and drinks, we hope you can join us.
The event will be held on April 16th from 6pm to 8:30pm at Work-Bench, located at 110 Fifth Avenue, 5th Floor.
Featured companies include:
- Bloomberg - No other company processes financial data into meaningful and actionable information with the breadth and depth that Bloomberg does. Their 5,000+ engineers and data scientists are dedicated to building and advancing new solutions for the Bloomberg Terminal and enterprise products. Together, Bloomberg's team rolls out new software daily that integrates seamlessly — and immediately — into their clients' workflows.
- Peloton - Peloton is more than a bike. When you join Peloton, you get the opportunity to work alongside the most creative and innovative minds in the field. A few of the benefits and perks of working here are a 401k plan with a 4% match, $100 a month towards your student loans, $100 a month towards a college savings plan; Medical, Dental, Vision and Life Insurance, discounted bikes for you and your friends/family, a complimentary digital subscription service, a great work-life balance.
- TodayTix - Launched in 2013, TodayTix is redefining the way you see theatre. They have created an international ticketing platform that connects global audiences in 13 cities to the $50 billion live entertainment business by helping people secure the best discounted and full-price last minute tickets for the most sought after shows around.
Agenda (Subject to Change)
- 6:00pm - Check-In & Networking over Cocktails & Light Food
- 6:30pm - Event Kickoff by Work-Bench
- 6:35pm - Introductory Remarks by PowerToFly
- 6:40pm - Tech Talks & Audience Q&A with Women Tech Leaders
- Bloomberg - Wendy Kim, Recruiter; Betty Lam, Engineering Manager; Priya Shrivastava, Engineering Manager
- Peloton - Mary Huang, Strategic Program Manager
- TodayTix - Rachel Birnbaum, Director of Vertical Expansion; Kiki Dolan, Director of Geographic Expansion
- 7:20pm - Closing Remarks
- 7:25pm - Networking Continues over Cocktails & Light Food
About Work-Bench: Work-Bench is an enterprise technology-focused VC fund based in New York City. Work-Bench invests in the next era of enterprise founders selling into the Fortune 500 and supports startups through customer acquisition and community. The firm's investments include CoreOS, Cockroach Labs, Algorithmia, Merlon Intelligence, Dialpad, Socure, and other leading enterprise startups. Follow Work-Bench on Twitter and sign up for the 15K+ subscriber Enterprise Weekly newsletter.
About our Events: All RSVP'd attendees are welcome, regardless of race, color, religion, national origin, gender identity, pregnancy, physical or mental disability, or age. If you require assistance to fully participate in this event, please email hi@powertofly.com, and we will contact you to discuss your specific needs.
Unfortunately, PowerToFly cannot admit outside recruiters to this particular event. Please email hi@powertofly.com if you have any questions about this policy.
