Inclusion in Tech

Being an Advocate for Other Women

A woman in the industry was looking for an organization that valued diversity and inclusion. She was one of the first few employees hired for a start-up division of a larger parent company and formed a national, company-wide women’s committee. She recommends that all hiring managers have at least one woman or other diversity candidate in the room during an interview. She also suggests having a peer buddy to provide a safety net if someone in the room tries to shut her down mid-thought. People need to be aware of what needs to change and have introspection to understand why they are not getting what they want or need.

Retaining Women In Tech

After leaving her engineering manager position at Apple due to burnout and lack of supportive leadership, the author started her own small business helping other small business owners with their technological needs. Through this experience, she realized the importance of resilience, an inclusive environment, and strong leadership for women in the tech industry. She encourages women to network outside of their own organization, and to stay in and influence the industry in order to shape the future.

Parent Friendly Work Culture

ITA's Women Influence Chicago initiative brought together tech leaders to discuss best practices for creating inclusive work cultures for parents. Discussions focused on transparency, creating an even playing field, having a robust leave policy, and changing the profession to accommodate working parents. The event was sponsored by Lantern Partners and the top four takeaways were shared.

Succeeding as a New Product Manager

A remote PM for a widely dispersed engineering team in New York had to balance the team's enthusiasm with the company's priorities. To do this, the PM got to know the team through 1:1s, conducted a virtual brainstorming session, and was overly communicative. The PM learned that it is important to understand communication styles, conduct information gathering sessions, and share drafts early and often.

Establishing A Career Ladder By Involving Everyone

When Hired joined, they had a broadly designed career ladder matrix that led to engineers aiming to become managers who had limited experience and inflated titles. To solve this problem, the VP of engineering and a director created a new career ladder with input from the engineering team and feedback from outside the organization. They also did an anonymous poll across the engineering team to determine if they wanted to be re-titled, which resulted in almost all of them voting for it. In the end, they created individualized growth plans for every engineer and only had to re-title two of them. This process taught the importance of involving the engineers in the process and being open and honest.

Creating a Cultural Shift for Effective Meetings: Building a Writing Culture

Poor documentation can be risky for businesses, but adopting a writing culture can help to increase inclusivity, reduce meeting time, and increase productivity. To build a successful writing culture, it is important to make it collaborative, document the process and make it accessible, and encourage people to read it. Remote work requires trust, focus time, and asynchronous ways to collaborate and discuss.