Raji Rajagopalan – Partner Software Engineering Manager at Microsoft

Raji Rajagopalan
Partner Software Engineering Manager at Microsoft

raji circle

Impactful Engineer shares the stories and journeys of women and men who are making significant impact in the software industry. The purpose of Impactful Engineer is to inspire young software engineers to see that there are many paths they can take to move forward in their careers and grow their impact wherever they work.

Profile: http://rajiraj.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rajiraj/

Interviewed by Sharon Xie, Tony Tam,
Kristal Curtis
Editing by Robin Pille


[beautifulquote align=”full” cite=””]You should talk about your work in terms of the value that it is bringing to the people that you are serving.[/beautifulquote]

Tony: Can you briefly tell us about where you currently work and how your journey led you to where you are today?

Raji: I am a partner engineering manager at Microsoft. I have been working at Microsoft for 12 plus years now. Before then, I got my bachelor’s in computer science in India. I did my master’s in computer science in Canada. I then worked for a company called Schneider Electric for three years. So that’s sort of my journey going back. 

Tony: Can you tell us more about your scope of impact within your organization?

Raji: My team’s mission is to help our IT professional customers be the best at their jobs on Windows and Office Platforms. That’s we think about, what we obsess about day in and day out. What do I specifically do?

My role is a combination of a venture capitalist, a therapist or coach, and a culture curator. Here’s what I mean by that.

The first part of my role is like a venture capitalist.  I look for the best ideas possible, those great ideas that are going to be successful, and fund those ideas. And to me, in my day-to-day, I’m looking for ideas coming from my team, ideas coming from myself, ideas coming from my partners and from my customers. And I need to make the decision: is this a good idea for the business? Is it something that I want to fund with people? Is this something that I want to work on, something I want my team to deliver on? So, that is a big portion of what I do. Setting the strategy for the company, finding the best ideas, and grooming those best ideas.

The second part of my role is sort of like a coach. A lot of my time is spent on people: growing people, mentoring people, hiring the best people, making sure that these people are happy, retaining them and making them be the best at their jobs. So that’s like being a coach: I talk to them, I hear them. What are the challenges in their jobs? How can I make them better? Are they being the best human being they could possibly be, both from a personal perspective and a professional perspective.

The last part of my role is more the culture curator. I am looking for the cultural aspects, the values I want to nurture in my team, the culture I want to establish. Things about how we are inclusive, about how we’re all growing up to be emotional intelligent human beings and respectful of each other, providing each other an opportunity to grow and be supportive of each other so that we have the right kind of culture I want to set for my team. So that is my impact within the company.

raji-1.jpegTony: In this journey, where do you think you had the most significant growth and learning experience?

Raji: I learned different things in different stages in my career because at every single point in my career, I intentionally chose to accomplish something that I wanted to be known for. When I was an entry level IC, I wanted to be the champion of engineering excellence within my organization. I chose it because I was passionate about engineering excellence.I knew that there was a gap in my team and I intentionally chose to become the engineering excellence champion. I didn’t think of that at the time as branding. I just wanted to do this. And I grew in that respect, because it was not like I was born an engineering excellence champion. I only knew some things. But I learned a lot about how to drive and influence people towards culture changes, like doing test-driven development or unit tests, and code reviews.

But then, when I became a senior engineer I had this tendency to land myself projects that were screwed up or not on track. Either the code needed to be refactored or, you know, there was something messed up about the project and the people were like “Oh my God, this is the worst project ever.” And I would pick that project intentionally because at that time I wanted to change what I was known for. If a project was screwed up, I wanted people to say “Pick up the phone, call Raji.” So I kind of landed myself those projects and again there was a lot of learning there. It’s not just that I got to be associated with these projects. This was my brand, but it was more. I learned so much from working on these projects that other people had given up on because it was up to me to figure out how to go about fixing them.

Then I became a lead and there was a lot of learning there. My training was all in computer science. No one really teaches you people management and what motivates people, what makes people tick and how to communicate with people in a way where they understand what’s going on and get motivated. When I became a lead, there was a lot of learning in that regard. How to manage people, basic behavioral science, what drives people, and so on. And also how you work with people who are difficult to work with, including managing people out.

And then strategy was what I learned in the next stage of my career. Now I’m a development manager. I have to pick projects that have promise and that are going to make money for the company, right? Strategy was something that I didn’t know how to do before. It’s a journey of learning how to be more strategically savvy.

[beautifulquote align=”full” cite=””]When someone is interrupting me, I don’t think of it as, “Hey they interrupted me because I am a woman.” Instead, I internalize that and say “Oh I need to speak up more,” or “I need to make this point more clearly because it didn’t actually land.”[/beautifulquote]

Sharon: Can you tell us why you decided to make the move from the IC track to the manager track?

Raji: I’m always interested in trying new things. Before I started hiking and running marathons I did not know if I was going to be successful at it. But it interested me. It seemed like there was something that I could learn from that. Maybe I’ll be successful, maybe I’ll like it. In my career, I followed a similar logic. There was an opportunity that came up to lead people. I didn’t know if I was going like it or be good at it, but I thought, What’s the worst that can happen? Maybe I will not like it, maybe I’ll fail. I can always come back and be an IC.” I knew that my skills were not going to go away if I became a manager. So I took a leap and I raised my hand and I said, “I want this opportunity, can I become a lead?” and I ended up liking it. In another life, I’d probably be a behavioral scientist because I like learning about people. I like learning about why people do certain things and what causes people to not do things a certain way and so on. So I like that aspect of psychology and human behavior and being a leader of people gives you that opportunity.

Sharon: You say you like to try new things, but I see that you’ve been at Microsoft for quite a while. What keeps you there and what motivates you every day?

Raji: So there are a few things I consider to be important when I make a decision on whether to be in a team or not. Keep in mind that Microsoft is a huge company with lots of different varieties of technologies, different teams, a lot of people that you can work with. So, very often I have this decision point of changing my team.

For example, I want to go from working in Azure to working in Windows. Within Windows, I want to go from working on the client side writing kernel code to writing service code, Windows update code. Very often you have to make these decisions, so I give them a lot of thought. I like being intentional about my decisions.

What keeps me in a team or makes me want to change teams? I look for four things.

Number one: I want to have really good people that I work with. People that I love, managers above me that I really like and enjoy and respect. People that are working with me that I respect and love. People who work for me that I absolutely admire. So, people are a very important factor. I want to make my decision based on that.

Second, I want to work on interesting projects that have customer impact and business value. I think that also is important for your career growth. Obviously, there are lots of projects you can work on. You can work with interesting technologies and you can build cool tools, but, it’s important to pick things to work on that are going to have business value and customer value. At the end of the day, you want to have customers, humans that are going to use what you’re building. So that’s important.

The third thing is that I want to constantly be learning. I get excited every day if I come in and I get to learn something great. Every stage of my career has been an immense learning journey for me.

Lastly, I want to have career growth. I always want to feel like my career is not stagnant  and that it’s obvious that people are recognizing what I bring to the table.

Microsoft has given me all four of these factors. These are the biggest reasons I stayed within the company. The mission of the company is to “empower every single person and organization on the planet.” That really really resonates with my core value as an individual. At Microsoft, we do a lot of things around the world to make sure that we are empowering people. And the people that I’ve worked with, the ideas that I come across on a day-to-day basis, have made my life a lot richer. Every once a while I think if I didn’t work in technology, if I were at home doing something else like writing, because I love to write, then I would be at home by myself, and I would miss out on opportunities to meet and understand people that are so smart and have so many bright ideas.

[beautifulquote align=”full” cite=””]Even if you feel you might not be up to a particular opportunity, if you raise your hand and give yourself a chance, you might fumble but you will learn.[/beautifulquote]

Sharon: What has your experience been like as a woman in tech?

Raji: My experience has been somewhat unique, and I’m puzzled over that every once a while when I talk to people that I coach. See, I come from India and in India, I was never told that I was not good at math. I hear that here a lot of women enter into technology with that sort of social messaging already given to them, which was not the message for me. We have other problems in India, but that was not the problem that I faced. In fact, people were constantly encouraging me, “Hey, you know, you’re good at math” and so it never occurred to me that I could not be a computer science engineer. I mean I did not choose to be a computer engineer. That was not my first choice. I wanted to be a doctor. Once I chose my career, I did not think that I would not be a good tech person because I was a woman. Instead, I had challenges with communication.

English is not my first language, there was a point in my life that I was new in this country, I would not pick up the phone because I was worried that I wouldn’t understand what they are saying because my own English was so broken. This was 20 years ago. My English was so broken that when I first came  to California and the phone would ring, I would think “Oh my God, the phone is ringing and I cannot pick up the phone because they will speak English and they will speak so fast.” I wouldn’t understand what they were saying.

I had to work constantly to overcome that, but I never felt like the men that I was working with were deliberately disrespecting me because I was a woman. Perhaps I just had the good fortune of working with really awesome men in my career, but more likely, it is that I tend to reframe my problems. When someone is interrupting me, I don’t think of it as, “Hey they interrupted me because I am a woman.” Instead, I internalize that and say “Oh I need to speak up more,” or “I need to make this point more clearly because it didn’t actually land.” There are some unique aspects to my own experience as a woman in tech, and so I’m constantly aware of the fact that you cannot take an isolated experience and generalize it.

But I have the fortune of working with many women and many quiet people, and that’s where I derive my advice for folks that ask me for this kind of advice.

Sharon: What advice do you have for women in the tech industry?

Raji: I wrote a blog post about this topic after my conversation with the woman engineer whom I mentor. In my mind, the advice for a woman in tech is not very different than the advice that I give to men in tech. It’s more about personalities than even gender. I meet lots of men who are quiet and introverted and they don’t know how to get across their point, and they get interrupted all the time, which is also a challenge that I hear from a lot of the women engineers that I work with. “How do I work with people who are constantly cutting me off? Who don’t recognize even my presence in the room?”

My advice is, number one, like I said before, pick the project that is going to help you be successful. You have to be passionate about what you work on and you have to make sure that the project that you’re working on is not some grunt project, but it is going to deliver customer value and business value.

And when an opportunity comes, like it did for me with my switch from IC to a lead, take it and give yourself a chance. Remember, I actually did not know whether I was going to be a good lead.

I did not know if people would respect me. But I raised my hand still. I strongly believe in that. Even if you feel you might not be up to a particular opportunity, if you raise your hand and give yourself a chance, you might fumble but you will learn. For a lot of women, the first barrier in their career is confidence. This is true for some men as well. You have to have confidence in yourself. Granted, a lot of people placed confidence in me, starting with my own dad, and also my mentors and all the people that helped me grow in my career. But first and foremost you need to have confidence in yourself. You need to know that you’re going to figure it out. Things may not be so crystal clear right now, but you’ll learn and you’ll figure it out. So, I think the first thing is pick projects that you are passionate about and that have business value, and then raise your hand and volunteer for leadership roles on projects like that.

And the second thing is actually own it on your turf every single day. Do a very good job at what you are doing. You have to be thorough about it. You have to understand what you are doing and you have to really deliver successfully for your team. And lastly, which is a challenge for a lot of women and a lot of introverted quiet people, is to talk about what you’re doing. Talk about it, even if you’re shy. You don’t have to talk about “Sharon, me, I did this.” Talk about your work in terms of the value that it is bringing to the people that you are serving. The work that I do, like I said before, brings a lot of value to IT professionals. It helps them understand their own enterprises and it helps them be the best at their jobs. So I always focus on telling the customer’s story rather than my own story. But you have to tell the story of what you’re building, whether it’s from a customer’s perspective or something else. If you’re just quiet and don’t talk about your team, your people, and yourself, then no one is going to do that for you. So that’s my advice for how you can be successful as a woman in tech.

[beautifulquote align=”full” cite=””]I learned different things in different stages in my career because at every single point in my career I intentionally chose something that I wanted to be known for. [/beautifulquote]

Tony: Do you have any advice for talking about your work, whether it be an elevator pitch, hallway conversations, writing, or giving formal talks? What advice do you have for how to do this well?  

Raji: Yes. I think the key thing here is that whatever the medium of your message is, whether you’re writing, speaking, or just giving someone a hallway or elevator pitch, you have to be clear about what the core of your message is going to be. Because one of the challenges I see is that people ramble on and their message gets lost. So, you have to ask yourself “What is the core of the message that I want to convey to this person?” But then, it’s not just the message itself, you have to understand the person that you’re talking to. What is the currency of that person? Is this person a V.P., is this person a customer, is this person a reporter, is this person an engineer that you want to attract and recruit in your team, or is this a fellow engineer? For every single person you want to deliver that core message in a slightly different way, the angle will have to be different. It’s not about changing your message, it’s more about how to resonate with that person, because everybody sees the world through their own unique lens. And so you have to understand that a V.P. will look at your message from the business perspective, versus an engineer who is probably looking at it from a technical perspective. So how you’re conveying what you’re working on should resonate with the person that is your audience.

Tony: Do you have any advice for getting your message through when people are talking over each other in a meeting?

Raji: I saw someone do this recently in a big meeting that I attended. I’ll will give this example and then I’ll circle back to some of the concrete tips that I have. So, this was a big meeting, thirty people, or something like that. There was a mix of senior people and junior people, and people were talking over each other. At one point, this woman just stood up and everyone just looked at her. She stood and then she made a point and she made it very clearly, and then she said “Now we are going to listen to this person, and then we are going to move on.” So, she did two things there. She made her presence known just by the act of physically standing up. People noticed that. Wow, what is she doing? Why is she standing up? Once she had people’s attention she landed her point but she also did one more thing which I really appreciated. She said, this person wants to say something. Let’s hear him. Let’s hear what he’s trying to say and let’s move to the next topic. So she kind of set some of the ground rules there, that when someone is trying to talk you need to give them the chance to talk. I think the ground rules are so important. When you are driving a meeting or even if you are a participant in a meeting, I think it’s useful for you to set the ground rules. Like, we are meant to listen to each other. If someone feels that they are not being heard they are going to raise their hand or stand up or whatever. Raising your hands helps sometimes. But I think setting the ground rules is important because people are people. They don’t intend to be rude, just in the heat of things they run on, because they want to be heard themselves.

So it’s human nature. So at that point it makes sense to call it out. “It looks like things are getting heated. It looks like there’s lots of voices that are getting drowned out in the room. So let’s take a step back and reset this meeting.” So be aware of what’s going on in the room and see who is getting heated up and step in to calm the temperature down.

One thing to remember is projecting your voice. A lot of people have soft voices. Others are not even aware that a soft-spoken person is trying to say something. You might not even know you have a quiet voice. I spoke at a get-together recently. We were celebrating a milestone achieved by one of our directors. I spoke and didn’t have a mic. I always believe that my voice will carry through. I thought that I had a loud voice, but it turned out I did not. I was talking to the crowd and I was thanking this person for doing an amazing job. And then I see my friend standing in front of me motioning with her hands to say “Raise your voice, raise your voice.” And I was very thankful she gave me that cue because I did not know that people couldn’t hear me. So I think projecting your voice helps.

One of my colleagues gave me this advice recently: Even if you don’t say a lot in the meeting and you’re not the loudest voice in the room, how you say something matters. If you believe in what you’re saying, make sure that comes across. It’s important not to sound tentative, like “Maybe I know this, maybe I don’t know this.” This advice applies when you really believe something, obviously. If you don’t believe in it then you have to make that clear, because you don’t want people to take away the wrong message. When you believe something it’s important to sound authoritative and have conviction in what you say.

[beautifulquote align=”full” cite=””]When you pitch an idea to senior people, show them that you’ve thought it through and it’s going to make the business successful or make them as individuals successful. [/beautifulquote]

Tony: How can you best influence decisions when people ultimately making decisions are more senior than you are? For example, what if you are trying to come up with a new design direction and trying to influence somebody two levels above you?

Raji: Think about it from the senior person’s perspective. Put yourself in the shoes of the senior person. Obviously, most people working for companies want to be successful. And they can be successful if they make the best decisions possible. There are obvious biases and things that are screwed up every once in a while. Most of the time, people want to pick decisions, designs, and technologies that are going to make them successful as well. What they are looking for, a senior person, is some level of conviction and credibility in what you are proposing. When you pitch an idea to senior people, show them that you’ve thought it through and it’s going to make the business successful or make them as individuals successful.

So your challenge then is to prove or show that you have thought through this and that your idea is going to give this person the best chance of success. And you can do this in many ways. You can just have one-on-ones with people. Find the influencers of the person you need to convince and have one-on-ones with them to say “Hey, here is my idea and this is why I think it is going to be successful.” Or, have a one-on-one with the person you’re trying to influence. But prototyping, having a little bit of actual validation that something is working, also helps. You have a design idea, you’re thinking about how to use a cool tool, or whatever. If you do a little bit of a prototype and show it to that person, when someone can concretely see something in action there’s going to be more belief in the idea itself.

You can also write up a white paper or some kind of document to pitch your idea, and do prototypes, but ultimately you have to have talk about it.

[beautifulquote align=”full” cite=””]If you want to progress in your career, you have to make sure that people know you, and not just the people you work with on a day-to-day basis. [/beautifulquote]

Tony: Have you seen a situation where something that you were doing or that other people were doing was overshadowing your impact?

Raji: I think the one thing that people with an engineering background tend to overlook is making sure that people know you. This is actually true in my own experience. When I became a manager of managers, I walked into my manager’s office for my first one-on-one thinking we should talk about how I will run the team. Then he sits me down he tells me “Raji, I’ve heard so much about you. You were technically kickass. Every single person I’ve talked to talks about how you’ve run these difficult projects and you come across amazingly from an engineering point of view . But outside of this little world of our team, people don’t know you. If you want to progress in your career, you have to make sure that people know you, and not just the people you work with on a day-to-day basis. You have to be a known commodity inside Microsoft and externally as well.” I did not spend a lot of time early on in my career explicitly for relationship building. I would sit in my office, finish my features, finish my bug fixes, write my tests, and so on. I would work with my seven people that were on my team and we had a very good relationship. We knew each other. We were friends and all that. But then I did not spend a lot of time going out and seeking out people that were going to be influential. I realized, based on this conversation with my new manager, that this was not just for my career, because that’s in a way secondary, but if I wanted to advance my business in a certain way, I could not do it on my own. If I had an idea and I wanted to pitch the idea and I wanted the best backing for the idea, I wanted to make sure that there were people that know me and would trust me. And so then I started actually very intentionally and consciously figuring out who are the people I need to go and start understanding more. Have coffees, have lunches, and meetings and so on to understand what they’re doing, first of all. How can their organization help me and how can my team help them. How can I personally help them. So, figure out who are the people that you need to build relationships with. Even if you do an amazing job, at some point you want to know people that are not in your immediate sphere. Your close friends should not be the only ones who know about you and can speak well about you. You want more people to speak well of the work that you are doing.

It’s very uncomfortable. I know how uncomfortable it is. I’m by nature not a very extroverted person but I know a lot of times you just have to put yourself outside the comfort zone and go seek out these relationships. At the end of the day, I have come to enjoy these relationships that I’ve built over over time. I think that is one thing that we cannot neglect doing.

[beautifulquote align=”full” cite=””]For me now, in this stage of my career, my mission is making a difference in other people’s lives. [/beautifulquote]

Tony: What question did I not ask you I should have asked?

Raji: What do I want out of my career?

Raji: If you were a business, then you have to do a lot of planning. You sit down and think about as an organization, why do we exist? What is the vision? What is the mission for this organization? What are the cultural values you want this organization to have? We should do the same thing for ourselves. Ask yourself: “Why do I exist? What is my mission in life?” And it can be different things at different points in life. I have done this many times, and my answers have been different in different times. My mission ended up evolving. For me now, in this stage of my career, my mission is making a difference in other people’s lives. I think it’s not about just making a living anymore. I really, really, really want to make a difference in other people’s lives. I want to make sure that it’s not just me but I lift other people to the top as well. So I think that’s one thing that I really want to nail. Everybody should think what they want to do. What is it about at this stage in your life: is it about making a buck? Perhaps it is. You still haven’t paid off your student loans? You still have things you need to take care of? From that perspective, it’s okay in this stage of your life to want to make a buck. But then, over time, constantly think about what do you want in this stage of your life and have that answer ready for yourself.

Tony: How far out do you project that mission? Do you plan five years, ten years out?

Raji: I usually do only two years. Because every couple of years there’s some kind of inflection in my own life where I have to rethink this. Even if there is no major inflection, from a life perspective, it is a good idea to check in. “Is this still what is me? Are these my core values? Do I still value freedom and integrity and being able to help others? Are these my core values at this point in my life?” Perhaps it’s different in two years, but we don’t know. I plan for a timeline for two years, but more often than not, I end up planning every year.

Tony: Awesome, thank you so much for your time.

Raji: By the way, it was so much fun doing this interview, and thanks for launching the interviews on Impactful Engineer. I really appreciate what you are doing and I want to see what the end product looks like. You already said that you have four interviews already done. This is awesome. I think there is a lot of potential in here and you should keep working on it.

Tony: Thank you so much. I know you’re pushing me to think bigger. Thank you.


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Personal blog

Read more of Raji’s personal blog posts and her wonderful photographs at https://rajigopal.weebly.com/-me.html

More Background Questions

Tony: Could you explain what a partner manager is?

Raji: A partner engineering manager is the last level before the executive level at Microsoft. As a partner manager I am a manager of managers. So I have leads under me who have ICs under them. Twelve years ago, I started at Microsoft at level 59, which is the entry level. I got promoted to SDE2, and then a senior engineer, and then principal engineer. Between when I was a senior and principal engineer, I became a lead, which means managing other engineers. So that was both an expansion of my role, moving to managing people from being an IC, but also a promotion in levels. Very recently actually, just last month, I was promoted to the partner level. It’s one of the biggest things that has happened to me in my life from a career perspective. Out of 95,000 people here at Microsoft, there are 113 women who are partners.

Lyn Campbell : Corporate VP, Global Operations at Proofpoint

Lyn Campbell
Corporate VP, Global Operations at Proofpoint

Impactful Engineer shares the stories and journeys of women and men who are making significant impact in the software industry. The purpose of Impactful Engineer is to inspire young software engineers to see that are many paths they can take to move forward in their careers and grow their impact wherever they work.

Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lyncampbell
Interviewed by Tony Tam
Editing by Hunter Shen
Reading Time: 24 minutes
Artwork by Cate Tam


TT: Where do you currently work and what is your role within the company? Also what is the scope of impact that you have within your organization?

LC: I work for a cybersecurity company called Proofpoint, a leading provider of security solutions to our customers. I’m the Corporate Vice President of Global Operations. Proofpoint Operations includes our NOC (network operations), our network team, the data center, and data center technicians. We have engineers who are responsible for core infrastructure and then we have DevOps engineers who are responsible for product infrastructure—the applications that are running on our core infrastructure. Operations at Proofpoint also include the CapEx (Capital & Expenditures) responsibilities for the company. I’m also responsible for our compliance, both our own as well as the compliance guidelines of our customers. For example, we have a large number of financial institutions that use our products and they have compliance requirements that we need to meet as a vendor. I’m also responsible for our security team, our information security, and the application security for the company. I’ve been here for almost four years. I report to our CEO who is someone that I’ve worked with twice previously over my career. I have a phenomenal team and I work for a phenomenal company.

TT: That a fantastic summary. I looked through your profile and at your college degree. It was the first time I looked at it. Your college degree was actually in English. It’s the same major that my daughter actually hopes to major in.

LC: Good for her!

[beautifulquote align=”full”]You can look at someone’s technical skills and know that they are brilliant technically and maybe they’re even a good communicator. But when you start going up that vertical ladder for individual contributors and technology people, to be really good you have to be an influencer.[/beautifulquote]

TT: It was surprising to me how you got here. Could you talk about your journey, and how you got into this part of the industry.

LC: Sure. I originally wanted to be a film critic. My goal was to become the next Pauline Kael. And so I got my degree in English and also studied a lot of film and film literature. But when I graduated from college, as you might have guessed, Pauline Kael’s job wasn’t available. And so I started working in the reinsurance industry. There was a technology aspect that I sort of fell into through selling a computer version of the product to other companies. That kind of morphed into a QA (Quality Assurance) function, which then finally morphed into Tech Pubs (technical publications). And so I became a tech writer and a manager of tech writers, which opened a door to Sybase. Sybase was looking to expand their database technology and they needed someone to start up a new Tech Pubs team. And so I left the insurance industry and went to work at Sybase and my CEO now was my VP then. As I got more responsibility at Sybase for more and more documentation, I got to know him pretty well and when he left Sybase to become the CEO of an early SaaS company, he brought me over to run a small business unit of services for our target market as well as tech pubs and QA.

What I found through that period was how much I liked working with engineers. I like how engineers think. It is very different from my own way of thinking. But I was really kind of looking to expand all the experience that I was getting in the various companies beyond working closely with engineers, so I started working directly with customers by going to another SaaS company where I managed account managers and first and second level support. And at that company was an Operations engineer that I knew who left there and went to Yahoo. And while he was at Yahoo he found that Yahoo Media was looking to expand its service engineering function. They were hiring a lot of service engineers and they needed to hire a handful of managers and so he convinced me that what I didn’t know about technology I could learn well enough to be a good people manager at Yahoo.

After getting into Yahoo, what I found was that my liking for working with engineers was in part due to my strong communication skills. I like the challenge of understanding the context, if not the code, and I’m able to synthesize information and deliver it to different kinds of audiences. And so because I was able to speak and write articulately, I got more responsibility at Yahoo and had some really good mentors at Yahoo who helped me further develop.

And those years at Yahoo brought me all the way back to a former VP who was the CEO at Proofpoint. At Yahoo, there was a period where we had some stability issues for a time. I was having lunch with a longtime friend who worked for the CEO at Proofpoint and he was telling me about their outages and I was telling him about my Yahoo outages. And he said “hey, why don’t you come to Proofpoint and help us improve our infrastructure.” And he pitched the idea to the CEO—and here I am. So I think it was not so much the aptitude for technology as much as the aptitude for working with technologists that got me to this place. The seven years at Yahoo and the four in the Proofpoint have absolutely been the most rewarding of my career.

[beautifulquote align=”full”]There are two things that I tell people about meetings. First, I don’t care what your company culture is, shut your laptop, put your phone down and be present.[/beautifulquote]

TT: I have a follow up on that question. We connected on LinkedIn and you say you are a strong supporter of women in tech. Do you feel like you’re an industry insider or because of your background do you feel like you’re an outsider? Are you able to look at the industry from an outsider’s viewpoint?  

LC: It’s a really good question Tony. I think I have a foot in both worlds. I’ve been doing this now for more than 15 years if you aggregate the experience with working with tech companies. So I don’t feel like I’m an outsider. I’ve certainly had to develop my technical skills to be conversant as well as to understand a lot of the principles behind them. But I am still an outsider in the sense it’s not the technology; it’s that language and the words that we use—the way we express ourselves, the way that we write—is very very important to me. I’m always going to be an English major regardless of what I’m doing. My philosophy, which is a slight tangent from what you asked me, is if somebody hadn’t given me the job at Yahoo, I never would have found that I have affinity for operations and the kinds of things that we do in operations. And if I hadn’t had that opportunity, all of the things in my life that have happened over the last 15 years wouldn’t have happened. Because of that, I feel a tremendous amount of alignment to women in technology because I think a lot of times women have fewer opportunities. Whether or not there are reasons behind that, I don’t want to say.

But I literally also make opportunities for other people because I really do believe in paying it forward. So, to give you an example, the guy who was the project manager for remodeling my kitchen had a phenomenal customer-facing skill set. He also was able to balance about ten different subcontractors, deal with purchasing, deal with pricing, and deal with me as a customer—and I can be a little demanding. At the time, I was realizing that I needed to up-level the whole purchasing function within Proofpoint, from procurement all the way through to deployment into our data centers. And so I asked this guy who had been in construction his entire adult life, “Hey, do you want to give high tech a try?” He’s been with us now for almost three years. He gets recognized in quarterly meetings. All of the ops people and the engineers love him. He’s doing a phenomenal job and gets to spend more time with his family, and there’s zero physical labor. His whole life changed—and it wouldn’t have, if someone wasn’t willing to take a chance on him.

I brought another woman into the company who was one of my Account Managers and who took over the leadership for that team after I left my second SaaS company. I brought her in to first run the Operations program management office and then our Compliance team. She’s knocking it out of the park and utilizing all of her skills, but in a different function entirely. Everybody just needs a chance to show what they can do and trying to find those opportunities is my responsibility, whether for women specifically or people who want to further their career. That’s what I’m here for.

[beautifulquote align=”full”]The difference between feeling like you are controlling your day or your day is controlling you is to consciously decide what you’re NOT going to do today. Try something for me. Make your list and then take 20 percent off the list. Just decide that you are not going to do this, this, this, and this today. .[/beautifulquote]

TT: When I started the Impactful Engineer project, I wanted to interview an equal number of women and men. My original idea was to interview only individual contributors, not leaders in management. I thought I wanted to show the path forward for individual contributors. However, what I found was in our Senior Principal level, there were probably fewer women in IC roles than female VPs. It was incredible. I wonder if what you’re saying about opportunities is also true of our current senior level IC roles. Because senior ICs need peers to nominate and support them to get over an artificial wall, because we try to run pattern recognition to recognize if a person fits in a club.

LC: Right, for sure. I think some of it also has to do with the fact that to be a really good leader and to be a high performing individual contributor, you have to have pretty solid influencing skills. I think that because women at times may have fewer opportunities and potentially fewer mentors who are helping them develop some of those skills, they have the additional pressure of trying to grow their careers without the benefit of some of the coaching that men seem to get more directly.

You know, you can look at someone’s technical skills and know that they are brilliant technically and maybe they’re even a good communicator. But when you start going up that vertical ladder for individual contributors and technology people, to be really good you have to be an influencer. And so I think that it’s key for that skill set to be nurtured very early in both men and women.

But we may need to over-rotate a little bit on behalf of women so that we can catch up. While I think that Sheryl Sandberg sounds like a fantastic person, I think we’ve gone a little overboard on the whole Lean In movement; it’s become more of a catch phrase and now we’re all leaning in all the time. But there is more to it than that, and one of the things she said much earlier—it was quoted in her first New Yorker interview—was that if you offer an opportunity to a man that’s outside of his skill set, many men tend to say “sure, no problem,” even though they don’t know how to do whatever the thing is, whereas women tend more often to say “I don’t know how to do that” and hang back. From talking to people in my network, men and women, it seems to hold true very frequently.

If we were to spend more time with women early on, building awareness in how many of us think by default, and how to think differently, and how to develop our soft skills in addition to technical skills, we can do more. Because it seems for women that we need more than just influence; we also have to carve away at that notion that “I don’t know how to do that, therefore I can’t.”

[beautifulquote align=”full”]Everything that you say to your manager is going through a filter. So if you’re one of those people who constantly brings a lot of negatives or challenges, your manager will come to expect that of you and see you as more negative.[/beautifulquote]

TT: Do you have any tips about how you stay productive, how you protect your time while managing a large organization.

LC: I have one really good one that’s particularly relevant. The company that I was at prior to joining Yahoo was a small SaaS company and the CFO was a woman I admired greatly. My teams were all customer facing, and my entire day was interrupt-driven. Our customers were so sensitive to stability at the time that we had to over-communicate whenever the Ops team needed to apply patches or do anything in production that MIGHT be noticeable. And one of my responsibilities was to notify everybody every time we were going to make a change, which was just not a scalable way to run, and as a result, I was just constantly overwhelmed.  

The CFO came by my office one day and said “You know, you look frazzled. What’s going on?” By the way, that’s the biggest thing I’m still working on because I still don’t do a good job keeping my face impassive. Anyway, I was telling her how overwhelmed I was feeling. She said “What’s your normal process?” And I said “Well my normal processes is that I get in super early when it’s quiet, I make a list of everything that I need to do, and then I attack the list.” And she said “OK, so, how’s that working for you?” I replied that I was never able to get to everything. And she said, “The difference between feeling like you are controlling your day or your day is controlling you is to consciously decide what you’re NOT going to do today. Try something for me. Make your list and then take 20 percent off the list. Just decide that you are not going to do this, this, this, and this today. I don’t care when you do it in your workflow—just practice consciously choosing not to do certain ‘must do’ things.” And it was the single best piece of coaching on how to not feel overwhelmed by aspects of a demanding job that I’ve ever received, and I’ve relied on it for years. And I find that it works so well, if I occasionally don’t manage to grab a little bit of quiet time and decide what I’m not going to do, I really do feel like I’m flailing a bit and I can’t lead effectively if I seem scatterbrained or distraught. I always try to make sure that I’m controlling all of my inbound, even the stuff that comes to me on the fly, and just say “You know what? I’m not going to do that today.” Eventually, it became largely subconscious, and that’s how I’ve managed to keep my sanity over the years.

[beautifulquote align=”full”]A lot of the credit for mentoring has to go to people who cared enough about me to give me feedback in a way that I could absorb it.  Because it took me several years to be able to absorb feedback with gratitude as opposed to feeling “Ow, ow, ow, that hurts.[/beautifulquote]

TT: And do you have a process of ranking, even in your head?

LC: There are certainly buckets of ranking. Whoever my boss is at any given time is always number one.Then customers. Then the people who work for me, and there I try to be mindful of the balance between people who are growing in their careers and people who are struggling. I try to stick to some of the great teachings at Yahoo about facing forward and not overly investing in the strugglers and instead investing in people who are growing.

So those are kind of the three buckets that I tend to think in terms of. At my level, they wind up being interchangeable to some degree because I’ve found the higher I report in my career the more it’s easy to see the intertwining of all of those things. It’s not as stratified as people think—there are those three, and then most other stuff that can be punted when the day is overly busy.

TT: You talked about a mentor or several mentors. Could you please describe some things that you carry with you that you still practice from these mentors?

LC: A lot of the credit for mentoring has to go to people in my Yahoo career who cared enough about me to give me feedback in a way that I could absorb it. Because it took me several years to be able to absorb feedback with gratitude as opposed to feeling “Ow, ow, ow, that hurts.” Early on, when I got promoted to Director, I got pulled into a conference room one day by my VP at the time, and she said “You need to remember that you’re on a stage.” She knew I was a Disneyland person, so she said “Think about being a Disneyland cast member. The other cast members look to you. If Snow White is having a bad day, Mickey Mouse is going to freak out a little, as are the children. And so you really do need to remember that you’re on a stage whether it’s walking through the hallway or in a meeting.” As I said earlier, working on keeping my face “open” has probably been the hardest thing for me to do but it is something that I try to stay conscious of and whenever I’m in my office with my door shut, before I open it and walk out into what is basically a large open space, I try to remember to smile, or at the very least not frown.

There’s one other thing which is kind of odd but is very important. Because of my non-technical background, I had a lot of trouble with impostor syndrome for the first several years at Yahoo. I know impostor syndrome is something that often gets assigned to women in general, but I actually talk to a lot of guys about it and men feel it too. I struggled so much that at one point I even tried to resign, but a senior VP intervened and stopped me from leaving, and also gave me a raise to convince me to stay. That was this weird sort of validation for me—I couldn’t be an impostor because they were choosing to pay me more rather than lose me. I also talked to my boss at the time who told me, “You’re the only one in the world who has this job. There’s nobody else in the world who is responsible for this collection of things. You’re unique.” So those two people’s feedback and support helped me to finally put aside this notion that I’m an English major hanging out at tech companies and sooner or later somebody is going figure out that I don’t know what I’m doing. I had never managed a network team before I came to Proofpoint, as well as some other areas in what I’m responsible for now. But I don’t have that impostor syndrome pulling me back into a lack of confidence. Fortunately, I have more of the attitude of  “You know what? I’ll figure it out,” or “I’ll trust the people I work with to know, and we’ll do it together.”

So, I think those mentors all really had a tremendous influence on me.

[beautifulquote align=”full”]I think that because women at times may have fewer opportunities and potentially fewer mentors who are helping them develop influencing skills, they have the additional pressure of trying to grow their careers without the benefit of some of the coaching that men seem to get more directly.[/beautifulquote]

TT: When I mentor young engineers one of the first things I tell them is, your job as an engineer is to make your manager’s job super easy to promote you. They want to promote you. Some engineers don’t understand that. Your job is to make it super simple for them. And part of that is just do your job well and do more than they asked you to do. The second thing I tell especially women is, in meetings make sure to say something, ask a question, contribute something in the dialogue, never be silent, because that’s time you just lost, and that’s an opportunity lost, especially when your boss or your VP is in the same meeting. Besides those, is there other advice you would give to young engineers?

LC: There’s a very important component to the second suggestion that I have heard quite a bit, and honestly that advice predates both of us. But what I noticed from the really ambitious people is that they can be so interested in contributing and getting their spot in the conversation that sometimes what they’re adding isn’t always valuable. There are times when being silent, if done correctly, also forms a good impression.

There are two things that I tell people about meetings. First, I don’t care what your company culture is, shut your laptop, put your phone down and be present. I’m not the only person who evaluates others in meetings. People who are sitting there typing away are either are too busy, which is a problem for their manager, or they just don’t understand how important it is to be present, make eye contact, follow the people who are talking, and be 100 percent focused. We’re not as good at multitasking as we like to think we are. You miss things when you’re in your phone or laptop. Being present allows a person to contribute much more meaningfully because they are listening to what is said and they’re watching what’s going on in the room. Those things matter.

The second thing is about body language. I just I hired a guy in a remote office and we did an all-hands meeting to introduce him to everybody—video for multiple locations except for the office in which he is based. He was in a curious position; leaning backward, and slumped sideways in his chair. It was hard to separate the body language of—tired? Overly relaxed?—from his talk track about being super glad to be here. They just didn’t align. So, don’t just be present by shutting your laptop, be present by looking interested, sitting up straight, having body language that shows you want to be there. Because sometimes, when you’re competing with a bunch of other people, you have to also rely on non-verbal cues to stay noticed in a meeting.

Also, to complement your suggestions about making it easier for your manager to promote you: one of the things that also helps is to bear in mind is that everything that you say to your manager is going through a filter. So if you’re one of those people who constantly brings a lot of negatives or challenges, your manager will come to expect that of you and see you as more negative. That’s not to say you can’t vent. But tell your manager, “Hey, look, I’m frustrated. I need to vent for a minute before I tell you what I want to do about it.” Help your manager help you by cueing them that you know  you’re not at your best, and then moving on to a more positive place. You know, there’s a lot of communication and packaging that goes into all of these interactions that honestly matters.

TT: I’ll add a little bit to that. The advice I gave to this young engineer—and she might feel like I’m overdoing it—was this: Every meeting I go to, I prep ahead of time. Either the same amount of time or more than the meeting itself. So I go in there more prepared than anybody. And if somebody wants me to, I could probably control the agenda if I wanted. Besides what I said, is there any other tips on meetings that you would give to younger people?

LC: Absolutely. If you are going into a meeting and you know that you want to influence the outcome, whatever that is—you may be doing an architecture review and you’ve got a competing idea for the design or you’re going into a post mortem and you really believe that the root cause is wrong, then the place to begin your influence is pre-meeting. Go find another attendee in that meeting and run your idea past them. You don’t really want to surprise people in a meeting. You just don’t wind up getting A) buy-in, or B) the productivity that you want. Because if you throw a big thing out there that nobody’s expecting, the meeting takes three steps backward and then everybody has to get on the same page and then go forward.

And so, go to someone else who’s in the meeting and let them know what it is that you’re concerned about and let them know what it is you’re going to mention. Because again, it goes back to influence. You want to get people to join you in whatever that thought leadership is going to be. And the way that you do that are through multi-channels as opposed to just in that meeting space.

[beautifulquote align=”full”]For women, we need more than just influence; we also have to carve away at that notion that “I don’t know how to do that, therefore I can’t.”[/beautifulquote]

TT: So your advice does compliment my advice that you have to spend time before the meeting.

LC: I think we’re numb to meetings largely. And I think that people just kind of go from meeting to meeting to meeting and they don’t think about the value that their presence can add. The people that I’ve seen do well are the people like you who prep for the meetings or people who are present in the meetings or people who use the meeting for its intended purpose rather than to show people how bright they are. And I’ve been able to correlate those behaviors with people that I’ve watched rise. It’s the people who really do show up in all senses that tend to do well over time.

[beautifulquote align=”full”]So I think it was not so much the aptitude for technology as much as the aptitude for working with technologists that got me to this place. [/beautifulquote]

TT: What personal philosophy has contributed to you growing your impact over your long career? I have noticed that you are a “people person” and that groups of people tend to be very loyal to you.

LC:  The thing I have learned a long long time ago that has worked for me in every job that I’ve had pretty much since I started working at Sybase in 1993—so a really long time—is this: If you treat people well, and by that I mean you have empathy for them, you are genuinely interested in helping them grow, whether it’s growing a skill set or growing their career, and you are as fair as you can be and empathetic overall to the best of your ability, then they will do good work for you, regardless. And I think that putting people first and knowing—not hoping, really knowing—that good work comes from that, allows you to be able to help them balance their personal lives and their jobs. There’s a balance that comes by putting people first and trusting that they will deliver for you. I’ve never not found that to work. Each time you get to have that opportunity to prove that in action just makes it that much more of a core competency going forward. I’m not saying that putting people first means that you become some sort of nonprofit for making people feel good all the time, and I’ve certainly had to let people go many times in my career. But when you trust that from good comes more good, the philosophy itself doesn’t fail.

TT: Do you have any advice on being mentored, either formally or informally? For example, how do you ask for mentorship or even figure out who would be a good mentor for you?

LC: I’m going to talk about informal mentoring first because I think it’s super important. So, we’re all competing for time, right? We don’t have enough time, and each person that we deal with takes a little bit away. I think that there’s an implied notion that you need to have time to either be a mentor or seek mentorship. And one of the things that I tell people that I work with is that we all have slightly different viewpoints and we’re all in different places. Don’t ever miss an opportunity for informal mentorship. And by that I mean, in a meeting if you know going in that it’s going to be a tough meeting for you, go to someone whose opinion you value, not necessarily somebody you like or that you are a pattern match of, but someone to whom you can say, “Look, I want you to pay attention to me in this meeting because it’s going to be a bit of a struggle. Then afterwards would you be willing to give me feedback?” I do that in advance when I know that I want to get that feedback. I don’t want compliments. I don’t want criticisms. I just want to know how I came across. I want that person’s assessment as a benchmark for how effective I was.

TT: Do you have any advice for making the most of formal mentorship situations?

LC: I really admire my boss. I really admire our CFO. I will ask them after e-staff meetings when I had something important on the agenda, “Tell me what I could have done differently to be more effective.” Those organic moments are fantastic opportunities.

I also do some formal mentoring. I’ve got people who I meet with once a month who I tell that in order for me to work with them formally, they need to come prepared with an agenda. They need to have something in mind, not come to me with a random list of questions. Mentoring is not an interview, it is a series of conversations designed to make some progress. I think people think that if you don’t have a formal structure for feedback you can’t get the feedback, but that’s absolutely not true. There are formal and informal ways in which to gather data on how you’re coming across and to improve.

The other thing that I would say that goes along with that is you learn as much if not more from people that you don’t naturally click with. Some of the best feedback for me has come  from people that I really disliked working with or for. That lack of synergy or alignment doesn’t change the fact that you need to be effective with a broad spectrum of people, not just people you like working with. Getting a diverse view is very helpful. And I think that a combination of structured and organic mentoring helps you be the best you that you can be.

TT: What should I have asked you that I didn’t?

LC: What would you have done differently?

TT: OK, what would you have done differently?

LC: I would have thrown myself into my job at Yahoo earlier. In my first year, I got feedback that as a non-technical individual, my entry level was as far as I could go in technology. This was motivating in that I had a strong desire to prove this individual wrong. I was also supporting a VP whose respect I wanted to earn and both of these combined into a tremendous sense of focus, a crazy amount of work 7 days a week, and a drive to achieve that I had never felt before. If I had thrown myself into my work with that same amount of drive in my 20s as opposed to my 40s, I have no idea where I’d be today. I wish I had known what I was capable of earlier in career, because I think I would have done things differently. But I will tell you, on balance, I am satisfied with where I have ended up because of the people that I’ve met and worked with and the opportunities that I’ve been able to create for others. So it works out!

TT: Thank you so much Lyn! I hope this was useful for you as well to reflect back on your career.

LC: Absolutely. Anything I can do to help other people is just paying it forward. And you know, it was really interesting to think back on my career in this context. So it was enjoyable. I’m really glad to have done it.

TT: That’s great. Thank you Lyn!


Feedback from our beta readers!

Reader 1 (Senior Software Engineer)

Things are useful:

  • To grow in IC track, you need to be an influencer. Knowing that women are likely say “no” to opportunities because of uncertainty, we as women should consciously push us more out of the comfort zone.
  • Lyn’s story about how she came from an English major and grew her career is totally intriguing and impressive. It gives me a lot of confidence because she has come (maybe arguable) from an even more difficult route.
  • You need to work hard, throw yourself in!

Things that I will practice:

  • For meetings: Shut your laptop, put your phone down and be present
  • Ask for feedback from PM and my manager for important meetings

Reader 2 (Software Engineer):

For Lyn’s interview, points I find to be useful:

  • Do things you don’t know how to do
  •  Decide what not to do today to avoid feeling overwhelmed
  • Don’t try to multitask in a meeting

Things I will actually practice myself (in addition to the above):

  • Think about whether you want to influence the outcome of the meeting; if so, prepare, and talk to the other attendee(s) beforehand so you make sure they’re on the same page
  • Ask in advance for feedback on how you do in a tough meeting, or ask how you could have been more effective

Reader 3 (Senior  QASoftware Engineer):

1-3 things I learned from interviews:

  • When you start going up that vertical ladder for individual contributors and technology people, to be really good you have to be an influencer.
  • Each meeting should be an opportunity, make you valuable at presence.
  • Informal mentorship, ask diverse feedbacks, to make you be the best one you could be

1-3 things I going to follow and change

  • Changing the meeting habit, be present, be prepared and be valuable
  • Work less hard, make more impact
  • Carve away at the notion that “I don’t know how to do it, therefore I can’t”
  • keeping my face “open”, at the very least not frown

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