Monthly Archives: August 2015

“I was right, I am the only girl. AGAIN!”

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This is the fourth summer in a row that my youngest daughter, now 13, has done some sort of a programming camp. For three out of four summers, she has been the only girl in her group. While I commend these programs for a great curriculum and instructors, this has caused me to think about how, as parents and a community, we need to step up efforts on gender balance in computing much earlier than college or even high school. If girls are not participating in programs like this in their formative years, how are to expect them to be computer science majors or pursue technical careers?

As we walked to Harvard this summer for her first day of camp, my daughter was a bit anxious about yet another digitalmediaacademy.orgsummer as the token girl. We had chosen a new program through Digital Media Academy (DMA) largely because they were one of the few to offer a Virtual Reality course where she could play with Oculus Rift and learn how to design virtual worlds. A second major factor was that much of the DMA website and materials are full of images of girls having fun with technology – suggesting they are very successful in recruiting girls to sign up for their courses.

In response to “Mom, if I am the only girl again this summer I am going to be so mad.” I tried to be encouraging and focus on the coolness of the course she was taking. I told her how leading edge she was to learn about an emerging technology before most people her age even knew what it was. I didn’t talk about the potential gender imbalance and instead focused on the fact that this was about pursuing her interests and passions. Inside though, I was hoping…no praying…she wasn’t the only one. Not just because I didn’t want her to be the one girl among the boys, but for the bigger picture. I was dying for a sign that the canaries were singing loudly in the coal mine. Hopeful that I would see a mixed group of boys and girls in the room eager to dig into technology.

The canaries weren’t singing…

When we arrived at the camp check-in area, we were relieved to see a few other girls signing in and heading off to their classrooms. The counselors whisked my daughter away to her classroom so I didn’t have a chance to see the gender composition. I asked her to text me at lunch with a pulse on how it was going.

As I walked back home, I reflected on the prior three summers. The first summer, she signed up for a game design course through ID Tech, hosted at MIT. The boys in this class were obsessed with Pokemon cards – something my daughter knew nothing about and had no interest in – and their break time was used to trade cards or play video games. As a pretty typical 10 year-old girl, she would have rather spent her lunch break talking about boy bands and Youtubers or maybe tossing a frisbee around outside. Needless to say, between that and being among a group of 8-10 year-old boys with zero interest in socializing with girls, my daughter felt pretty isolated among the group. Outside of learning a bit of Javascript, she was pretty disappointed with the experience that year.

The following year, I decided to combine a week I needed to spend at VMware’s Palo Alto HQ with an opportunity for her to try ID Tech again, but this time hosted at Stanford. She was willing to give it another try, thinking it was cool to “attend Stanford”. Once again, I dropped her off at the sign-in area and hoped for a better outcome than we experienced on the MIT campus the prior summer. At pickup time, she joyfully jumped in my rental car bubbling over about all the fun girls who were in her mobile app game design class. Just like her, some were there because their parents were in the valley for work and others were locals and long-time ID Tech participants. Not only did she have a lot more fun than the prior summer, but she accomplished a lot more in that week than I would have expected. We were both thrilled.

Flash forward to last summer and another year with ID Tech at MIT. My daughter was pretty into Minecraft at the time and was eager to go deep and get better at programming in general. She is a very go-with-the-flow kind of kid and told me she didn’t care if she was the only girl, she just wanted to geek out for a week after her return from a month at sleep-away camp. After such a good experience on the west coast the year before, I hoped that I’d see a trend shift here and she’d have other girls in her course. Alas, once again, she was the only one.

While I only have one data point of one summer in the valley, it was pretty interesting to experience such a different situation out there as compared to here. Are more households tech savvy out there because of the thick concentration of tech jobs? Is the bar higher in Silicon Valley schools such that kids out there are exposed to programming/technology earlier? Perhaps it’s climate and spending a week inside to code is a welcome break from sunshine (?!) whereas here we take every moment we can to get our kids outside before the next snomageddon.

Or, perhaps the girls here are not signing up because, like my kiddo, they’re worried they’ll be the only girl.

“I was right, I am the only girl. AGAIN!” was the text I received during her lunch break last Monday. I told her to hang in there and get as much as she could out of the course. But, I felt so very disappointed. Where are the girls that were shown so prominently on the brochure? Why are parents not signing up their girls for these cool classes? It’s Oculus for Pete’s sake!

My biggest concern here above all is that this is one of the biggest factors that impacts the pipeline of young women choosing technical degrees and jobs. If 8-13 year-old girls think their only option to learn how to code or experiment with new technology like Virtual Reality is to be an outlier in a room full of boys, they won’t sign up. Even now, while she learned a lot and got along just fine with the “gamer boys” (her nickname for them) in her class, my daughter is desperately looking into more girl-friendly programs for her age group next summer. Thankfully, now that she’s older, there are programs like Girls Who Code or Technovation. Even though I am a huge fan of programs like these and they give girls the critical mass of peer support they need, I worry it swings the pendulum the other way. I want to see balance in these programs. Not programs for just girls or those that cater to just boys.

So, how do we solve this problem?  Some suggestions:

  • Parents: Sign up your girls for programming summer camps! In most cases it’s ONE week. One! Your kids will survive a week of being indoors most of a day, trust me. And if not in the summer, sign them up during the school year or during school vacations (gasp!). Also, have them sign up with a friend to further balance whatever program they choose. And if you have boys interested in tech, try to sign them up for programs that are diverse too! The younger boys are sitting next to girls who are coding, the more “normal” it’ll feel to them as the grow up with technology.
  • Tech Camps: Don’t just try to recruit girls, sign them up. Reach out to faculty and school technology programs that have girls enrolled and develop partnerships that drive these girls to your camps. Also, try to mix up your courses so it’s not eight solid hours a day of programming. Stop catering to the boys who play video games all day and offer time to run outside or maybe even swim in the afternoon. Kids learn fast. There’s a lot they can learn in a week without having to sit in front of their desktop the whole time. And please, for the love of God, stop plastering your brochures and websites with just pictures of girls. Show boys and girls working and having fun together. Foster diversity.
  • Groups that target professional technical women: Invite young girls to some of your events or encourage mentoring between your members and the girls’ programs mentioned above. If more young girls interested in tech have role models, they are more likely to persevere in rooms full of boys. Maybe even start a camp of your own?

As the VR camp came to a close, I attended a showcase to see what my daughter had accomplished for the week. It was pretty cool to navigate the funky landscapes and terrains she had designed as though I DMA_showcasewas in them via the Rift. She was proud of what she had learned and was eager to download Unity at home so she could keep working on her project. I asked her how she felt about the week overall and she said “It wasn’t so bad this year being the only girl, in fact the best part was that I had the bathroom all to myself.”

Got ideas about how to get more young girls into tech?  Please share in the comments!

The Three P’s: Lenses to Assess Your Startup’s Performance

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I took a bit of a sabbatical this summer and now, refreshed and with a few new topics brewing, it’s time to get back to writing!

LunettesA recurring theme I’ve encountered this summer is which lenses you should apply when evaluating the performance of your growing organization. As an advisor and executive coach to early stage companies, I’m finding more often I am preaching the concept of the “Three P’s: People, Processes and Programs”. Looking at your company or department through each of these lenses and asking yourself how you’re doing in each area can be very telling. It helps you understand where you may need to improve to continue to scale and reach success.

Lens #1 – People

The best leaders of any organization know that their people are what makes or breaks the success of their company. This isn’t just about performance and productivity metrics of each member or as a team, this is about people being in the right roles, having the right training, career path and great peers, bosses and teams to work with. When you ask yourself “are my employees happy?”, consider if you are doing everything you can to ensure greatness. This is well beyond great pay and company perks or weekly beer bashes. Most people want to feel challenged in their roles, but also supported and set up for success. They want equally smart (or often smarter) people to work with and they want to see you get rid of people who don’t work as hard as they do or who are jerks.

Great employees want to work towards growth either as an individual contributor or as a leader. They want to know that they will be rewarded for making solid contributions and for being team players. Growth should not always come from taking on more responsibility or more people to manage. Growth can also come from broadening their knowledge through exposure to new things such as customer visits, interactions with your board, or maybe going to a conference or speaking on a panel with other domain experts. When an employee is not growing or rising to a new challenge, ask yourself if this is a limitation of the individual, or is the system limiting them? Do they need mentorship from someone who’s been in their shoes before to guide them to the next level? Are you micromanaging, thus not giving them a chance to step up and show what they can do?

Happy employees also feel like they have visibility into the vision and direction of the company. They don’t need to know every detail of a product roadmap or the revenue strategy, but they want to understand where the company is headed and how leaders of the organization are measuring success. As a leader of an organization, do you have weekly or monthly all-hands and/or quarterly reviews that include vision and strategy? Do you routinely communicate through company email or on-line forums (e.g., Slack) on big company news like closing a big deal or a great new hire and include why these are important? The more understanding each employee has about the big picture, the more they can calibrate their actions and contribute towards success.

This first lens – evaluating if you are setting up an environment for happy, growing and informed employees – is probably the most important thing you can do to set your company up for long term success.

Lens #2 – Processes

As much as any startup loves being small, nimble and usually pretty organizationally flat, the reality is that implementing processes can be useful. I’m not talking about three ring binders full of protocols and standards. I’m just saying that having a general process for key parts of the business is important. There was probably a time (or maybe your company is there now) where everyone sat around one table and could just talk through how to get something done. Then, all of a sudden, one table becomes a few desks, maybe a few remote employees and a field sales person or two and what used to be a simple chat becomes harder to navigate.

ProcessConsider what processes are in place today that grew organically vs. with intention. If the organic processes work, that’s cool, but keep an eye on them because over time they may not scale. For those set up with intention – e.g., a hiring process or maybe your weekly sprints – reevaluate them on a regular basis. Are they repeatable and do they scale with more people in the company or more bugs to fix? Resist the temptation to keep a process because “that’s how we’ve always done it” or because “our Founder set it up, so how can we kill it?”. Companies that evolve have processes that evolve and what once worked then, may not work now.

Think about how decisions are made, information is disseminated and loops are closed for critical processes first. The most common areas where processes comes more and more into play tend to be product roadmap and execution plans, hiring strategies and go to market strategies. Here are some suggestions for each:

Product Roadmaps

  • Consider monthly, three-months-out roadmap reviews to prioritize new products, major features and release plans. Do not lose sight of the fact that this is not just which designers or engineers are building what, but also how you’ll market and support these products and features.
  • You may have weekly reviews to ensure you’re tracking to the meta-plan and make adjustments if needed. Have some sort of process in place to deal with surprises like a critical bug that bumps a feature or a customer opportunity that may change the priority of a future feature. Set criteria that justifies this type of change so you don’t have to analyze each one on the fly. For a critical bug to bump a priority feature, it might be something like “must impact >50% of our customers or degrade performance more than “20%”. For a customer opportunity it could be “must be a deal worth >$(?) revenue or a customer that will provide undeniable street cred for >50% of our current prospects”.
  • If/when the roadmap changes, have a process for letting people know. Don’t just update Trello and assume everyone will see it – have some sort of change management message that goes out via email/slack that tells the team what and why.
  • It also doesn’t hurt to have a process to track changes to the roadmap so you can see the impact on your initial plan over time. This will contribute to better planning going forward.

Hiring

  • I highly recommend a quarterly hiring plan – not just how many new heads, but actual roles you intend to fill. Given today’s climate where hiring is SO hard, it could take 2-3 months to get that right candidate. So have a process in place to assess where you are with hiring and what new roles you need to ramp on filling.
  • Get in the habit of a regular job description (JD) writing process. Don’t always wait for a role to open up. If people are in the role now, have them write their own job descriptions. This not only helps when it comes to review or promotion time, but you then have these JDs on file if/when needed. I’ve seen major delays with filling a pipeline with good candidates or terribly inefficient candidate interviews simply because no JD exists.
  • Have a hiring process in place that starts with the JD and ends with the on-boarding of this new hire. I’ll write a future post on this with more details, but the short story is that it should include how you’ll post and market the opening, handle phone screens, on-site interviews, making an offer, negotiating terms and how you’ll get that new hire on board and productive as fast as possible.

Go to Market

  • It’s one thing to have a product roadmap that outlines what you’ll build, but it’s another to say how you’ll get those things out there. With every product roadmap, there should be a parallel process for laying out how and when new products/features are publicized, priced (if applicable) and sold.
  • Have a process for content updates such as your website, marketing materials, and demos.
  • What process will you have for telling the world about your new stuff? Do you have a regular list of press or industry bloggers who write about your company or trends in your market? When should they hear about your new product/feature and what’s your plan to share what they write through social media or other channels?  How do your current customers and/or prospects hear about the latest new thing? These are not afterthoughts once the engineering is done, they are just as important processes to get in place as your code check-ins and testing procedures (which you have already, right?).

Looking through the lens of processes and seeing what you have and don’t have in place should tell you whether your company will be able to scale or is heading for a train wreck. Don’t be afraid to pause when you see a gap where a light process could relieve a bottle neck or better prepare your team for future scaling challenges.

Lens #3 – Programs

The Program lens is not used as often as it should. Granted, as a former Program Manager in a past life, I’m a little biased. However, what I often see missing in growing organizations is someone looking across the organization, programmatically, to ensure all the pieces are coming together including people, schedules and money.

A great example of this is the processes I mentioned above around new products or major feature releases. These are often multi-pronged activities involving engineering, sales, support, marketing and maybe finance and operations. You may have program_managerheads of each of these groups, but who is overseeing how they all work towards a common goal or launch date? For many small companies, that’s the CEO or CPO, but (oh by the way), these same people are running your company or out in the field selling or closing your next round of funding.

In the early stage, you may consider rotating the role of Program Manager between different leaders in your organization. Keep in mind, though, not everyone has the knack for project plans and cross-company communication. Make sure you pick the right people to be in this role.  As your organization grows, consider hiring an actual Program Manager. A Program Manager is often one of the unsung heroes of a company because they are in the background instead of on the front lines. They quietly prod and check things off lists. They communicate what’s happening and where there are possible gotchas. Program Managers beat the drum so everyone is marching in the right direction and at the right pace. They are masters in GSD (Getting Sh-t Done) with no task too small or ask too big.

So, don’t just look through the process lens, but also ask yourself what programs are cutting across more than one part of your company and who is orchestrating them. You’d be amazed how productive and efficient your startup will be when programs are well managed.

In Summary….

Startups, when they’re working, develop very quickly – often without enough attention given to people, processes and programs. It’s one thing for an Advisor or Investor to tell you what your company or department is lacking or how you could be doing better, but in the end, you need to ask yourself how YOU think it’s going. Applying these three lenses should help bring things into focus [pun intended].

Have you been using any of these lenses to assess performance or have different lenses that you’ve found effective?  Please share in the comments below!