Getting started with today's session on building women tech leaders in a male driven world. Uh So my name is Nancy Wong. I am the General Manager for AWS Data protection and data governance uh businesses which uh comprise all of the products.And here at Amazon, we call them services um that help customers protect, secure and also discover their data. So d you step back, I'd love to, you know, have a uh interactive dialogue uh with you all. So I share here that uh or I see that John and has already shared her questions. So as I go through uh my prepared thoughts today also include some of the answers to questions as they come in. Um So just starting off, right? Is why is this topic so near and dear to me? Because as we hear about big names out there, right? Like uh Indira, you know, Nui or for example, Mary Barra or even suffer cats, right? The CEO of oracle, I feel like these days, we hear more about uh high profile departures than actual uh more women, right, entering the highest levels of tech leadership. And of course, that just this past week, we also saw the departure of Sheryl Sandberg from Facebook or Meta where she really started as a founding team and rose all the way to coo.

So I get this question uh quite often from my mentees because it often comes down to, well, how should we think about this? Right, as an ambitious, you know, aspiring future c suite member, right? How should I prepare my career? What steps should I take And even to Chan? And he's question, right? What are some critical moments, right? That one should consider and develop an experience in order to make it to the next leadership level? So we'll cover that in today's talk. Um So a little bit about me, I, you know, grew up in communist China. So right after the Cultural Revolution, you know, there was a big moment or a big movement towards a, you know, women um can hold up half the sky, right? And so what that actually led to, right, of course, with communism, with all of its uh you know, obviously trade offs, you know, one thing that did stick with me and my parents who both were practitioners in the stem field is that women can do anything that men could. And so growing up, I built paper uh wooden airplanes, competed in math competitions, science competitions the same way that I would have if I were born a boy and I didn't really encounter the difference between what men can do and what women can do until really, I, I moved to the US.

And so that was a great first or very eye opening experience as to, well, you know, going to college and, and study engineering and actually hearing some of my very bright and also very ambitious classmates talk about what was known then as the MRS degree, right, going to college to for the purpose of not, you know, obtaining a degree for uh occupation, but rather to find a spouse, right?

And so that continued a longer dialogue within me. And actually what uh later led to my mission in establishing advancing women in tech, which is how can we right, start breaking barriers from very fundamental levels such as well, men and women can do are capable of doing exactly the same thing to when folks enter, you know, early career and mid career and actually have the opportunity to break into executive rules, right?

So that was um you know, I would say a great inspiration, right? Just seeing that in college. And so after college, I actually joined the US government. Uh one thing I've always been very passionate about is mission driven causes. And so from the US government, I worked actually on the Affordable Care Act and building out the data infrastructure layer that enabled uh researchers uh the general public like you and me, as well as large hospitals to be able to take advantage or leverage the large scale data sets that were found in uh certain organizations like the FDA NIH CDC for the express purpose of sharing wealth of knowledge, right?

Democratizing access to. Well, let's actually take a look at if access to health care, for example, is different between the reservations in New Mexico. And let's say the more affluent urban areas in New York City, right? And really just seeing that star contract, the contrast actually again fueled the desire in me to carry out missions to help equalize access. And so from there, I went on to consult for large scale uh intelligence agencies. So I think Department of Defense, as well as uh top secret agencies on how do they think about, you know, counterterrorism and large scale system integrations. And then from there, of course, embarked on my big tech journey first by joining Google as a product manager, then moving from Google into a start up, although it's quite a big company these days, uh called Rubric in the Data Protection, Data Security Space. And then from there, moved into AWS. And that is actually where, you know, I I experienced, right, that my first executive journey. And so I'll talk about my step function there, right? And how I moved from a head of product, which is how I join AWS to now currently the general manager and also director of engineering um for uh data protection and data governance, right?

So from that sense, um you know, there are definitely a few I would say learnings and takeaways that I've gained throughout my leadership journey. One is, you know, being a woman leader lean into that, right? Being female, you can definitely make that work for you. And oftentimes I get the question of really like, how does that actually work? And so for example, right, when you're the only woman in a room, whether you like it or not, you do stand out and so make that being able to stand out work for you. So if you go in there very prepared, right? And you're on mission, you have a great leadership voice. Well, you're definitely going to be more memorable than the majority or your male counterparts, right? So use that to your advantage and that's one trait that I've, you know, leveraged over and over again in my career. In fact, actually to, and, or, you know, V's question as to how did I progress from, you know, being a product manager to being a general manager is, well, when I started or when I joined AWS, you know, I joined as a senior manager of product management. And that role typically is responsible for managing a team of product managers who are responsible for either a product or a portfolio of products in my case.

And from there, it generally grew to owning more responsibility and it usually starts by owning a bigger and bigger profit and loss or abbreviated PNL statement. So that's often talked about in terms of, well, your product brings in, you know, 50 million A R, right, or 100 million A R or in the case of, let's say EC2, 1 of the biggest products within the AWS portfolio, your A R can be in the billions and tens of billions. So that generally is paramount or in parallel with how you grow is that you own bigger and bigger pnls, which is typically correlated with larger and larger teams. So once I grew my product management team, from then three to now, the product management team is actually over uh 10 individuals and there is now a a wonderful head of product leading that team. I then had a actually growth experience, right? And that actually also serves to answer Chan's question of how did I take advantage of my growth experience? Well, so it just so happens that a lot of teams, whether in big companies or small companies uh sometimes have employee turnover, right? And so my counterpart at the time who was a senior manager of software engineering, decided to move to another team internally. And so that's raised the question. Well, should my manager, right, hire a backfill for this individual or at the time?

Do I have sufficient confidence and belief in myself that I could also extend my abilities to engineering? Right? And so that's really the question and the decision point that I had to make. So I went to my manager and I candidly said, well, you know what, I don't have experience in being a general manager, right? And that was the truth at the time because you don't have experience doing roles you've never done before. But what I did have was a lot of missionary grit, right? And we can go into the whole dialogue on what is a missionary, what is a mercenary, right? And I had a lot of passion about where I saw the business and how I wanted to grow the business right along the the next, you know, 24 months, the next 36 months. And I said, look, you know, give me a shot, right? Um And if this doesn't work out, which we all know there is a definite chance of this not working out, you can then hire a director of engineering or product to run this group, right? And I would totally understand. So my manager being open minded said, sure, why don't you give it a shot?

So at that time, that's when I transitioned from, actually transitioned is I guess probably the better word is grew my scope from being a head of product at the time to then also head of product and engineering. And it was actually after six months of seeing me execute at bar, which is an Amazon term of, are you meeting your goals as a head of business? Which means that PNL growth, are you able to hire and actually being able to hire senior leaders onto your team is a measure of success, right. So are you able to hire, are you able to retain and grow? So, are you able to promote the folks who are currently on your team into also higher leadership roles? And in fact, that's also a measure of how senior and how successful someone is as a business leader here at Amazon, right? And of course, the the fourth factor is is your product healthy, right? Because one of the things that actually I really enjoy about my role as a service owner and business leader at Amazon is we operate our own service. And so in other companies, you may hear of the role of DEV ops which stands for development operations, engineers or SREs for example, site reliability engineers. Well here at AWS that is actually contained all within a service team, right?

And so that means if you ship bad code or if you ship unreliable code, a code that may not have gone through integration testing or end to end testing, then you also deal with the consequences which may include 2 a.m. pages, uh potentially unhappy customers reaching out to you to talk about their experience. And so it really creates that incentive to produce and ship high quality products. So all that to say, given my performance for the six months, you know, after I became product head of product and engineering, I was then officially moved into the general manager role where today I oversee not only product and engineering functions where again, I have uh really great individuals and actually leaders running those departments, but also solutions architect team, a design team, a documentation writer team, um all reporting into my overall org.

And so that's typically how businesses are run at Aws. And we do that because of speed and agility. So when you have all of the stakeholders, all reporting up to a single uh leader or an sto single threaded owner, which is the model that Aws has, you can tend to make decisions a lot faster. And there really isn't that notion of functional silos then for folks to work through as they're making a decision. So which moves into actually, uh my second, uh learning from my journey, which is empower your male allies, right? In this case, you know, my manager who decided to frankly take a risk on me, right? Take a bet, allow me to have runway, to make mistakes, to, you know, take ownership, right? Was for example, um, you know, my, uh a man, right? And his manager who was also very been very supportive of me in my development career is also a man because let's face reality, right? The reason why we're even talking about this topic today is that there are overwhelming odds of men in leadership roles where they make decisions about women's careers. So engage them empower them, right? Get them included or rather include them into your career journey.

And there are certain ways and this actually is a longer conversation I have with my mentees, which is there are right ways right to include them as part of your regular mentorship conversations or your career growth dialogues, right? But let them know what you're up to and you can do that simply by maybe scheduling quarterly, I often bring up quarterly because that's not a huge ask of um folks time. And if you have a set agenda for those quarterly, one on ones, it can be a great way for you to let your VP or director or whoever right is in your executive leadership chain have the lowdown on to, hey, here's what she's achieved right? Here are the big milestones that, you know, she's really hanker down, right? And here's the impact that she's dro driven in the past, you know, six months or, you know, two quarters or maybe the year, right? And so that all comes in handy because if you think about if you are looking to get to that next step, promotions are not decided, the quarter of right, promotions are decided a year, maybe even two years back because it frankly does take that long, especially within larger organizations to achieve the level of impact and results to result in a promotion.

So it's never um time to start or never too early to start to have those conversations and really engage your male allies. And so that leads me to actually my, my third learning as I've gone through my career journey, which is rising tide raises all boats, right? So now that I'm in, you know, this fortunate position of influence where, you know, I have a team of close to 100 little over 100 people at this point. And we're hiring, constantly hiring for across all of our roles, right? Software engineering, product management, product designer, um engineering managers, right? Uh as well as solutions architects, you know, I have that ability to influence hiring decisions and that's so important, which is why, you know, and on my team alone, for example, we're one of the few teams to have achieved um actually very significant ratio of uh women and other representative uh folks in key roles such as engineering managers, right?

And senior engineers, why? Because they then are also in positions where they can influence and where they can sit on promotion committees, where they can sit on performance evaluation committees. And that is where you create this five wheel effect, right? Because it's not just one person, it's really a network effect. And that's why again, we've been able to, I would say be so successful in attracting diverse talent who then themselves become beacons and role models to attract other diverse talent. So again, back to my point, rising tide raises all boats, right? As you continue to move up the career ladder as you advance your career, make sure to extend your hand right, and pull that next person up with you. Um So to answer, then V's question related to that topic, what agenda do you set with higher ups? Uh I get this feeling. Ab absolutely right, because for example, if I went to, to throw it out there, the CEO of uh Amazon, right. Andy Josie and said, hey, guess what I'm working on, right. I'm not sure that would be the best use of his time, but this is where you have to be strategic, right? So obviously, you know, look at the maybe next level, maybe next two levels. Um if you do go too high up, they may not have visibility to your point into what you're doing.

So that's why I recommend uh the next level up or the next two levels up where they still are, you know, in charge in the weeds, hands on with the area that you might be owning and typically how I structure it is, you know, that's why attending all hands, attending meetings, having regular one on ones with your leadership chain, very important.

So you can understand what their priorities are. And let's say I'm gonna use an example out of my direct domain, right? Let's say the priority is uh edge compute development, right? And you know that that's a priority for your leadership, let's say a project, you're working on in that space, just reach an important milestone, maybe a customer adoption milestone, maybe a revenue milestone, maybe a major partnership contract just got signed. Well, that's a great timing then to go to let's say your manager or skip level manager and bring them the good news, right? Also talk about, hey, what learnings did you have while getting to that milestone? In fact, you know, folks from my work, uh my skip directs or skip skip directs often have those type of one on ones with me. And it's a great way for me to say, wow xyz is really proactive, right? Because they're not just setting one on ones and frankly stare at me across the screen, right? They've actually come prepared, but two, I can see that passion and that their excitement for what they're doing and trust me when I then sit through performance evaluations. Well, guess what those names come to mind as folks who are passionate, you know, they're dedicated and I have direct line of sight into what they're working on.

So that would be my advice for how to set an agenda and how to be strategic as well about timing and also what topics you talk about. So I know that we are running out of time, I think. Uh one more question. Sure. So last question is, did you find pushback or negative feedback from male colleagues as you grew into your roles? Well, I would uh be a liar if I said that I did not experience any microaggressions or aggressions, right? And, and this is not in um indicative of any particular company, it's probably cross in my entire career journey, right? And I again would probably not be saying the truth if I said it would not happen from here on out. Right? So, but that's again a part of reality when a certain group is in the minority, right? And so that's the representation and that's my mission for behind, you know, for example, founding a wit, producing our upskilling trainings that you can find on Coursera or carrying out our executive mentorship program is to tackle this challenge head on because the more representation you bring more diversity, the more inclusion of thoughts that you bring.

And so that's really where right? You have more of a voice and saying, well, you know, that's a microaggression, right? Or that's not the right way to convey topics or push back in a constructive manner. So to answer Esther's question, um and I think no one's cutting me off. So I'll also answer uh Megan's question, which is what is the biggest hurdle you've had to overcome? Frankly, the biggest hurdle I've had to overcome is myself, reason why is I mean, take a look at me, right? I am not your typical general manager profile or archetype rather from age, whether from uh you know, gender, what what not, right? I'm also happened to be a woman of color. So all that to say that has created a large amount of insecurity just personally as well as to. Well, can I actually do this well, and, and further, right? Can I actually do this and succeed at doing it? And that's just something that is a constant part of a lot of my inner struggles and and but with that said again, that's where this representation, right? And us changing the representation in the next 5, 10 years, right? Hopefully, it doesn't take more than 10, right? Would that is really important because once you have role models and when you have other women who have gone through maybe the same imposter syndrome or the same, maybe inner doubt that you're experiencing and they can talk you through how they've worked through that. That's huge, right?

That's more than you could learn out of any textbook or any management book. So I think we're gonna wrap up now. Um But with that said, really appreciate all the great questions if you haven't any more. Uh Please DM Me on linkedin, I usually read and I'm pretty responsive. And so yeah, uh community is super important for women in tech and like I said, when you rise, please extend your hand and bring the next generation of women up with you. So, thanks everyone.