It's a pleasure to be here uh today. Um And thanks uh for the previous speaker, uh really a fantastic uh speech with no live. So, uh all my, all my blessing to you um uh an introduced me. Um I'm Julian Ida. My name is Julian Iao.It's a pleasure to be here after two days of uh uh super interesting uh uh tech and on tech uh sessions in the context of today's career growth theme. I'm here to share my experience in the tech sector and choosing trends opportunities while having a family because as you can see in the slide, this is my five years old daughter uh as the session title says, I've been a web developer now, a head of product and I've been learning and growing in start ups and unicorn.

Um I'm currently working as a head of product for wallop uh the leading second hand marketplace for unique goods. And my hope for today is that by sharing my approach to um what I believe is an excited life. Uh You'll have uh more confidence, you'll be more confident in the future. I can see that maybe the slides are not changing. Yes, now it's changing. Great. Uh So this is me uh at work and me at home. Um So let's start uh my path on. But before starting a path, you will discover the meaning of this minimal graph visualization along the way. But as a hint, uh this is a framework we refer to while building product in tech, non tech. And I discovered along the way and you will see that it's also my personal framework as well for a happy and challenging life. Um My path of uh chasing opportunities started as a child. I was one of those kids um that uh uh had no specific passions. So I had to try a lot of different activities before finding something I like. Uh At, at the time, I tried sports, of course, I was in a football team at the time, there were no mixed teams but only boys teams. So my parents has to ask the association for me to play as the only girl in the team. Then my dad used to and I loved it. Then my dad used to uh play judo. So he encouraged me to take the same.

And honestly, I was not uh it was not something I really like and enjoyed. So I dropped out of it, but I tried and I ended up after seven years and several activities to stick with athletics where I did find my passion. Finally, I was chasing where I competed for 10 years, more than 80 years. So these years, the early years are the first memory I have on uh discovering passions with the test fail approach as we do in products. And I'm sure some of you can also find this analogy in your life. Um jumping 10 years ahead, you will see a lot of uh cross mark on the slides because it was the time to decide for my university career. And again, since this time, I couldn't try several career path. I choose to go in exclusion approach. I was asking around gathering feedback from my friends and my sister's older friend and started to exclude those universities, those career paths that were not really interesting to me.

And luckily by exclusion, I was able to enter in industrial design of the Polytechnical of Milan. And I say luckily because I loved it, I started to study properly, like really enjoy studying. Finally, I was exposed to very interesting people, international environment. And this was one of my wow moments in life where I did find something I was passionate about during the five years of the UIC A year. Uh I got introduced to design thinking, to challenging ideas, to learn from others and to understand people um to work with others and friends and colleagues to solve problems together, to build a plan and work as a team to make it possible to explore the unexpected. And this hands on university taught me that it was ok for me to learn what I love by doing and find out also what I really didn't like by doing as well. Um So the curiosity of this environment led me to travel and discover a new passion and that's how I started uh working as a web developer and designers of freelance. Uh when I was getting in contact with the agencies, consultancy and digital transformation companies. So from industrial design to web developer, freelance, uh what I've learned during the web development experience is to be humble uh to listen, be some rotted by very smart people that can teach you um along the way, uh this might be a little bit controversial but uh for people like me that are chasing their passion step by step, we learn from each other and in the quest of a constant growth, the social tissue and the people that we meet in a work environment do have an impact on shaping who we are in our career, growth mindset.

Um By learning from these years of a freelance uh web designers uh was basically to progress on uh tech skills on uh trying to shape every day moving forward to the de learning challenges, which made me realize that I wanted to discover more on the other side of the project.

I want to discover the strategy, the planning, the management side and not only the development world. So I went back to the learning path. Um I went to study um design management. I landed a job as project manager as by then product management was not a very common role um in companies. Um And I work as a project manager for a few years. And then mobile happened uh the hype of mobile started and so my need of chasing this new market trend. Also, it was all mobile and I wanted to be in it. So I've quit work. I got some basic uh very basic mobile API knowledge. I played around with the the initial up development framework like phone gap. I'm not sure if anyone remember phone gap. Um And uh and then I was after 15 years from my first football experience where I was the only girl in the room, I found myself again sitting at the table uh where I was not the executor, the designer, the developer, but I actually had to convince uh a bunch of very, very experienced project managers or males with all the PM certifications that uh we could build an app from scratch in different languages in three months, remotely from Europe and Asia.

Um But it was a fantastic experience. Uh I was uh backed up by my company uh that it's now one of the biggest digital companies called DM I. Um And during this time, I learned that everyone has a sit on the table if we bring expertise and add value in this wonderful tech dynamic world. As women, we could do have, we do have a plenty of opportunities. Uh So I spent four years in that company where I traveled the world building end to end uh mobile apps with distributed teams in us in Asia and Europe. Um And then again, uh I was surfing the wave of chasing trends. I was uh I've been a freelance, I have been a web developer, a project manager. Uh So I thought, well, let's chase the trends of start up and let's build a start up. I cannot do it. Uh And there I was working at uh night to launch what would have become for me, at least a very successful start up product in my mind. Of course, with lots of love and sweat, we were able to launch local in Italy, my original country, which was received by lots of positive feedback award from word, et cetera, et cetera. However, when you learn by doing, uh it also means that you fail along the way.

Uh So after three years of building a team and understanding the market space, three seats round and the effort behind getting the fuel to pay salaries, um we could not reach sustainable growth. So we finished the money in the bank and we have to shut it down. And that's my entrepreneurial failure, big failure. Um But the fail with the failure comes also learning. So my, from this experience, my couple of learning that I would like to share with you is uh the first one is building product. It's very expensive, very, very expensive and time to market is key. So the we need to be very wise, I need to be very wise on the money raised that we're going to salary um and have a time to market fit which we weren't able to do it. And the second takeaway is that being a freelancer, a web development, freelancer and a start up entrepreneur is not the same. The hard job for me at least is leading teams, building teams. It's hard and leading by influence, it's even harder. So after the failure experience, I went back to work for a company as a product manager, the company is called Skyscanner. I work for Skyscanner for almost five years and uh we are a shipping work class product. We are working on hyper grow environment. Super interesting, super cool.

I was introduced then to soft skills as well to the coaching side of management to understanding people's needs and motivation and scan while I was there became a unicorn and it was sold to a the biggest Chinese travel corporation. And in this phase of transition of a unicorn, I've discovered the passion of leading teams in different country, focusing more on processes rather than have an impact as individual contributor. And then I started the mentorship work. Um I recall in some of the previous shot also was mentioned, mentorship uh for me, mentorship has been very important, giving and taking. And it's not about sharing my personal experience to other P MS. So the kid could avoid to go through the same mistakes I've made along the way, learned it with a hard lesson. But to me, mentorship also uh is a learning approach, understanding how people think consolidating concept and most important, I've started to listen more to people and listening is a big part of management. And after that, my daughter came. Um so I spent a while before getting back to work to understand what was my priority in life and uh balancing, of course, work, life, taking time to think.

I realized that for me, an important part is to have a challenging work is to spend time in a work environment that enriched me as a person with tech challenges, solving problems. And the new requirement for me to work was to work in a family friendly place because I want to be there also for my kids. So at Skyscanner, I was lucky enough to travel the world to work with international team. But I quit the fantastic job to be more locally present in Barcelona. Um I start working for Avita uh the word classified giant where I could work uh still for tech giant, keep on learning, but accept them being based in, in Barcelona to meet my, my other family uh with this uh fantastic environment. Of course, I once again, felt the urge of getting out of my comfort zone because this is uh some of other people uh uh happened to uh to, to tell life. So I signed up for an NC A course, uh which was most work was most about leadership. And um the study gave me the challenge not only to understand better the product, the company management dynamics, but also the tool for setting new professional goals for me personally.

Um So now back to the current reality and these days, um I'm not sure if the GIF gif is working. I don't think so, but this should be the Wall AOP logo. So I joined um five months ago, Wall AOP. We are a scale up company with international footprint with a fantastic life work balance. Where from AC X Os to P MS have a time locking calendar to pick up kids from school. I'm super surrounded by smart people. Some of them share a great session yesterday on Backend driven UI which I suggest you to, to watch. And if I look back um on the on on my career path, I can say that I never made a decision based on the role on the position, but based on what I wanted to learn and to be challenged on. So that's similar to the di di approach. Um We used to build successful product on, I can say that uh what works for my career is to have a similar path when I have a divergent phase um that allow me to explore certain domains, then a focused phase that helped me to strengthen those domain. And then follow up by a learning initiative, a learning activity, a learning session that helps me build confidence in new domains and open the door of what can come next.

Um And also by learning by being with other professionals across the world, we share similar challenges and we build confidence of jumping off the box and going to the next challenges. Um So that's basically it for my session today. Uh This is my adventure so far. I hope you enjoy the ride the time spent. Uh And I think that we have a couple of minutes left left if in case you have questions,

fantastic presentation. Thank you so much Julia. I did really like how did you, how you describe your journey and how, you know, honest and authentic. You were talking about the importance of, you know, the way you learn to lead teams and then how you actually like to lead teams, you know, in, in the, in, in different um from different countries. And that became your passion reminded us also about the importance of mentors that it's important to give back to the community and support others as well as uh and something that deeply resonated with me is, you know, looking for a challenge because I believe challenge also helps us grow a lot.

So thank you so much for this really authentic presentation to share, sharing your journey. And do we have questions for, for Julia? Because if you don't, I have a question for Julia. Yes. Uh So take, take this opportunity to ask the questions and um yeah, absolutely. The wallop logo didn't uh it wasn't showing, but I will now remind people that Wallop is put in the global conference and has a booth and there is going to be also um uh you know, an info session, meet and greet. So you'll be able to meet cool people from wall AOP and maybe Julia is also going to be there in any case, connect with Julia on linkedin as well. I'm sure she will be happy to.

Absolutely. I think we have a question from Susmita. Uh This one, if the uh would

you like to know, how did you bring yourself in the product race up to speed? Did you have to take any specific trainings or certifications?

Yeah, that's a really interesting question because a few years ago, there were not many uh product trainings around. So um I constantly read books about different topics about uh leading teams, uh specific agile skills, uh Strat start how to build strategies. So all the skills that uh product needs to have a product leader needs to have in order to drive success with the team and to manage a team. So I read a lot uh from different uh um market scenarios and disciplines. And then I also had some uh session specific session on product one back a few years ago in Silicon Valley Product Group, we had a three month, three days uh uh session focus on a product. And now there are a lot of uh product management masters classes, online courses that we can attend. So now there is the opportunity to actually um uh get more specific in some of the product management skills because we need to have tons of them. So my suggestion will be read, uh read, read, read as much as you can because in every booth there is something you can take and apply in your teams and then look for this product management muscle that are out there right now.

Yeah, and never stop learning, especially when you have such an abundance of different courses and different programs and you know, improving and, and and getting better every year, every month, even as we are talking. So, yeah, thank you so much for entering the question and Angela is sharing that the presentation is wonderful and extremely personal as well as relevant. So, thank you so much for being with us today. So, Smita is very happy with the answer. Yeah. Yeah. So fantastic. Thank you so much Julie. It was really great to have you with us. Um and everyone who would like to ask more questions to Julia, please make sure to send her a note on linkedin and drop by wallop booth. So Julia, thanks once again, have a great day. Bye.