Session: The Case for Emotions in the Tech Workplace
Regardless of how groundbreaking and innovative we get with our technological advancements, every successful product still fundamentally depends on three groups of people: buyers, users and creators. All three groups of people carry one common attribute with them, everywhere they go - emotions. Emotions have long been considered out of place at work and yet, they are the most basic drivers of our ability to design, our willingness to invest in, and our capacity to care about any product. In fact, our job as innovators in tech is to lead these people - buyers, users and creators - on an emotional journey. In this talk, I make the case for acknowledging, accepting and choosing our actions with emotional clarity, and show how this helps us make better decisions, achieve more impactful goals, and have an easier time with hard conversations - all of which lead to product success.
Bio
Divya Ramachandran is a Professional Certified Coach with the International Coaching Federation, former Silicon Valley product and design leader, and mom of two. Her career trajectory is best characterized as an intentional journey from product to people. After completing her bachelor’s degree in engineering, she attended the University of California, Berkeley to pursue a Ph.D. in Computer Science. It was there that she discovered her passion for understanding how technology products could be used to directly address fundamental human needs like health and education. More than a decade of user experience and product design followed at a handful of Silicon Valley tech startups. She was leading a team of designers and product managers at a deep learning AI startup when she first worked with an executive coach. The work was transformative both professionally and personally, and so she eventually enrolled herself in a coach training program. On the first day of the course she knew without a doubt that it would be her life’s work, and has not looked back since.
Divya offers guidance as a leadership coach, workshop facilitator, and speaker to startup leaders of all kinds - from managers to founders to C-suite executives - and across all departments, including engineering, product, sales, marketing and professional services. She draws from her hands-on leadership experience and training in highly effective frameworks based on energy awareness, cognitive behavioral coaching, and emotional intelligence to help leaders and their teams tackle their deepest challenges, like communicating with clarity, dealing with conflict, getting high-value work done, making tough decisions, and empowering their teams to achieve impactful outcomes. When she’s not coaching, she enjoys board games, outdoor adventures and musical experiences with her husband and two children.