Thank you and thank you for having me and good evening. Good afternoon. Good morning where you are. I'm speaking to you from the beautiful Barcelona. I'm actually here this week also for the disaster uh Europa conference. And it's my first in-person conference in the last 2.5 years.

Um So you can imagine, I'm super excited to meeting with you all here and also meeting many of the technology leaders, especially in Europe um this week and I can help you reminded um how much our professional life and our personal life has been changed um In this pandemic. Um I'm trying to see if I can get my slice. Uh Fantastic. Thank you. Um We mentioned a little bit um change, you know, is we are the biggest and largest social change platform that empower people everywhere to create the change we want to see, right in the last few years, we reach a critical mass as the number one digital platform for petitions in us and much of the world giving people a place to realize the change they want to see in their life and community.

Right? Currently, 100% funded by you know, millions and millions of users like you and me. Um and we treat financial self supe, which is huge for a nonprofit owned organization. So we believe that we're in a perfect position to move on to the next step. Now, the challenges is how do we do that? Especially consider the time that we're in global pandemic. And now yet another world users come to change because our mission and their passion to change the lives, the community and the world for better, right? Um So we have to put our users first and our employees join change because of our mission and the passion to do good. So right now as a leader in in the company, I constantly trying to funnel this passion into focus areas where we can actually have the biggest impact to our users. Always put our user first to start with petition starters. These are the people user who create petitions, right?

Petitions will always be the core of what we do and who we are and that's how we got into this moment, right? It's one of petitions simply put, it's the single most widely taken civil action beyond voting. So we have seen many election critical elections happen in uh in different countries in the last two years. Us, France, Australia, Colombia and so on and so on. What we did during this critical time is we mobilized our organizers success team to support our organizers, these starters who created petitions on the ground in each of these countries. In the technical side. What we did is we completely rebuild our start up petition workflow to dramatically reduce the number of steps to create powerful petition to improve our UX. Ultimately just help our users to create petition faster and more powerful our success. Today, it's also a recognition of the power of technology to change the world. We must to build user trust and protect their safety. The recent Russian Ukraine war reminded us, our user data could be great inches to certain state actors we have seen unfortunately increase DDOS attacks ever since the war started. We actually have made quite some changes to update our certain features to block access to user information.

We stop tracking uh taking contributions in Russia while doing everything we could possibly can to ensure our site is accessible in Russia. For example, since the war, we double down our investment in security monitoring and incident responses. Every little thing help. We also innovated in petition for the last 10 years where we've become the leading platform of choice for racial justice movement campaigns. In addition to some support some of the largest campaigns in recent history, spring about technical scaling challenges. We also create a racial justice fund.

We have donated $10 million to support nonprofit organizations that are dedicated to racial justice. So basically putting money on web mouth is now when we put in our users first, many of our staff are consumed by the news. The work with petition organizers are going through this petition contents day in and day out are extremely challenging and make us exposed and stressed out. It's a very demanding job in this time. We need to take care of our staff so that they can take care of themselves before we can take care of our users together. So for me, I reminded myself, I learned and relearned how to be an empathetic leader. And I think this is every leader in all levels can do. Let's focus on the simple things. For me, I want to be present and listen to them. I make time for my staff for the rocks. I have for the direct reports. I have weekly one on ones and I also create space to have skip level one on ones in the remote first environment. I packed my suitcase, you know, in the last few months and start to visit some of our hubs and offices to make that human connection to support our staff. We also put in quite generous benefits including paid leave of absence.

For example, for people who are impacted by the recent war, one of my engineers actually went back to Ukraine to help his relatives. In addition to the security Monitoring Response initiative, I mentioned earlier, we also wrote out additional security trainings. We make changes to strengthen our application security and this is going to be an ongoing critical effort for us. And we also need to improve our physical security for our staff, which is quite unique for change compared to many other application developments. Uh house, many of us probably hear about mental health and mental health awareness. Now, I would say that having that benefit, well, it's great itself is not enough, right? We have to make that benefit known to our staff. We have created expert workshops in house. We encourage time off and actually ask staff to take the time off and give them flexible work times, give space for them. Um I'm sure this week you'll hear a lot more in on these topics in woman tag global. So as we reach critical mass, you know, as the go to platform for petitions, we have to focus on, you know, as the biggest tech social platform that is purpose of bill to enable a healthier, more participatory civil life. So how do we do that? Well, we need to keep growing, you know, we need to keep our growth mindset, right? Speaking about growth, we need to first deepen an employee engagement. One way to do that is to increase satisfaction and happiness.

Our staff which come from two main areas, mindfulness and curiosity in curiosity starts with having a growth mindset. Now just ask people to be curious to do more, to give ideas. It's not enough. We have to give them tools to do that. One of the technique is to build out the mechanisms. Jeff Bezels once said, quote, good intentions never work. You need good mechanisms to make anything happen, end quote. What does it mean to us simply put, we need to improve throughput and quality by putting simple mechanisms in place to help our staff give them tools. And we can also we it will also help us decrease management, waste, empower the team. Well, when we say ideas can come from anyone at any levels, what we need to encourage the staff to submit ideas or before then we need to first show them how to a change. We will conduct a lot of trainings in house training to provide working, you know, one of the concepts that we follow is working backward uh method that make famous in Amazon. So we conduct trainings that provide those document templates to help our staff to have a fast start.

Tennis is another mechanism that we use. Tennis can be expressed at the team levels, the team's values and it will help them to guide their decisions. Right? In our case, we created and rolling, we are in the middle of rolling our operation principles, operating principle will help to empower each team to make decisions. We can have, you know, top down decision making all the time. It will create such a bottleneck instead of me to make every single decision, I need to empower my team to do that. And to do that is as long as we create the envelopes or we create the tenants, so we can all agree on. In this case, is the operating principles. Many of us like, you know, um quite well aware of OKRS, we use OKR as well. We want our OKRS to be clear and easy to understand. And in our feature development teams, uh we also reference those OKR to um the proof Pr Fa Qs, pr fa Q is yet another mechanism that we use. It stands for press release and frequently asked questions. It's one way for us to identify ideas and uh product features, product, you know, initiative.

So you see all these 10 you know mechanisms that work together provide tools for our teams, our staff to do their work as the technology leader of the organization, I wouldn't be speaking to you. Now, if I don't put engineering excellence front and center for us, it's enablement to boost our developers productivity for greater impact. This year, specifically set out technology strategy in four major areas, automate manual process for scale using A I and ML. And we want to do it responsibly by the previous speaker just mentioned, modernize our cloud native infrastructure to dramatically shorten our development time, our deployment time and improve code maintainability. That's another thing that has such a long term implication and such motivation to engineers.

Many places people struggle to figure out how can we find time and investment take that? Well, this is how you have to make the connection, how to use, you know, how to make sure the technical work will contribute to revenues to user impacts. Um We also created a dedicated growth team to speak out feature experimentations so that we can bring value to our users faster and last but not the least one of the biggest investment in the technology side this year. Uh I want to put in is to build out an end to end data platform to enable ML research and development to support business analytics, product analytics and feature experiments. You see we have to get all of these technical infrastructures together to support the business. You have to connect the dots as a technology leader and this is the perfect time to do it. You know, when during the challenge time, make us even more recognize the importance of efficiency and productivity and effectiveness. And this is what the development in, you know, uh investment should go. People often ask me how to gain alignments with product leaders or other executive in to to invest in technology. You know, the key like I said is to create a technical strategy that will enable business growth and the productivity gain needs to be immediate and also substantial, right?

You need to let your your peers let the rest of companies feel the gains is so substantial and feel the wins and our users have to be benefit. I have talked about invest investing in tools and developer productivity. The last piece of the puzzle is to invest in our employees career development. It is hard to get budget for employee development in any company and it's even harder to do so in a nonprofit. So I need to think very creatively and optimize on speedy outcomes. First of all, I need to identify the most relevant techniques for the right people for their needs at the right time. One of the techniques I like to use is train the trainers. That means when I identify training um useful trainings in either technical topbas domains or product development or engineering management leaderships, I will send the leaders, you know, in all levels to those trainings and train the trainers. So they come back to, you know, share those knowledge and practice it and train others. Don't be afraid to work with vendors who share our missions and passions. We create mentorship programs uh including external mentorship like different services like Plato. Um they provide mentors, mentorships for engineering leads and front line engineering managers. So it is really helpful for us for this kind of eh mentorship.

We also want to utilize our personal network and other executives or even our board members network to create this expert uh uh uh network. So for them to provide pro bono services to help us in certain areas. And last but not the least, I'm excited that we're rolling our internal peer to peer membership program. Allow senior engineers, technical leads for my managers to mentor junior engineers. It's such a growth opportunity for both sides and we are in the middle of the road in this hour and I'm super excited and hopefully I can share some of the learnings with you next time we talk. So now I just, this is how I never get through the challenging times in the last 2.5 years, putting our user first, taking care of his own staff while doing so, still nurture and foster a growth mindset. And that is my journey. I would love to hear yours and sure, you know, learn from you and hopefully I get the chance to do so. Thank you.