>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCube! Covering Grace Hopper's celebration of women in computing, brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. (upbeat techno music) >> Welcome back to theCube's coverage of the Grace Hopper conference, here in Orlando. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Jeff Rick. We're joined by Erin Yang. She is the VP of Technology Product Management for Workday. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Of course, thank you for having me. >> So tell us a little bit about what you do at Workday and what are the most exciting projects you're working on right now? >> All right, so I lead up our Technology Product Management team at Workday, and so for those of you who might not have heard of Workday, we are a leading cloud provider for financial management, human capital management, analytical applications. Been around since 2005, I've been there for the last six years and I would say the technology is such an exciting part of the company and one of the things that really drew me there so a lot of people don't the original story around workday but when we started we had this amazing mix of really experienced leaders who had been in the enterprise space before, who had built a lot of these products before. Combined with cloud technologies, just taking off and no one had really done the HCM and the cloud before financials in the cloud and so they were able to completely start over, we like to say with a clean sheet of paper, with new technologies but having experience in the industry and build from there. So we have a single technology platform that powers all of our different applications and that's the part of the company that I sit on. >> So you're really in the core technology that's driving the application. Desired technology NOD, ATM or one of the other sets. >> So the things that my team really looks after are security, integration, our infrastructure, the common data model and the common work flow that goes across the different applications. And the fact that we can have a single platform that connects all the applications, makes it so much easier for our customers and that's really been the philosophy of the company, which is customers first. We really focus on making our customers happy and so one of our company goals is always hitting 95% customer satisfaction, which is really unheard of in the enterprise industry when most people are not super happy with those products. And we've been able to hit 97% in the last year that we did the surveys. >> It's an interesting part of the SAS model because unlike a traditional enterprise software sale, they make the sale, they collect the 15%. But you're getting paid monthly I assume and maybe it's an annual contract. So you have to keep delivering value each and every single month cause you don't have this long term, big giant, enterprise license. >> It's a subscription revenue model. It's no more of a you deliver a product, then you don't think about it anymore. It's a continuous partnership with our customers. And I think that's why the relationship matters so much with our customers, they're stuck with us to a certain extent and we want to make sure that they're happy, that they're getting the value that they wanted out of the product and then we can also grow with them. And so one of the interesting parts of our technology is that we actually abstract the application and business logic from the technology itself through a meta data language that we've built out internally. And so we've been able to swap out our persistence technology, change the way that we store data, scale our transactions without our customers even knowing it. So that's kind of one of the beautiful parts of the way that our architecture was designed. >> So it's the architecture but then what else are you doing to hit that 97%. The key is empathizing with your customer. >> We spend a lot of time with our customers, that's one of the big points, almost every single product, every single feature that we build has a design partner program where we literally are with our customers, understanding what their pain points are and figuring out how can we solve those pain points in the product. And on the fact that we're pure SAS, so we just have one version that every customer has. So if we're improving the product for one customer, we're improving it for all of our customers. And so we're able to just focus on that single version instead of splitting our attention across old versions and maintaining old systems. >> So shifting gears a little bit to Grace Hopper specifically. You talked about, before we turned on the cameras that Workday made a big investment in Grace Hopper this year and you brought a huge contingent of people. I think its interesting and I think a lot of people know that there's a lot of hiring that goes on. I don't know that everyone knows as a development opportunity where companies bring large contingents. I wonder if you can speak to one. What is the value that you guys made this investment in this show around people that already work for Workday. >> So ultimately we're here because at Workday, we really believe in diversity, being good for our business, being good for our people. It helps us make better decisions, helps us build better products, we're more creative and it helps the bottom line. I think there's a lot of research out there now. And so at Grace Hopper we think this is the best way because it's such a big event to improve all aspects of the talent pipeline. So it's not just the hiring coming in from college, which we are definitely doing but it's also bringing, we have over 130 employees who came here from Workday and all walks in their careers. So some newer more junior people and some more experienced people. And we really think that the networking that they can do here, the sessions that they can come to to do professional development and learn. One of our sessions is how to get out of that middle management quagmire. How do they continue moving up and forward in their careers. It's not just that entry point into that junior entry level position. >> So what an investment. Outside of your own event, I would imagine that's probably the biggest presence you have at any tech event. >> I think it is, I haven't heard of us having more than 130 people at any other event. And it's a big investment especially because our big customer conference is next week. (laughs) We're all busy with that but this is a important enough event for us, both for college recruiting, both for professional developments and for, like I said, building that network even within the women who are here at Workday because we're a bigger company now and this is a good opportunity for us all to strengthen those relationships and we have eight employees who are speaking in sessions and that's a great experience as well. To get up on stage, to build your presence, learn how to speak and communicate and challenge yourself in that way. >> What would you say has been the biggest challenges in your career and your someone who grew up in the bay area, went to the same high school Steve Jobs, Stanford graduate, working in this industry for a while now. What would you say you've learned along the way in terms of overcoming challenges. >> I would say I've had a lot of opportunities growing up and I would say some of the biggest challenges though are the impressions that people might have of you that you need to overcome >> Okay interesting. >> And so for me it's like, first you start off as a female and so people think you might be leaning towards certain areas and so starting from when I was young I got a rush out of defying expectations that people had of me and maybe that's how I have ended up to where I am today. But I like to surprise people but some people don't like that and so I can see that being a challenge for some women if they're saying I really like math and technology and science and if it gets them odd looks or even just a lack of support, they might, start backing off and start thinking they may be better suited for something else. But for me I actually really liked the challenge, it made me more excited to overcome that and say hey, I can be a woman, I want to surprise more people, I want to get into Stanford and do electrical engineering cause that's not going to be the expected path that others have of me and I want to show that I can do it. And it's been really nice to see more and more female role models who have stories like that. Because then you start making it the norm so that if someone really is hesitant on whether they should or shouldn't be going down that path if they see other women who've been strong and achieved many things that they were able to do that. >> Before the cameras were rolling, you were also talking about your experience at Workday and mentorships and the sponsors that you've received. Can you tell our viewers a little bit more about your experience. >> I think that's been a big part of my journey at Workday. I started off as the product manager for our collaboration team. It was my first time doing product management only six years ago and my manager at that time, he really believed in me and combine that with the fact that we're at a fast growing company we were only 900 people at that point. I told you we're over 7000 now, lots of opportunities were coming up. He was able to say, there's this other opportunity around our extensibility area, which was totally unrelated to collaboration but he's like, you've down well with what I gave you over here, why don't you try this? And it was not something I would personally volunteer for cause I actually didn't think that I was capable of doing it. But he's like, no, I believe in you, I think you can do it, I've already advocated for you that you should take on this role. And so I stepped into it, did a good enough job for them to say, okay we're going to keep investing in her. And that manager continued to really put me forward for other opportunities and then when he switched roles he nominated me to be his successor for leading the whole team and so he's been a really major part of my career progression here at Workday and I think having someone who can be there to advocate for opportunities for you, and also teach you how to navigate and organization, who are the key decision makers, who do you need to influence, what are the relationships you need to build. All of that is such valuable knowledge to have that you may not know otherwise. A mentor might not even be able to do that for you but someone who's really sponsoring you can. >> Well Erin thanks so much for joining us here in the cube, its been great talking to you. >> Thank you so much. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff Rick, we will have more from Grace Hopper just after this. (upbeat techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's The Cube covering Grace Hopper's Celebration of Women in Computing brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. >> Welcome back to The Cube's coverage, we are wrapping up day one of the Grace Hopper Conference here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Jeff Frick. Jeff, it's been a great day. What's been your highlight? >> The highlight was Megan Smith. We were really excited to get her on. We tried to get her on last year. She's a really hard get. She's a super high energy, super smart lady. >> So she's the third CTO of the US. >> She's fantastic. We got to go back and read the tape, but there's probably an hours worth of material there that we could've followed up on her. I think she was definitely terrific. Also of course Brenda, the new president of Anita Borg. Doing the research on her and understanding what she accomplished at the Chicago Public School System is just phenomenal, something we've talked about time and time again. Are we turning a corner? Do people understand that computer science is a basic thing you need to learn in 2017, like biology, like math, like reading and writing and arithmetic. I think those were two terrific points of the day. >> I completely agree. We've had those veteran women of the technology industry, but then we also have had two young up-and-comers on the show, Jasmine Mustafa, who is the head of Roar for Good, which is a B Corp that makes a wearable self-defense tool, and then just now, we had Morgan Burman of Milkcrate, which does a platform that helps companies and non-profits measure and grow social and environmental impact. It's really exciting to sort of see the baton being passed, you can almost witness it being passed. >> Right, right, and it physically is. From Kelly, who we will have on Friday, to Brenda. So we're absolutely seeing it. >> Rebecca: Right. >> The other piece I'm taking away... You're hearing from Boston, and I hate to do the sports analogy, but I am anyway. Most great quarterbacks, Tom Brady, jumping out having a huge chip on their shoulder. They were passed up, they were told they couldn't do it, and they continued to excel, way more than the fair-haired people that have an easy path. So many times today, we heard about being told I can't do it and using that, internalizing that, as a force to do it. Debra, the physicist, being told by her mom overtly don't be a physicist a number of times, the Roar story again you can't do this. Even Erin Yang from Work Day said specifically I want to surprise people, I don't want them to know what I'm going to be able to do. Really, this concept of having a chip on your shoulder and taking negative feedback and turning it into a positive spin that you can feed off of, really important attribute that I don't think enough people have, they take the hit and absorb the hit instead of taking the hit and saying I'm going to prove you wrong. This does not apply to me. I think that's another thing that I did not expect to hear today but came up over and over again. >> No, I agree. We also heard, and this is really the Silicon Valley mantra right now, is Fail Fast. We've been hearing about redefining failure and one of our guests said don't even use that word, make up some sort of safe word for yourself. It's not that I failed in that endeavor, it didn't work out. But no matter what, you cannot be deterred from that. >> Right, and you got to learn and you got to move on. I tell people a lot of times, it's kind of like the old sales analogy. If your hit rate is one out of 10, that eighth call you should be excited about because that means you're almost to number 10. Don't be depressed that number eight doesn't go well, change your attitude. Eight is just one step closer to 10. Grind through one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. It is a real resilience, and that was another thing that came up is the people that win are not the smartest, they're not the fastest, they're not the most intelligent, but often they're just the most persistent. They just keep getting up. The age old saying. Give me the wisdom to worry about the things I can control and not to worry about the things I can't. It's not what happens to you, it's what you do about it. That's what you can control. You can't control what happens to you. But do you get up, do you take your hit, do you use it as motivation, do you move to the next step? Again, another great theme. Move to the next step. Take the next step and that will get you. A journey of a thousand miles starts with one step. >> That's right. That's right. Those are >> I'm cliche-ing, it's been a long week. >> This is the largest Grace Hopper ever. 18,000 attendees, 700 speakers, three days. We've got another big lineup tomorrow. We start right after the keynotes. We go through to the end of the day. Is there anything you want to highlight to our viewers that you are especially looking forward to tomorrow? >> What am I especially looking forward to tomorrow? Just another good day. The great thing about this show is you don't really know what you're going to get. >> It's true! >> A lot of the names, you don't know who they are. You don't necessarily know the companies. I think we will have a number of the Women of Vision award winners, which is always good. It's such an atypical tech show, which is why I love it. >> Rebecca: Which is why it's so fun! >> And we've got to get you warmed up, >> I know, it's freezing in here! >> Out into the heat. >> It's so true, it's so true. >> Alright well let's wrap it up. Great day, Rebecca. >> Great day it's always so much fun to cohost alongside you. >> Thanks for coming down. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff Frick, we will have more from Grace Hopper tomorrow! >> Jeff: Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)