>>Hey everyone. Welcome to the AWS partner showcase season one, episode three women in tech. I'm your host. Lisa Martin. I've got two female rock stars joining me. Next Vera Reynolds is here engineering manager, telemetry at honeycomb, and one of our Cub alumni, Danielle GShock ISV PSA director at AWS joins us as well. Ladies. It's great to have you talking about a very important topic today. >>Thanks for having us. Yeah, thanks for having me. Appreciate it. >>Of course, Vera, let's go ahead and start with you. Tell me about your background and tech. You're coming up on your 10th anniversary. Happy anniversary. >>Thank you. That's right. I can't believe it's been 10 years, but yeah, I started in tech in 2012. I was an engineer for most of that time. And just recently, as of March switched to engineering management here at honeycomb and, you know, throughout my career, I was very much interested in all the things, right. And it was a big FOMO as far as trying a few different companies and products, and I've done things from web development to mobile, to platforms. It would be apt to call me a generalist. And in the more recent years, I was sort of gravitating more towards developer tool space. And for me, that came in the form of cloud Foundry circle CI, and now honeycomb. I actually had my eye on honeycomb for a while before joining, I came across a blog post by charity majors. Who's one of our founders and she was actually talking about management and how to pursue that and whether or not it's right for your career. >>And so I was like, who is this person? I really like her found the company. They were pretty small at the time. So I was sort of keeping my eye on them. And then when the time came around for me to look again, I did a little bit more digging, found a lot of talks about the product. And on the one hand, they really spoke to me as the solution. They talked about developers owning their coding in production and answering questions about what is happening, what are your users seeing? And I felt that pain, I got what they were trying to do. And also on the other hand, every talk I saw at the time was from an amazing woman, which I haven't seen before. So I came across charity majors again, Christine Young, who's our other founder. And then Liz Frank Jones, who's our, our principal developer advocate. And that really sealed the deal for me as far as wanting to work here. >>Yeah. Honeycomb is interesting. This is a female founded company. You two leaders, you mentioned that you liked the technology, but you were also attracted because you saw females and the leadership position. Talk to me a little bit about what that's like working for a female led organization at honeycomb. >>Yeah. You know, historically we have tried not to over index on that because there was this maybe fear or rareness of it taking away from our legitimacy as an engineering organization, from our success as a company. But I'm seeing that rhetoric shift recently because we believe that with great responsibility with great power comes great responsibility. And we're trying to be more intentional as far as using that attribute of our company. So I would say that for me, it was a choice between a few offers, right. And that was a selling point, for sure, because again, I've never experienced it and I've really seen how much they walk that walk. Even me being here and me moving into management, I think were both ways in which they really put a lot of trust and support in me. And so I it's been a great ride. >>Excellent. Sounds like it. Before we bring Danielle in to talk about the partnership. I do wanna have you here, talk to the audience a little bit about honeycomb, what technology it's delivering and what are its differentiators. >>Yeah, absolutely. So honeycomb is an observability tool that enables engineers to answer questions about the code that runs in production. And we work with a number of various customers. Some of them are Vanguards, slack. Hello, fresh. Just to name a couple. If you're not familiar with observability tooling, it's akin to traditional application performance monitoring, but we believe that observability is succeeding APM because APM tools were built at the time of monoliths and they just weren't designed to help us answer questions about complex distributed systems that we work with today, where things can go wrong anywhere in that chain. And you can't predict what you're gonna need to ask ahead of time. So some of the ways that we are different is our ability to store and query really rich data, which we believe is the key to understanding those complex systems. What I mean by rich data is something that has a lot of attributes. >>So for example, when an error happens, knowing who it happened to, which user ID, which I don't know region, they were in, what, what they were doing at the time and what was happening at the rest of your system. And our ingest engine is really fast. You could do it in as little as three seconds and we call data like this. I said, kind of rich data, contextual data. We refer it as having high ity and high dimensionality, which are big words. But at the end of the day, what that means is we can store and we can query this data and we can do it really fast. And to give you an example of how that looks for our customers, let's say you have a developer team who are using honeycomb to understand and observe their system. And they get a report that a user is experiencing a slowdown or something's wrong. >>They can go into honeycomb and figure out that this only happens to users who are using a particular language pack with their app. And they operated their app last week, that it only happens when they are trying to upload a file. And so it's this level of granularity and being able to zoom in and out under data that allows you to understand what's happening, especially when you have an incident going on, right. Or your really important high profile customer is telling you that something's wrong. And we can do that. Even if everything else in your other tools looks fine, right? All of your dashboards are okay. You're not actually getting paged on it, but your customers are telling you that something's wrong. And we believe that's where we shine in helping you there. >>Excellent. It sounds like that's where you really shine that realtime visibility is so critical these days. Danielle, Danielle, wanna bring you into the conversation. Talk to us a little bit about the honeycomb partnership from the AWS lens. >>Yeah. So excuse me, observability is obviously a very important segment in the cloud space, very important to AWS, because a lot of all of our customers, as they build their systems distributed, they need to be able to see where, where things are happening in the complex systems that they're building. And so honeycomb is a, is an advanced technology partner. They've been working with us for quite some time and they have a, their solution is listed on the marketplace. Definitely something that we see a lot of demand with our customers, and they have many integrations, which, you know, we've seen is key to success. Being able to work seamlessly with the rest of the services inside of the AWS platform. And I know that they've done some, some great things with people who are trying to develop games on top of AWS things in that area as well. And so very important partner in the observa observability market that we have >>You back to you, let's kind of unpack the partnership, the significance that honeycomb ha is getting from being partners with an organization as potent and pivotal as AWS. >>Yeah, absolutely. I know that this predates me to some extent, but I know for a long time, AWS and honeycomb has really pushed the envelope together. And I think it's a beneficial relationship for both ends. There is kind of two ways of looking at it. On the one side, there is our own infrastructure. So honeycomb runs on AWS and actually one of our critical workloads that supports that fast query engine that I mentioned uses Lambda. And it does so in a pretty Orthodox way. So we've had a long standing conversation with the AWS team as far as drawing outside those lines and kind of figuring out how to use the technology in a way that works for us and hopefully will work for other customers of theirs as well. That also allows us to ask for early access for certain features when they become available. >>And then that way we can be sort of the Guinea pigs and try things out in a way that migrates our system and optimizes our own performance, but also allows again, other customers of AWS to follow in that path. And then the other side of that partnership is really supporting our customers who are both honeycomb users and AWS users, because it's, as you imagine, quite a big overlap, and there are certain ways in which we can allow our customers to more easily get their data from AWS to honeycomb. So for example, last year we built a tool based on the new Lambda extension capability that allowed our users who run their applications in Lambdas to get that tele, telemetry data out of their applications and into honeycomb and it land was win-win >>Excellent. So I'm hearing a lot of synergies from a technology perspective, you're sticking with you, and then Danielle will bring you in. Let's talk about how honeycomb supports D and I across its organization. And how is that synergistic with AWS's approach? Yeah, >>Yeah, absolutely. So I, I sort of alluded to that hesitancy to over index on the women led aspect of ourselves. But again, a lot of things are shifting, we're growing a lot. And so we are recognizing that we need to be more intentional with our DEI initiatives, and we also notice that we can do better and we should do better. And to that, and we're doing a few things differently that are pretty recent initiatives. We are partnering with organizations that help us target specific communities that are underrepresented in tech. Some examples would be after tech hu Latinas in tech among a number of others. And another initiative is DEI head start. That's something that is an internal practice that we started that includes reaching out to underrepresented applicants before any new job for honeycomb becomes live. So before we posted to LinkedIn, before it's even live on our job speech, and the idea there is to kind of balance our pipeline of applicants, which the hope is we'll lead to more diverse hires in the long term. >>That's a great focus there. Danielle, I know we've talked about this before, but for the audience, in terms of the context of the honeycomb partnership, the focus at AWS for D E and I is really significant, unpack that a little bit for us. >>Well, let me just bring it back to just how we think about it with the companies that we work with, but also in, in terms of, you know, what we want to be able to do, excuse me, it's very important for us to, you know, build products that reflect the customers that we have. And I think, you know, working with a company like honeycomb that is looking to differentiate in a space by, by bringing in, you know, the experiences of many different types of people I genuinely believe. And I'm sure Vera also believes that by having those diverse perspectives, that we're able to then build better products for our customers. And, you know, it's one of, one of our leadership principles is, is rooted in this. I write a lot, it asks for us to seek out diverse perspectives and you can't really do that if everybody kind of looks the same and thinks the same and has the same background. So I think that is where our de and I, you know, I thought process is rooted and, you know, companies like honeycomb that give customers choice and differentiate and help them to do what they need to do in their unique environments is super important. So >>The, the importance of thought diversity cannot be underscored enough. It's something that is, can be pivotal to organizations. And it's very nice to hear that that's so fundamental to both companies, Barry, I wanna go back to you for a second. You, I think you mentioned this, the DEI headstart program, that's an internal program at honeycomb. Can you shed a little bit of light on that? >>Yeah, that's right. And I actually am in the process of hiring a first engineer for my team. So I'm learning a lot of these things firsthand and how it works is we try to make sure to pre-load our pipeline of applicants for any new job opening we have with diverse candidates to the best of our abilities. And that can involve partnering with the organizations that I mentioned or reaching out to our internal network and make sure that we give those applicants a head start, so to speak. >>Excellent. I like that. Danielle, before we close, I wanna get a little bit of, of your background. We've got various background in tech, she's celebrating her 10th anniversary. Give me a, a short kind of description of the journey that you've navigated through being a female in technology. >>Yeah, thanks so much. I really appreciate being able to share this. So I started as a software engineer back actually in the late nineties during the, the first.com bubble and have, have spent quite a long time actually as an individual contributor, probably working in software engineering teams up through 2014 at a minimum until I joined AWS as a customer facing solutions architect. I do think spending a lot of time, hands on, definitely helped me with some of the imposter syndrome issues that folks suffer from not to say I don't at all, but it, it certainly helped with that. And I've been leading teens at AWS since 2015. So it's really been a great ride. And like I said, I'm very happy to see all of our engineering teams change as far as their composition. And I'm, I'm grateful to be part of it. >>It's pretty great to be able to witness that composition change for the better last question for each of you. And we're almost out of time and Danielle, I'm gonna stick with you. What's your advice or your recommendations for women who either are thinking about getting into tech or those who may be in tech, maybe they're in individual contributor positions and they're not sure if they should apply for that senior leadership position. What do you advise them to do? >>I mean, definitely for the individual contributors, tech tech is a great career direction and you will always be able to find women like you, you have to maybe just work a little bit harder to join, have community in that. But then as a leader, representation is very important and we can bring more women into tech by having more leaders. So that's my, you just have to take the lead, >>Take the lead, love it there. Same question for you. What's your advice and recommendations for those maybe future female leaders in tech? >>Yeah, absolutely. Danielle mentioned imposter syndrome and I think we all struggle with it from time to time, no matter how many years it's been. And I think for me, for me, the advice would be if you're starting out, don't be afraid to ask questions and don't be afraid to kind of show a, a little bit of ignorance because we've all been there. And I think it's on all of us to remember what it's like to not know how things work. And on the flip side of that, if you are a more senior IC or in a leadership role, also being able to model just saying, I don't know how this works and going and figuring out answers together because that was a really powerful shift for me early in my career is just to feel like I can say that I don't know something. >>I totally agree. I've been in that same situation where just ask the question because you I'm guaranteed. There's a million other people in the room that probably has the, have the same question. And because of imposter syndrome, don't wanna admit, I don't understand that. Can we back up, but I agree with you. I think that is one of the best things. Raise your hand, ask a question, ladies. Thank you so much for joining me talking about honeycomb and AWS, what you're doing together from a technology perspective and the focus efforts that each company has on D and I, we appreciate your insights. >>Thank you so much for having us great talking to you. >>My pleasure, likewise for my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the AWS partner showcase women in check.

>>Hey everyone. Welcome to the AWS partner showcase season one, episode three women in tech. I'm your host. Lisa Martin. I've got two female rock stars joining me. Next Vera Reynolds is here engineering manager, telemetry at honeycomb, and one of our Cub alumni, Danielle GShock ISV PSA director a at AWS joins us as well. Ladies. It's great to have you talking about a very important topic today. >>Thanks for having us. Yeah, thanks for having me. Appreciate it. >>Of course, Vera, let's go ahead and start with you. Tell me about your background and tech. You're coming up on your 10th anniversary. Happy anniversary. >>Thank you. That's right. I can't believe it's been 10 years, but yeah, I started in tech in 2012. I was an engineer for most of that time. And just recently, as of March switched to engineering management here at honeycomb and, you know, throughout my career, I was very much interested in all the things, right. And it was a big FOMO as far as trying a few different companies and products. And I've done things from web development to mobile, to platforms. It would be apt to call me a generalist. And in the more recent years, I was sort of gravitating more towards developer tool space. And for me, that came in the form of cloud Foundry circle CI, and now honeycomb. I actually had my eye on honeycomb for a while before joining, I came across a blog post by charity majors. Who's one of our founders and she was actually talking about management and how to pursue that and whether or not it's right for your career. >>And so I was like, who is this person? I really like her found the company. They were pretty small at the time. So I was sort of keeping my eye on them. And then when the time came around for me to look again, I did a little bit more digging, found a lot of talks about the product. And on the one hand, they really spoke to me as the solution. They talked about developers owning their coding in production and answering questions about what is happening, what are your users seeing? And I felt that pain, I got what they were trying to do. And also on the other hand, every talk I saw at the time was from an amazing woman, which I haven't seen before. So I came across charity majors again, Christine yen, who our other founder, and then Liz Frank Jones, who our principal developer advocate. And that really sealed the deal for me as far as wanting to work here. >>Yeah. Honeycomb is interesting. This is a female founded company. You're two leaders. You mentioned that you like the technology, but you were also attracted because you saw females in the leadership position. Talk to me a little bit about what that's like working for a female led organization at honeycomb. >>Yeah. You know, historically we have tried not to over index on that because there was this maybe fear or rareness of it taking away from our legitimacy as an engineering organization, from our success as a company. But I'm seeing that rhetoric shift recently because we believe that with great responsibility with great power comes great responsibility. And we're trying to be more intentional as far as using that attribute of our company. So I would say that for me, it was a choice between a few offers, right. And that was a selling point, for sure, because again, I've never experienced it and I've really seen how much they walk that walk. Even me being here and me moving into management, I think were both ways in which they really put a lot of trust and support in me. And so I it's been a great ride. >>Excellent. Sounds like it. Before we bring Danielle in to talk about the partnership. I do wanna have you here, talk to the audience a little bit about honeycomb, what technology it's delivering and what are its differentiators. >>Yeah, absolutely. So honeycomb is an observability tool that enables engineers to answer questions about the code that runs in production. And we work with a number of various customers. Some of them are Vanguard, slack. Hello, fresh. Just to name a couple. If you're not familiar with observability tooling, it's akin to traditional application performance monitoring, but we believe that observability is succeeding APM because APM tools were built at the time of monoliths and they just weren't designed to help us answer questions about complex distributed systems that we work with today, where things can go wrong anywhere in that chain. And you can't predict what you're gonna need to ask ahead of time. So some of the ways that we are different is our ability to store and query really rich data, which we believe is the key to understanding those complex systems. What I mean by rich data is something that has a lot of attributes. >>So for example, when an error happens, knowing who it happened to, which user ID, which I don't know region, they were in, what, what, what they were doing at the time and what was happening at the rest of your system. And our ingest engine is really fast. You can do it in as little as three seconds and we call data like this. I said, kind of rich data, contextual data. We refer it as having high ity and high dimensionality, which are big words. But at the end of the day, what that means is we can store and we can query this data and we can do it really fast. And to give you an example of how that looks for our customers, let's say you have a developer team who are using comb to understand and observe their system. And they get a report that a user is experiencing a slowdown or something's wrong. >>They can go into honeycomb and figure out that this only happens to users who are using a particular language pack with their app. And they operated their app last week, that it only happens when they are trying to upload a file. And so it's this level of granularity and being able to zoom in and out under data that allows you to understand what's happening, especially when you have an incident going on, right. Or your really important high profile customer is telling you that something's wrong. And we can do that. Even if everything else in your other tools looks fine, right? All of your dashboards are okay. You're not actually getting paged on it, but your customers are telling you that something's wrong. And we believe that's where we shine in helping you there. >>Excellent. It sounds like that's where you really shine that real time visibility is so critical these days. Danielle, Danielle, wanna bring you into the conversation. Talk to us a little bit about the honeycomb partnership from the AWS lens. >>Yeah. So excuse me, observability is obviously a very important segment in the cloud space, very important to AWS, because a lot of all of our customers, as they build their systems distributed, they need to be able to see where, where things are happening in the complex systems that they're building. And so honeycomb is a, is an advanced technology partner. They've been working with us for quite some time and they have a, their solution is listed on the marketplace. Definitely something that we see a lot of demand with our customers, and they have many integrations, which, you know, we've seen is key to success. Being able to work seamlessly with the rest of the services inside of the AWS platform. And I know that they've done some, some great things with people who are trying to develop games on top of AWS things in that area as well. And so very important partner in the observa observability market that we have. >>Vera a back to you, let's kind of unpack the partnership, the significance that honeycomb ha is getting from being partners with an organization as potent and pivotal as AWS. >>Yeah, absolutely. I Don know that this Predates me to some extent, but I Don know for a long time, AWS and honeycomb has really pushed the envelope together. And I think it's a beneficial relationship for both ends. There's kind of two ways of looking at it. On the one side, there is our own infrastructure. So honeycomb runs on AWS and actually one of our critical workloads that supports that fast query engine that I mentioned uses Lambda. And it does also in a pretty unorthodox way. So we've had a long standing conversation with the AWS team as far as drawing outside those lines and kind of figuring out how to use the technology in a way that works for us and hopefully will work for other customers of theirs as well. That also allows us to ask for early access for certain features when they become available. >>And then that way we can be sort of the Guinea pigs and try things out in a way that migrates our system and optimizes our own performance, but also allows again, other customers of AWS to follow in that path. And then the other side of that partnership is really supporting our customers who are both honeycomb users and AWS users, because it's, as you imagine, quite a big overlap, and there are certain ways in which we can allow our customers to more easily get their data from AWS to honeycomb. So for example, last year, we built a tool based on the new Lambda extension capability that allowed our users who run their applications in Lambdas to get that tele telemetry data out of their applications and into honeycomb and demand was win-win >>Excellent. So I'm hearing a lot of synergies from a technology perspective, you're sticking with you, and then Danielle will bring you in. Let's talk about how honeycomb supports D E and I across its organization. And how is that synergistic with AWS's approach Vera? >>Yeah, absolutely. So I sort of alluded to that hesitancy to over index on the women led aspect of ourselves. But again, a lot of things are shifting, we're growing a lot. And so we are recognizing that we need to be more intentional with our DEI initiatives, and we also notice that we can do better and we should do better. And to that end, we're doing a few things differently that are pretty recent initiatives. We are partnering with organizations that help us target specific communities that are underrepresented in tech. Some examples would be Africa, tech hu Latinas in tech among a number of others. And another initiative is DEI head start. That's something that is an internal practice that we started that includes reaching out to underrepresented applicants before any new job for honeycomb becomes live. So before we posted to LinkedIn, before it's even live on our job speech, and the idea there is to kind of balance our pipeline of applicants, which the hope is will lead to more diverse hires in the long term. >>That's a great focus there. Danielle, I know we've talked about this before, but for the audience, in terms of the context of the honeycomb partnership, the focus at AWS for D E and I is really significant, unpack that a little bit for us. >>Well, let me just bring it back to just how we think about it with the companies that we work with, but also in, in terms of, you know, what we want to be able to do, excuse me, it's very important for us to, you know, build products that reflect the customers that we have. And I think, you know, working with a company like honeycomb that is looking to differentiate in a space by, by bringing in, you know, the experiences of many different types of people I genuinely believe. And I'm sure Vera also believes that by having those diverse perspectives, that we're able to then build better products for our customers. And, you know, it's one of, one of our leadership principles is, is rooted in this. I write a lot, it asks for us to seek out diverse perspectives and you can't really do that if everybody kind of looks the same and thinks the same and has the same background. So I think that is where our de and I, you know, I thought process is rooted and, you know, companies like honeycomb that give customers choice and differentiate and help them to do what they need to do in their unique environments is super important. So >>The, the importance of thought diversity cannot be underscored enough. It's something that is, can be pivotal to organizations. And it's very nice to hear that that's so fundamental to both companies, Barry, I wanna go back to you for a second. You, I think you mentioned this, the DEI head start program, that's an internal program at honeycomb. Can you shed a little bit of light on that? >>Yeah, that's right. And I actually am in the process of hiring a first engineer for my team. So I'm learning a lot of these things firsthand and how it works is we try to make sure to pre-load our pipeline of applicants for any new job opening we have with diverse candidates to the best of our abilities. And that can involve partnering with the organizations that I mentioned or reaching out to our internal network and make sure that we give those applicants a head start, so to speak. >>Excellent. I like that. Danielle, before we close, I wanna get a little bit of, of your background. We've got various background in tech, she's celebrating her 10th anniversary. Give me a, a short kind of description of the journey that you've navigated through being a female in technology. >>Yeah, thanks so much. I really appreciate being able to share this. So I started as a software engineer back actually in the late nineties during the, the first.com bubble and have, have spent quite a long time actually as an individual contributor, probably working in software engineering teams up through 2014 at a minimum until I joined AWS as a customer facing solutions architect. I do think spending a lot of time, hands on, definitely helped me with some of the imposter syndrome issues that folks suffer from not to say I don't at all, but it, it certainly helped with that. And I've been leading teen at AWS since 2015. So it's really been a great ride. And like I said, I'm very happy to see all of our engineering teams change as far as their composition. And I'm, I'm grateful to be part of it. >>It's pretty great to be able to witness that composition change for the better last question for each of you. And we're almost out of time and Danielle, I'm gonna stick with you. What's your advice, your recommendations for women who either are thinking about getting into tech or those who may be in tech, maybe they're in individual contributor positions, and they're not sure if they should apply for that senior leadership position. What do you advise them to do? >>I mean, definitely for the individual contributors, tech tech is a great career direction and you will always be able to find women like you, you have to maybe just work a little bit harder to join, have community in that. But then as a leader, representation is very important and we can bring more women into tech by having more leaders. So that's my, you just have to take the lead, >>Take the lead. Love that various same question for you. What's your advice and recommendations for those maybe future female leaders in tech? >>Yeah, absolutely. Danielle mentioned imposter syndrome and I think we all struggle with it from time to time, no matter how many years it's been. And I think for me, for me, the advice would be if you're starting out, don't be afraid to ask questions and don't be afraid to kind of show a bit, a little bit of ignorance because we've all been there. And I think it's on all of us to remember what it's like to not know how things work. And on the flip side of that, if you are a more senior IC or in a leadership role, also being able to model just saying, I don't know how this works and going and figuring out answers together because that was a really powerful shift for me early in my career is just to feel like I can say that I don't know something. >>I totally agree. I've been in that same situation where just ask the question because you I'm guaranteed. There's a million outta people in the room that probably has the, have the same question and because an imposter syndrome don't wanna admit, I don't understand that. Can we back up, but I agree with you. I think that is one of the best things. Raise your hand and ask a question, ladies. Thank you so much for joining me talking about honeycomb and AWS, what you're doing together from a technology perspective and the focus efforts that each company has on D E and I, we appreciate your insights. >>Thank you so much for having us talking to >>My pleasure. Likewise, for my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the AWS partner showcase women in.

(bright music) >> Welcome to the AWS Partner Showcase. I'm Lisa Martin, your host. This is season one episode three and this is a great episode that focuses on women in tech. I'm pleased to be joined by Danielle Greshock, the ISV PSA director at AWS, and a sponsor of this fantastic program. Danielle, it's great to see you and talk about such an important topic. >> Yes, and I will tell you all of these interviews have just been a blast for me to do and I feel like there has been a lot of gold that we can glean from all of the stories that we heard on these interviews and good advice that I myself would not have necessarily thought of. >> I agree, and we're going to get to (indistinct) 'cause advice is one of the the main things that our audience is going to hear. We have Hillary Ashton, you'll see from Teradata. Vera Reynolds joins us from Honeycomb. Stephanie Curry from NetApp. And Sue Persichetti from Jefferson Frank and the topics that we dig into are, first and foremost, diversity equity and inclusion, that is a topic that is incredibly important to every organization. And some of the things, Danielle, that our audiences shared were really interesting to me. One of the things that I saw, from a thematic perspective, over and over, was that, like Vera Reynolds was talking about, the importance of companies and hiring managers and how they need to be intentional with DE&I initiatives and that intention was a common theme that we heard. I'm curious what your thoughts are about that, that we heard about being intentional, working intentionally to deliver a more holistic pool of candidates where DE&I is concerned. What were some of the things that stuck out to you? >> Absolutely, I think each one of us is working inside of organizations where, in the last five to 10 years, there's been a strong push in this direction, mostly because we've really seen, first and foremost by being intentional, that you can change the way your organization looks. But also just that without being intentional there was just a lot of outcomes and situations that maybe weren't great for a healthy and productive environment, working environment. And so a lot of these companies have made big investments and put forth big initiatives that I think all of us are involved in and so we're really excited to get out here and talk about it and talk about, especially as these are all partnerships that we have, how these align with our values. >> Yeah, that value alignment that you bring up is another theme that we heard consistently with each of the partners. There's a cultural alignment. There's a customer obsession alignment that they have with AWS. There's a DE&I alignment that they have and I think everybody also kind of agreed, Stephanie Curry talked about, it's really important for diversity on impacting performance, highly performant teams are teams that are more diverse. I think we heard that kind of echoed throughout the women that we talked to in this episode. >> Absolutely, and I definitely even feel that there are studies out there that tell you that you make better products if you have all of the right input and you're getting many different perspectives. But not just that, I can personally see it in the performing teams, not just my team, but also the teams that I work alongside. Arguably some of the other business folks have done a really great job of bringing more women into their organization, bringing more underrepresented minorities, tech is a little bit behind but we're trying really hard to bring that forward as well in technical roles. But you can just see the difference in the outcomes. At least I personally can, just in the adjacent teams of mine. >> That's awesome, we talked also quite a bit during this episode about attracting women and underrepresented groups and retaining them. That retention piece is really key. What were some of the things that stuck out to you that some of the guests talked about in terms of retention? >> Yeah, I think, especially speaking with Hillary and hearing how Teradata is thinking about different ways to make hybrid work work for everybody, I think that is definitely, when I talk to women interested in joining AWS, oftentimes that might be one of the first concerns that they have. Like, am I going to be able to go pick my kid up at four o'clock at the bus? Or, am I going to be able to be at my kid's conference? Or even just have enough work life balance that I can do the things that I want to do outside of work, beyond children and family. So these are all very important questions that especially women come and ask, but also it kind of is a bellwether for, is this going to be a company that allows me to bring my whole self to work and then I'm also going to be able to have that balance that I need. So I think that was something that is changing a lot and many people are thinking about work a lot differently. >> Absolutely, the pandemic not only changed how we think about work. You know, initially it was, do I work from home or do I live at work, and that was legitimately a challenge that all of us faced for a long time period, but we're seeing the hybrid model, we're seeing more companies be open to embracing that and allowing people to have more of that balance, which, at the end of the day, it's so much better for product development for the customers, as you talked about, it's a win-win. >> Absolutely, and definitely the first few months of it was very hard to find that separation, to be able to put up boundaries, but I think, at least I personally, have been able to find the way to do it and I hope that everyone is getting that space to be able to put those boundaries up, to effectively have a harmonious work life where you can still be at home most of the time, but also have that cutoff point of the day or at least have that separate space that you can feel that you're able to separate the two. >> Yeah absolutely, and a lot of that, from a work life balance perspective, bleeds into one of the next topics that we covered in detail and that's mentors and sponsors, the differences between them, recommendations from the women on the panel about how to combat imposter syndrome, but also how to leverage mentors and sponsors throughout your career. One of the things that Hillary said that I thought was fantastic advice, where mentors and sponsors are concerned, is be selective in picking your bosses. We often see people, especially younger folks, not necessarily younger folks, I shouldn't say that, that are attracted to a company, it's brand maybe, and think more about that than they do the boss or bosses that can help guide them along the way, but I thought that was really poignant advice that Hillary provided, something that I'm going to take into consideration myself. >> Yeah, and I honestly hadn't thought about that but as I reflect through my own career I can see how I've had particular managers who have had a major impact on helping me with my career. But if you don't have the ability to do that or maybe that's not a luxury that you have, I think even if you're able to find a mentor for a period of time or just enable for you to be able to get from, say a point A to point B, just for a temporary period, just so you can grow into your next role. Have a particular outcome that you want to drive. Have a particular goal in mind. Find that person who's been there and done that and they can really help you get through. If you don't have the luxury of picking your manager, at least be able to pick a mentor who can help you get to the next step. >> Exactly, I thought that advice was brilliant and it's something that I hadn't really considered either. We also talked with several of the women about imposter syndrome. You know that's something that everybody, I think regardless of gender, of your background, everybody feels that at some point. So I think one of the nice things that we do in this episode is sort of identify, yes, imposter syndrome is real, this is how it happened to me, this is how I navigated around or got over it. I think there's some great advice there for the audience to glean as well, about how to dial down the imposter syndrome that they might be feeling. >> Absolutely and I think the key there is just acknowledging it but also just hearing all the different techniques on how folks have dealt with it because everybody does. Even some of the smartest, most confident men I've met in industry still talk to me about how they have it and I'm shocked by it oftentimes, but it is very common and hopefully we talk about some good techniques to deal with that. >> I think we do. You know, one of the things that, when we were asking our guests about advice, what would they tell their younger selves, what would they tell young women or underrepresented groups in terms of becoming interested in STEM and in tech, and everybody sort of agreed on the, don't be afraid to raise your hand and ask questions. Show vulnerabilities, not just as the employee, but even from a leadership perspective, show that as a leader. I don't have all the answers. There are questions that I have. I think that goes a long way to reducing the imposter syndrome that most of us have faced at some point in our lives and that's just, don't be afraid to ask questions. You never know how many people have the same question sitting in the room. >> Well and also, for folks who've been in industry for 20, 25 years, I think we can just say that it's a marathon, it's not a sprint, and you're always going to have new things to learn and you can spend, back to we talked about the zigging and zagging through careers where we'll have different experiences, all of that kind of comes through just being curious and wanting to continue to learn. So yes, asking questions and being vulnerable and being able to say, "I don't know all the answers but I want to learn," is a key thing, especially culturally at AWS, but I'm sure with all of these companies as well. >> Definitely I think it sounded like it was really ingrained in their culture. And another thing too that we also talked about is the word no doesn't always mean a dead end. It can often mean, not right now, or maybe this isn't the right opportunity at this time. I think that's another important thing that the audience is going to learn is that failure is not necessarily a bad F word if you turn it into opportunity. No isn't necessarily the end of the road. It can be an opener to a different door and I thought that was a really positive message that our guests had to share with the audience. >> Yeah totally, I can say I had a mentor of mine, a very strong woman who told me, your career is going to have lots of ebbs and flows and that's natural and that when you say that, not right now, that's a perfect example of maybe there's an ebb where it might not be the right time for you now, but something to consider in the future. But also don't be afraid to say yes, when you can. >> Exactly, Danielle, it's been a pleasure filming this episode with you and the great female leaders that we have on. I'm excited for the audience to be able to learn from Hillary, Vera, Stephanie, Sue, and you. So much valuable content in here. We hope you enjoy this Partner Showcase. Season one episode three. Danielle, thank you so much for helping us. >> Thank you. Thank you, it's been a blast. I really appreciate it. >> All right, audience, we want to thank you. Enjoy the episode. (upbeat music)

(bright music) >> Everyone, it's nice to see you. Welcome to the "AWS Partner Showcase". I'm Lisa Martin, your host. This is season one, episode three, and this is a great episode that focuses on women in tech. I'm pleased to be joined by Danielle Greshock, the ISV PSA Director at AWS, and the sponsor of this fantastic program. Danielle, it's great to see you, and talk about such an important topic. >> Yes, and I will tell you all of these interviews have just been a blast for me to do, and I feel like there has been a lot of gold that we can glean from all of the stories that we heard on these interviews and good advice that I myself would not have necessarily thought of. So-- >> I agree, and we're going to get to that. 'Cause advice is one of the main things that our audience is going to hear. We have Hillary Ashton, you'll see from Teradata, Vera Reynolds joins us from Honeycomb, Stephanie Curry from NetApp and Sue Persichetti from Jefferson Frank. And the topics that we dig into are first and foremost, diversity, equity and inclusion. That is a topic that is incredibly important to every organization. And some of the things, Danielle, that our audiences shared were really interesting to me. One of the things that I saw from a thematic perspective over and over was that like Vera Reynolds was talking about the importance of companies and hiring managers and how they need to be intentional with DE&I initiatives. And that intention was a common thing that we heard. I'm curious what your thoughts are about that, that we heard about being intentional, working intentionally to deliver a more holistic pool of candidates where DE&I is concerned. What were some of the things that stuck out to you? >> Absolutely, I think each one of us is working in the inside of organizations where in the last five to 10 years there's been a strong push in this direction. Mostly because we've really seen first and foremost by being intentional, that you can change the way your organization looks. But also just that without being intentional, there was just a lot of outcomes and situations that maybe weren't great for a healthy and productive working environment. And so a lot of these companies have made big investments and put forth big initiatives that I think all of us are involved in. And so we're really excited to get out here and talk about it and talk about, especially as these are all partnerships that we have, how these align with our values. >> Yeah, that value alignment that you bring up is another thing that we heard consistently with each of the partners. There's a cultural alignment, there's a customer obsession alignment that they have with AWS, there's a DE&I alignment that they have. And I think everybody also kind of agreed. Stephanie Curry talked about it's really important for diversity on impacting performance. Highly performing teams are teams that are more diverse. I think we heard that kind of echoed throughout the women that we talked to in this episode. >> Absolutely, and I definitely even feel that there are studies out there that tell you that you make better products if you have all of the right input and you're getting many different perspectives. But not just that, but I can personally see it in the performing teams, not just my team, but also the teams that I work alongside. Arguably some of the other business folks have done a really great job of bringing more women into their organization, bringing more underrepresented minorities. Tech is a little bit behind, but we're trying really hard to bring that forward as well in technical roles. But you can just see the difference in the outcomes. At least I personally can just in the adjacent teams of mine. >> That's awesome. We talked also quite a bit during this episode about attracting women and underrepresented groups and retaining them. That retention piece is really key. What were some of the things that stuck out to you that some of the guests talked about in terms of retention? >> Yeah, I think especially speaking with Hillary and hearing how Teradata is thinking about different ways to make hybrid work work for everybody. I think that is definitely... When I talk to women interested in joining AWS, oftentimes that might be one of the first concerns that they have. Like, am I going to be able to go pick my kid up at four o'clock at the bus? Or am I going to be able to be at my kids' conference, or even just have enough work-life balance that I can do the things that I want to do outside of work beyond children and family. So these are all very important questions that especially women come and ask, but also it kind of is a bellwether for, is this going to be a company that allows me to bring my whole self to work? And then I'm also going to be able to have that balance that I need. So I think that was something that is changing a lot and many people are thinking about work a lot differently. >> Absolutely, the pandemic not only changed how we think about work. Initially it was, do I work from home or do I live at work? And that was legitimately a challenge that all of us faced for a long time period. But we're seeing the hybrid model, we're seeing more companies be open to embracing that and allowing people to have more of that balance which at the end of the day it's so much better for product development for the customers as you talked about, it's a win-win. >> Absolutely. And definitely the first few months of it was very hard to find that separation to be able to put up boundaries. But I think at least I personally have been able to find the way to do it and I hope that everyone is getting that space to be able to put those boundaries up to effectively have a harmonious work life. Where you can still be at home most of the time, but also have that cutoff point of the day or at least have that separate space that you can feel that you're able to separate the two. >> Yeah, absolutely. And a lot of that from a work-life balance perspective leads into one of the next topics that we covered in detail. And that's mentors and sponsors, the differences between them, recommendations from the women on the panel about how to combat imposter syndrome, but also how to leverage mentors and sponsors throughout your career. One of the things that Hillary said that I thought was fantastic advice where mentors and sponsors are concerned is be selective in picking your bosses. We often see people, especially younger folks, not necessarily younger folks, I shouldn't say that, that are attracted to a company, its brand maybe, and think more about that than they do the boss or bosses that can help guide them along the way. But I thought that was really poignant advice that Hillary provided, something that I'm going to take into consideration myself. >> Yeah, and I honestly hadn't thought about that, but as I reflect through my own career, I can see how I've had particular managers who have had a major impact on helping me with my career. But if you don't have the ability to do that or maybe that's not a luxury that you have, I think even if you're able to find a mentor for a period of time or just enable for you to be able to get from say a point A to point B just for a temporary period, just so you can grow into your next role, have a particular outcome that you want to drive, have a particular goal in mind. Find that person who's been there and done that and they can really help you get through if you don't have the luxury of picking your manager, at least be able to pick a mentor who can help you get to the next step. >> Exactly, I thought that advice was brilliant and something that I hadn't really considered either. We also talked with several other women about imposter syndrome. That's something that everybody, I think regardless of gender, of your background, everybody feels that at some point. So I think one of the nice things that we do in this episode is sort of identify, yes, imposter syndrome is real. This is how it happened to me, this is how I navigated around it or got over it. I think there's some great advice there for the audience to glean as well about how to dial down the imposter syndrome that they might be feeling. >> Absolutely. And I think the key there is just acknowledging it, but also just hearing all the different techniques on how folks have dealt with it, because everybody does. Even some of the smartest, most confident men I've met in industry still talk to me about how they have it. And I'm shocked by it oftentimes, but it is very common. And hopefully we talk about some good techniques to deal with that. >> I think we do. One of the things that when we were asking our guests about advice, what would they tell their younger selves, what would they tell young women or underrepresented groups in terms of becoming interested in STEM and in tech. And everybody sort of agreed on the don't be afraid to raise your hand and ask questions. Show vulnerabilities, not just as the employee, but even from a leadership perspective, show that as a leader, I don't have all the answers. There are questions that I have. I think that goes a long way to reducing the imposter syndrome that most of us have faced at some point in our lives. And that's just, don't be afraid to ask questions. You never know how many people have the same question sitting in the room. >> Well, and also for folks who've been in industry for 20, 25 years, I think we can just say that it's a marathon, it's not a sprint, and you're always going to have new things to learn. And you can spend... Back to we talked about the zigging and zagging through careers where we'll have different experiences. All of that kind of comes through just being curious and wanting to continue to learn. So yes, asking questions and being vulnerable and being able to say, I don't know all the answers but I want to learn is a key thing, especially culturally at AWS, but I'm sure with all of these companies as well. >> Definitely I think it sounded like it was really ingrained in their culture. And another thing too that we also talked about is the word, no, doesn't always mean a dead end, it can often mean, not right now or maybe this isn't the right opportunity at this time. I think that's another important thing that the audience is going to learn is that failure is not necessarily a bad F-word if you turn it into opportunity. No isn't necessarily the end of the road. It can be an opener to a different door. And I thought that was a really positive message that our guests had to share with the audience. >> Yeah, totally. I can say I had a mentor of mine, a very strong woman who told me, "Your career is going to have lots of ebbs and flows, and that's natural." And that when you say that, not right now, that's a perfect example of maybe there's an ebb where it might not be the right time for you now, but something to consider in the future. But also don't be afraid to say yes when you can. >> Exactly. Danielle, it's been a pleasure filming this episode with you and the great female leaders that we have on. I'm excited for the audience to be able to learn from Hillary, Vera, Stephanie, Sue and you. So much valuable content in here. We hope you enjoy this partner showcase season one episode three. Danielle, thanks so much for helping us with this. >> Thank you. Thank you, it's been a blast, I really appreciate it. >> All right. Audience, we want to thank you, enjoy the episode. (gentle music)