How does your usual day look like?

I start my day with meditation and daily reflection. A couple days a week, I’ll walk down Regent’s Canal for a morning yoga class. Starting the day with quiet time helps me stay focused, balanced, and make more measured decisions.

​

The work day begins with a quick scan of Slack and email, I try to organise my calendar by specific focus topics. For example, Mondays are kick off the week days, Tuesdays are organisational updates, Fridays are 1/1’s and skip levels. This helps me stay prepared for each day by having a rhythm to the week.

​

Regardless of the focus of the day, I primarily spend my time balancing tactical and strategic topics. I’m checking how projects are progressing, helping teams unblock issues, and thinking about what’s coming next and how I can set my teams up for success.

I’m trying to be better about ending the day at a specific time instead of when I feel I’ve finished all my tasks, currently the goal is 6pm. I’ll end the day by reviewing my calendar for the following day to make sure there are no surprises. The best days end with a walk in the park and a home cooked meal. I set my phone to ‘Do Not Disturb’ after 9pm and try to stay away from it. I’ll end the day by reading a library book and some meditation before bed. I’m currently reading The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder.

What are the things you like the most about your job?

No two days are the same. There are always new challenges to face, complexities to manage, issues to resolve. It keeps me on my toes!

What are some of the skills you utilise the most in your day-to-day at work?

Communication and decision making. My teams span three separate engineering verticals with different goals and dependencies. They need consistent direction on our strategy and their progress needs the right level of visibility across the organisation. Each day has a steady stream of escalations or issues requiring a decision. I've learned that it really is a skill to be able to make the call.

What’s more important: mindset or talent and why?

Mindset. To effectively lead you need to be flexible. My mindset is to focus on the things I can influence and to lead through others. I've previously tried to lead through my talent (of being good at doing specific things) and it held me back from scaling because it all depended on me.

What was the toughest career decision you ever made?

Taking a leap of faith and moving my family, and dog, to the UK for my career.

​

Growth and impact were important aspects to me of career development and I had the opportunity to do both by moving from Chicago to London to work in FinTech. To make a big move for my career was one of the scariest things I’ve done, but has had the biggest payoff.

What is something you had to learn to become better at your work?

To be more structured with my time and to say no. If my calendar doesn’t reflect my goals for the week, then I will have a hard time meeting them. If I don’t say no to work that can be done by someone else, I’m losing an opportunity to upskill, delegate the work, and scale myself.

How did you get to become a VP of Engineering?

It’s been a balance of developing my skill set, investing in my network, and finding the right executive sponsorship along the way.

I’ve spent my career in software development. While not the most common progression for engineering leaders, it’s been a natural evolution for me from project management, to product management, and then into engineering management. Being a VP of Engineering means I need to know how to get things done, be strategically minded on product development, and have the right level of context to guide senior staff engineers on how to unblock their teams.

​

I have an incredible network of brilliant and inspiring women who give great advice. They challenge me with different perspectives and can objectively call out blank spots I might be missing.

​

Building credibility with executive leaders means someone is advocating for me when I’m not in the room. This has been essential for promotions and getting the opportunity to take on big new projects that have been game changers in my career.

If you could give a younger woman one piece of advice (it can be anything) - what would you say to them?

1. Don’t put anything on your resume that you wouldn’t want to do in the future

2. If you’re having a tough conversation, write out the talking points beforehand so you stick to your guns if you start to get nervous

3. Before taking a new role, do your homework on salary and advocate for yourself - there are very few opportunities in your career, and they’re normally at the start of a new company, to get a competitive salary