Thread by @pcmasuzzo

Excited to be here! #EWIT22

And already impressed!
#EWIT22

Being a woman in tech is fucking hard. This session definitely started on the right foot. #EWIT22🔥

Adrienne Enggist, Senior Director of Product Development at @bookingcom is sharing her personal experience with tech, and her career & personal growth. What's getting to me is as simple as - growth is not a straight line and it's not necessarily going up. #EWIT22 >

> the space we inhabitate has more dimensions, it's more than OK to occupy them all, even the roads that go down or the corners that leave us standing still. Looking after ourselves must always come first.
#EWIT22

Also key to sorround ourselves with someone who's ready to have our back at any time. A coach, a good one, can make a whole difference. And I cannot agree more. #EWIT22

Adrienne Enggist finishes with a clear message - take care of yourself first. In whatever form that might come. Find your oxygen mask, wear it whenever you need it, collect yourself, and keep going! #EWIT22

Lior Ashkenazi, Group Director, Partners at Globalization Partners, will now talk about trends impacting the global workforce in 2022 #EWIT22!

1. The future of work is employee well-being. Not a surprise, but the COVID19 pandemic has certainly stressed how important this has become. #EWIT22

2. The talent shortage seems to be a myth. The key seems to be to widen the search space, but I argue that sometimes that's not easy / sustainable, especially for small to medium realities. #EWIT22

3. HR tech is critical to lead workforce transformation. Companies need to develop strategies to drive innovation for learning. #EWIT22

A session now with Sona Dagesyan, Head Of Product Seller And Monetization at OLX Group. She'll be talking about the difference between a product team and a features team. I'm very curious. #EWIT22

What makes you a great product manager? The ability to think (every problem is a people problem, after all). The ability to solve. Integrity. Honesty. Managing ambiguity. Lastly, competences. Speaks volumes to me that this was mentioned only for last. #EWIT22

The same tip comes back. Get a coach.
Also, obviously enough, don't stop asking why. And promote work across functions and teams. #EWIT22

A little exercise now to see how many of us work in a product team vs a feature team. The snapshot reveals about 10% of us working in a product team. (this stat is different for specific job positions like my own, I think, but fun to see this nevertheless) #EWIT22

These risks are true and tangible also if your product is pure data. #EWIT22

With respect to failure, it's true that it's part of the game - fully agree - but we should never forget that the way we can embrace failure comes with privilege. Failure will hit harder if you work for a small org., or if you are at the earlier stages of your career. #EWIT22

The narrative that says "embrace failure" is as dangerous as the one that says "no trying, only succeding". My 2 cents #EWIT22

Time for Carol Parillon, Chief Data Architect at Shell, talking about the rise of the data product (pane per i miei denti, as we say in Italian). #EWIT22

Data as foundation of digital transformation. Oh yes 🔥#EWIT22

The cornerstone of a data driven organization: delivering data as a product. Music to my ears.
Data needs to be packaged holistically as a product to be used, accessed, discovered, for the most to come out of it. No matter what team, product, marketing, developers.
#EWIT22

Self-service data platforms, going to leave this here for me as a reminder ;) #EWIT22

A strong data culture puts people at the centre. I find this very difficult to implement, unfortunately.
There needs to be a prioritization of resources and investments. Data Literacy programs for whole organizations, across functions and teams. #EWIT22

The magic ingredient? The courage. The courage to think beyond the current scope and methods, especially if you have already shown that you can deliver data as a product. #EWIT22

Where are the women at Shell? Almost half of current employees are female. Of course percentages shrink as we climb the ladder (duh). But kudos for the transparency and the active efforts in filling the gap. #EWIT22

Carol Parillon finishes off with an amazing message: every one of us is a sponsor, a mentor, and a body. We can create space & opportunities for each other and for our data products. We can support and lift each other. The data journey can be exciting, for everybody. #EWIT22

Another strong message here - when you receive a bunch of resumes from the hiring company you work with, and you don't find a diverse enough representation, send them all back! And demand they do a better job.
Amen. #EWIT22

An open call to men (I saw one in the audience, I gotta go talk to him lol) - be advocates, be mentors, create the space for the female voices to be heard and nurtured. Another amen from me! #EWIT22

The break is over. Time to start the parallel sessions. So much to choose from! I'm following a session on #MachineLearning or Human Learning? I'd say both :) #EWIT22

Machine learning folks, step away from the computer screen and get closer to the consumer side, says Jessica Jacobs. #EWIT22

45% of worldwide organizations use machine learning, yet 85% of projects fail. This hits a sour spot.
Why? 1. Data aren't ML ready.
2. ML is too often chosen to solve random problems. Think of the covid pandemic and the dashboard infodemic (I hated it). #EWIT22

3. Teams do not collaborate enough.
Usually this happens when the data culture within the organization is weak or not well ingested. #EWIT22

Your data is not linear.
(drops mic 🎤). #EWIT22

The human learning and the machine learning cannot be separated. A machine is only as good as the human that operates it. Success lies in designing a model that evolves data and people equally. #EWIT22

I am now at the session given Claire Hempel, Sr. Data Scientist & Tech Lead Manager at @Uber. From A Data Scientist: The Importance of D&I in Building Products. #EWIT22

Inclusion takes diversity one step ahead. Having people from diverse backgrounds & experiences doesn't automatically mean they feel empowered and safe to express themselves at their very best. #EWIT22

Difficult to think about it when developing data models and user experiences, but refreshing to see that this is possible. ##EWIT22

I don't know any revolution that didn't start with a pack of good stickers! #EWIT22 #WomenInTech

And we continue with this very important track with a talk by Kalpana Bagamane. Beyond the power of one.
#EWIT22

We deal bith a lot of biases every day, perhaps the biggest one is the bias against ourselves. "I can't do it. This is a space I cannot navigate". How many times have we told this to ourselves? As we women grew up, we were told to be quiet, while the boys? Another story. #EWIT22

And there it is.
The self-doubt we, women, experience and feel, is not our fault. It's the product of years, centuries of a marginalizing and dangerous narrative. We can and must build our confidence muscle. We need to start saying YES more. cc @donatacolumbro
#EWIT22

But Kalpana Bagamane makes an important precision, and I'm glad to hear it: it's the system that needs fixing, not the women. But change takes time, and in the meanwhile we need to learn to navigate a space that somebody else decided did not belong to us. #EWIT22

Organizations need to learn to have career conversations with their employees. Do not assume for them. Career aspirations need to be communicated clearly. Without this, talent goes after its aspirations on its own. Great message for HR & management, too, I guess. #EWIT22

Create a "personal advisory board". I love this concept. I love that the word "networking" was deliberately not chosen. It's more than that. It's about creating a support net, somebody who has your back. This keeps coming up a lot, there must be some truth in it ;) #EWIT22

Amplify, avvocate, support, challenge, encourage YOU. This is what the Personal Advisory Board should be able to do for you. To create this board, start from a concrete goal, and try to strike for diversity, to cover as many blind spots as possible. #EWIT22

Be comfortable with taking, because the moment you're going to give, will come. You're going to be advocating for someone, supporting them, coaching them, one day. So it's ok now to just take. And don't forget to invest the time! It cannot be an afterthought. #EWIT22

You can't do this alone. This was an amazing talk by Kalpana Bagamane. Now I'm way too hungry to even think straight. Be back in 30min! #EWIT22

Had a grilled sandwich and plenty of water (gotta stay hydrated) and back to the afternoon sessions. First in line, Claudia Vicol, Director Of Engineering at A.P Moller - Maersk: "Data Over Intuition: Never Go With Your Gut" (provocative title, I think). #EWIT22

But plot twist! The title is actually now something else!
How to use your data to kill your darlings... Uhm... Where is this going :D #EWIT22

Ok, the darlings are the projects we cannot let go off. Also known as - technical debt - if I get the speaker's intentions right. And she calls them darlings guess why - because usually we can't close them off because it becomes personal. Ouch. Painful. #EWIT22

The data team usually needs to help all the other teams (I recognize this), but resources are of course limited. Sometimes sunsetting a product (a solution, a website, you name it) is the smartest thing to do. #EWIT22

This slide speaks volumes and really doesn't need further explanation, I think. #EWIT22

Speaking of pet projects now. A baby, within an organization, is never just yours. Introduce others to the project, plan for the future. Look for open source alternatives that might have less maintenance. Make the cost visible and advocate for a support team. Great tips. #EWIT22

If you find a single point of failure for tooling used everywhere within the organization, run away and run fast. Big big warning sign. Democratize the resources, spread the workloads, share the intellectual capabilities. #EWIT22

Important lesson: if as a manager you decide to kill a project, do not assume that your team will feel the same way. There will be an impact on your team, they are the ones who did all the heavy lifting, spent resources & energies. Make them part of the decision process. #EWIT22

It's time to talk about careers in tech, with Andrea Morgan-vandome, VP of technical product management at @Nike. #EWIT22

Self doubt and self advocating come back. It's something I myself struggle with. The desire to be excellent, while allowing the doubt to not overtake too much space and destroy dreams. It's very hard. #EWIT22

Andrea Morgan-vandome leaves a question to the audience - what inspires you? Some home work to be done, I guess :) #EWIT22

Powerful video from @Nike closing this session. The voice of a collective is unstoppable. #EWIT22

Changing gears all together now as I move back to the Implement track, with a talk by Aleksandra Kovachev, data scientist at @deliveryherocom - a platform I actually discovered today for the first time. She'll be talking about Unstructured Data and Knowledge Graphs! #EWIT22

Interesting talk about Metadata extraction to deliver hyper personalized user experience. Data normalization is dish normalization in this case! #EWIT22

Lack of standardization and common nomenclatures or standard when it comes to food! I never thought about that (usually I eat the food, I don't build taxonomies to classify it lol).
#EWIT22

How to tackle the challenge? But with Machine Learning models of course! Build a small model on sample data, and extrapolate from it towards bigger datasets, more languages etc.
Easy peasy! (no, really, I don't know how difficult this was). #EWIT22

11 people labelled data manually, starting from 12k labels which then became around 8k after a looot of hard work. The problem was then a classification problem with around 1k classes, and 50% of the classes with less than 5 samples per class. My God what a nightmare 😂 #EWIT22

But hey, if you put people and technology together, you can build amazing stuff, and this story shows it! #EWIT22

OK, last session before I take a well deserved coffee break (my head is slightly spinning). Why Data Culture is Just as important as Data Science, a talk by Camilla Björkqvist, Execution Director at Johnson & Johnson Medtech. #EWIT22

What a fantastic slide this is!
#EWIT22

Are data maturity assessments done in your organization? Asks Camilla Björkqvist, and the answers in the audience are not so great... #EWIT22

Very interesting for me too see the possibility of data awareness surveys. Crucial tool to use to map out how much data are known within your org. Where to go to. What's get collected. How frequently. Etc etc. #EWIT22

Highlighted components to drive a more data-enabled model: awareness (online presence, for example), data literacy (data academies, courses), ways of working (agile methodology, for example). #EWIT22

I'm particularly intrigued by the digital presence via newsletter and the more physical-like kind of brand imaging via logos & stickers (I told you stickers are the key of every transformation!). And I think that's a wrap before my cup of coffee! #EWIT22

The @toyota_europe talk on diversity and inclusion was so engaging I completely forgot I was live tweeting. Back to it! #EWIT22

Toyota organizes Women in IT breakfasts and has worked towards the development of an IT diversity charter. We're now watching the charter brought to life in a video, and it's... Absolutely inspiring. When D&I is not an afterthought, but it's a founding pillar, it shows. #EWIT22

Final takeaways. You don't need to be high in the organization to start initiatives. Focus on numbers, not on emotional statements. Micro actions can lead to macro changes. I'll be bringing home all 3 of them. #EWIT22

And now I'm off to the last session for today, with Mounia Lalmas, Head Of Technology Research @Spotify, who'll be talking about personalization (of course!) and Machine Learning at scale. #EWIT22

Why at scale? Because the numbers we're talking about here are BIG. 422milion listeners on one side and a huge database of artists on the other one. How to create a unique relationship between these? Or better, 422milion relationships. #EWIT22

Three layers critical for this. The data layer, with all the data collected via the app, the web browser, music suppliers, audio tracks etc. A lot of these data comes from the user interaction: likes, skips, shares, queues. #EWIT22

The shared models layer with the embedding space. It all boils down to reduce the enormous complexity to a space where similar content can be put close to each other, and then be associated to specific user profiles. #EWIT22

The final layer, the experience one, is the only layer visible to the user. Weekly discoveries, release radars, time capsules. All the things the user can see and experiment with. #EWIT22

Machine learning doesn't work with special playlists that try to combine music based on genre, mood, time of the day or similar. @Spotify uses expert editors to inject the needed knowledge. That's why these playlists are called algotorial: algorithms + editorial work. #EWIT22

The goal seems to be to guide the user on a journey to discovery. Technically, this is done via Reinforcement Learning. The question is "what do you optimize for?". The piece to read seems to be "Variational User Modelling with Slow and Fast Features". #EWIT22

Slow feature, I always like Jazz. Fast feature, today I want something different. There seem to be patterns and pathways from a genre to another. Rock & roll leads to soul, soul to funk and funk to electronica. And these paths are unidirectional! How interesting! #EWIT22

Ultimately, the key process is about aligning the Machine Learning layer with the long-term satisfaction of the users, which is at the end what really matters. A lot of efforts and time also spent in the UI experience, of course.
#EWIT22

Great Q from the audience. Can @Spotify predict the mood of a person from the music they listen to, and suggest specific podcasts? Seems right now this is not done. #EWIT22
cc @donatacolumbro because she's a Spotify user & loves data for/of emotions.

And that's a wrap for day 1! I'll be back tomorrow with more content! #EWIT22

Goodmorning from day 2 of #EWIT22!
These are the next few courses of what seems to be another packed and exciting day! But first, another shot of espresso, per favore ☕

Tanuja Randery, Managing Director at @AWS EMEA, is about to share a few perspectives on how the face of industries is changing and where women fit into it all. She already mentions digital skills, so it's going to be a wild ride, I think! #EWIT22

Many organizations have had to reinvent their businesses during the pandemic. Zoom went from 10mil to 300mil users in a day. Holy crap.
Moderna transitioned to AWS services in the cloud to speed up research and vaccine development. This is so powerful. #EWIT22

Sustainability is high on agenda of AWS, says Randery. She mentions quite a few projects the company is committed to not only to reduce carbon footprint, but also to help its own clients building more sustainable products. #EWIT22

She's so captivating I'm having trouble writing down stuff. We definitely need to address a digital skill gap (I'm thinking again of data literacy, amongst other things), and a gender gap, which doesn't come as a surprise to the audience, obviously. #EWIT22

Not to myself - lookup the STEM vs STEAM curricula because the latter seems to be making a lot of sense to me! #EWIT22

Check out the @AWS GetIT program - aws.amazon.com/campaigns/aws-… Inspiring girls to consider a career in tech! #EWIT22

We need to recruit for competences, not for resumes. Too many hidden workers in the USA (I think numbers would be high in Europe, too). Care givers, teachers, whatever profile you have. Tech is or better should be for everybody. #EWIT22

Another training program by @AWS mentioned now - AWS re/Start
See here: aws.amazon.com/training/resta…
#EWIT22

I'm hearing something I love now. We track everything within our teams and our organizations. KPI, budgets, deliveries. Why do we not track gender gap? Salary gap? If we want to do better, we need to know where we stand. We can let the data advocate for ourselves. #EWIT22

Tanuja Randery closes off with some tips - have a plan, sketch out where you'd like to go. Challenge the status quo. It doesn't work, it's no longer fit for purpose. Find a tribe of support. Don't try to do everything yourself, pick your projects, pick your battles. #EWIT22

Another great program mentioned now at the Q&A session: heforshe.org/en
And we're off to the next talk! #EWIT22

It's time for Alison Tierney, Svp Of EMEA @SnowflakeDB (I visited their boot yesterday, cool product!). In 2019, she had an opportunity to leave a work place she didn't fit in. It was the first time she could actually be her authentic self. #EWIT22

To get diversity of thought, you need to find the people who genuinely hold different views and invite them into the conversation. - Adam Grant.
How important is to keep in mind that everyone is different. #EWIT22

Not everybody likes to hang in a bar after work. Don't expect your employers to all enjoy that! Ask & listen (this speaks really volumes to me, as I'm involved in organizing social activities within my own organization & I sometimes struggle to find real inclusion). #EWIT22

First thing on my agenda for next week: looking for a sponsor LOL. Just kidding, I already have one (at least I think, I'll double check 😅). #EWIT22

Back after a break with Sibel Atasoy Wuersch, Head Of Data @Frontify. She'll be talking about what it takes to build a modern data ecosystem, beyond the technology. #EWIT22

Frontify is a B2B SAS platform for brand identity, consistency and design collaboration. Data is central to the company's mission and goals. The speaker shows us the need for a data strategy. #EWIT22

Data maturity determines the speed of the transformation. You can't run before you can walk.
But how do you define your data strategy? Start from use cases. What are the different goals? Who are the stakeholders? #EWIT22

Interviews, workshops, surveys, all valuable tools to map out the possible use cases for data. Then you sit down and prioritize, using for example a value / effort matrix. And there you go, the road map is done! (lol I know this is a way oversimplified). #EWIT22

The strategy then reflects the data maturity within the organization. You can start from setting the foundation up (are we all on the same page when it comes to our data?!), moving on to getting data ready for analytics, all the way up to services and scaling up. #EWIT22

To keep in mind - the data strategy is not set in stone. It will be evolving as goals & resources shift. This might seem inefficient and scary, but it's just the only way to get it done. #EWIT22

3 key components within the data ecosystem. The stack, obviously. The talent team, with core skills & responsibilities. And, last but not least, the culture, Maybe the most difficult one to achieve. Cultivate relationships to foster common understanding & collaborations. #EWIT22

They went from SQL + Tableau to snowflake + ThoughtSpot, which eliminated (in their case) an accessibility layer, and sped up adoption and update within the org. Obviously every org will have the best tools for the job. #EWIT22

And now to the skills. Data engineers definitely key. Someone dedicated to the awareness, adoption and enabling (what a luxury!). And of course the connection to the business's core. #EWIT22 (I didn't hear about the data science profiles, but maybe I missed it).

And now to the culture bit. Experiment, listen, learn and adapt. If you want to win the hearts and minds of everyone, you need to try really hard. Some examples from the speaker. #EWIT22

An onboarding course for ThoughtSpot, so people don't get discouraged when they start their data journey. Keep a list of data sources and the teams that could be interested into those. Reach out to them, don't wait for them to come to you (to the data team). #EWIT22

Data quality is key not only to drive good business, but also to build and maintain trust with the data users. Completely recognize this!
#EWIT22

Some final thoughts from a really nice talk! Don't assume you'll build it and they'll come. You need to be proactive and push, sometimes. Don't assume everybody has the same skills. You need to build persona's and make sure everybody is equipped with the right resources. #EWIT22

Sarbani Bhattacharya, Head Of Finance And It Transformation at ASML (that started out as a spin off of @Philips!) will now talk about "Innovating At Speed" #EWIT22

She starts by showing us an amoeba, a single cell living, that starts dividing itself up once it grows too much and too fast. That is to say, how do you keep innovating and growing without having to break down into several parts? #EWIT22

The amount of stuff you can put on a chip doubles every two years, says the Moore's Law, and this has become ASML mission. So the challenge is, again, to drive innovation while remaining agile. This boils down to balancing risk taking with risk mitigation. #EWIT22

The second big challenge is to break siloes, and create competitive advantage. Co-investing is different than collaborating. ASML drives the industry value chain along, which means creating values for itself and for its collaborators. #EWIT22

What happens in the organization when nobody's watching? What happens in the classroom when the teacher's away? This is what defines the culture of an organization, a word we sometimes choose because it's otherwise very difficult to define it all. #EWIT22

Care & communication come with the culture building. There's no space for innovation, nor for competitive advantage, without care for the people and an open and honest line of communication. Many orgs can do way better. #EWIT22

The transformation house at ASML. Interfaces - how do we collaborate?
Data - how do we use data?
Processes - foundation in place. Structure. The architecture pulls everything together. The key enablers are, guess what, people. Technology alone is not enough. #EWIT22

Book tip now! When giants learn to dance, by Rosabeth Moss Kanter. "You have no future unless you add value."
"But the search for synergies is sometimes forgotten in a corporation." And, finally, "the power of the position is giving away to the power of the person". #EWIT22

And back to the Infotech track (my God too many things happening) with Bhagyashri Sarbhukan, Devops Lead at @Irdeto, who'll be talking about #DevOps: Challenges, Obstacles & Opportunities. #EWIT22

Irdeto is a leader in digital platform security, and started off with TV & channels subscriptions! Now we'll hear a bit more about DevOps, which has always looked more like a myth/unicorn to me. #EWIT22

Versioning control system, data recovery plans and strategies, agile methodologies, scalable systems, regional availabities and fall-backs, continuous testing, packaging, deployments. All parts of the DevOps journey. Every little step counts. #EWIT22

On to some technical challenges now.
Start small (always a valuable lesson). Software is destined to fail. I like this one a lot. When we write software we have a set of conditions in mind, & it's very very hard for software to represent the reality the way we want it to. #EWIT22

Technology moves fast, you need to try and stay one step ahead. Don't wait for it to come to you, and hit you hard. Catch up proactively. #EWIT22

Of course the hardest challenges have nothing to do with technology. The hardest part of it all is human, says the speaker. She mentions that the position is an "on-call" position, meaning you are needed 24/7. I don't know if this is true everywhere. #EWIT22

Definitely a lot of opportunities with DevOps. Improved product quality, continuous feedback loop, automation and less manual intervention (but then why the "on-call" profiles?!), improved collaboration, and most importantly perhaps - enhanced ownership.
#EWIT22

I'm now at the first and perhaps last Retail & eCommerce session for me, to hear Maria Morais, Business Development & Strategy Director @SAP speak about "Regenerative retail: Delivering On The Promise Of A More Sustainable Business" #EWIT22

If sustainable was the default way to do things, we wouldn't need job titles with the word in it, right? Same with digital, yes. #EWIT22

There's not enough infrastructure in the world to manage waste. This is a fact and a very sad one.
What does Regenerative Retail mean? There's something in the industry that was broken and that needs to be transformed. Something that needs to come alive. #EWIT22

Technology needs to be assembled differently. We can't afford anymore to not think about this. And the transition needs to go deep and be really transformative, otherwise it's just green washing. #EWIT22

4 challenges identified. 1. There is no lack of ideas, mostly lack of execution and scale. 2. Sustainable is more expensive. This is a fact strictly connected to the non-default of before. If sustainable were the norm, maybe it wouldn't have to cost more. #EWIT22

3. Managing waste is not enough. It's also about where we source our material. 4. Competition vs collaboration. The circular economy can only become a reality with collaboration from all stakeholders. #EWIT22

EPR regulations & plastic taxes are appearing all over the world these days. This will help in transitioning to a moment where the non-sustainable actually becomes more expensive. #EWIT22

How can technology help? Forecasting demand, for example, which means reducing potential waste. The speaker now talks about some successful stories, and mentions @CarrefourGroup with its own sustainable marketplace strategy. #EWIT22

Sustainable Brand Platform is a startup helping organizations certify and assess their sustainability maturity. Bridge Logistica is another one that has created kind of an Uber for trucks, to make sure they are all utilized at their full capacity. Cool stuff!! #EWIT22

And actually this closes the whole #EWIT22 for me! Time for a quick lunch, another cup of coffee and then a slow, nice trip back to Belgium.
Thank you, #EWIT22, you have been absolutely fantastic! #WomenInTech

@threadreaderapp please unroll! :)