Rose Theresa, our second winner of the GitHub scholarship for Femgineer’s Lean Product Development course, sought to change that!

Working in the Mid-Market Tenderlion neighborhoods, she heard many frustrations and time lost whenever the homeless had to line up every morning to have their names entered in the city reservation system for a bed.  To add to the frustration, she saw the amount of paperwork and phone calls required by social service organizations to find availability and to make a reservation.

Rose discovered that a huge amount of time was being wasted on checking availability and making reservations on certain shelter services, like beds.  She knew that some kind of information portal between the two would help save time and reduce needed paperwork.

With this knowledge, Rose and her team set off to put together a product at the Creative Currency Hackathon, an event that brings together developers,designers, and social finance experts to hack a product that helps social service organizations.

After many hours, they were able to put together a prototype called BRIDGE, that would allow shelter-seekers to make and check reservations themselves, and also check availability of other needed services like food and financial management at other local shelters as well via kiosk.

BRIDGE became a finalist in each of the demo days that is was presented, and was mentioned in the SF chronicle, The New York Times, Forbes, and Fast Company.

Although some time has passed since their initial launch at Creative Currency Hackathon, Rose is determined to complete a similar product called, MY CONNECT that would be a step up from BRIDGE that would also help the precariously housed as well as the social service organizations.

Rose is excited that Femgineer Lean Product Development course will guide her along that journey to get MY CONNECT launched and made ready to use by those less fortunate.

Tweet This Post

The students who are creating physical products are interested in Femgineer’s Lean Product Development course because they are eager to transition their idea into a physical product or understand how to use the internet as a distribution channel for their product.

Lisa Curtis is one of those students.  Her idea is to manufacture a nutrition bar called Kuli Kuli.

Although there are many types of nutrition bars in the market, Lisa’s Kuli Kuli bar is unique because it includes a special type of ingredient, Moringa.

Lisa‘s was inspired to include Moringa as the special ingredient for her protein bar after serving in the Peace Corps.  While in West Africia, Niger, where she was stationed, Lisa started feeling weak and began to experience early signs of malnutrition.  It wasn’t until she received her meal which was supplemented with Moringa, working in the women’s cooperative, that she started to gain her strength back.

Seeing the health benefits that it brought to the people in her village and herself, she was surprised that no one was selling it in the United States.

It was then that Lisa decided that she would introduce Moringa to the US, and be involved in something she was deeply passionate about.  She also wanted to use the profits to give something back to the women harvesting the Moringa in the villages’, by sourcing 20% of their harvest and paying them fair wages.

But the concept of the nutrition bar didn’t come to her immediately, Lisa and her friends, at first, experimented with different types of foods such as cookies, hummus, and pesto before deciding on a nutrition bar.

Once the first batch of nutrition bars were packaged, they brought them over to their local farmers market to sell for the first time.

Surprisingly, they sold out within hours!  It was then that Lisa knew she was onto something…

To further validate their idea, Lisa did surveys in which they discovered through Marketing Pros that they beat their industry average by 16%.

The major lesson Lisa learned from Femgineer’s Lean Product Development course, was how to do user segmentation and position a product.  She has been able to focus her customer base particularly on women in their early 30’s.

Although, she has gone through many difficulties such as having to obtain health permits , food safety certification, and manufacturing registration, Lisa is ready to take Kuli Kuli to the next level!

With a shoestring budget, she can only produce so much bars. It takes her and her team a whole day to produce 200 bars.  With retailers like Whole Foods requesting shipments of bars, the need to scale manufacturing has been dire.

Using Indiegogo, a crowdfunding website, Lisa is launching a campaign to gain more funding to ramp up manufacturing.

After a week of it being launched she has already amassed $44,470 out of her $50,000 goal.

As she continues, Lisa recommends Femgineer’s Lean Product Development course to everyone pursuing a venture.

“No matter what your product is, the methodology behind iterating and setting milestones is really helpful, and can help anyone in any field.” – Lisa Curtis

To learn more about Lisa’s Kuli Kuli bar or contribute to her campaign visit: Kuli Kuli’s Indiegogo Campaign.

Tweet This Post

Joining a startup as an engineer used to primarily be about believing in the startup’s vision, team dynamics, technology stack, equity, salary, and role along with employee number.  These are still important factors, but the dynamics of decision making have dramatically deepened due to the increasing number of startups that are competing for a stagnant number of engineers.

It’s become harder to recruit engineers, because engineers have many startups to choose from, and especially within the same category: gaming, marketplaces, payments, SMBs, fin tech, etc.  As a result, recruiting top talent has caused companies to become more creative when showcasing themselves.

One company that recently caught my attention is Medium, originally named Obvious Corp.  Medium was founded by Twitter and Blogger co-founder Ev Williams.  Medium is focused on being a platform where people can share ideas and stories about their lives, creative pursuits, and careers.  It aims to be more collaborative than Ev’s previous product Blogger.  Still in beta, the company is putting a lot of effort into hiring top talent.

I was introduced to Medium by its CTO Don Neufeld.  Don and I met at a previous Femgineer Forum I was hosting at CoverHound.  He candidly shared his approach to hiring top talent, team building, and some of the challenges he had faced when trying to attract technical women.

After meeting Don, I dug in to learn more about Medium, because as a blogger I’m generally curious about what platforms are out there.  What I discovered that was even more appealing than the product, was how the company had built a culture where employees naturally wanted to share their experiences on motherhood and being recruited (as a candidate who needed a visa).

You may think that employees who work there will only want to say good things, but then there are those who are around for a just bit, and feel strongly enough that they want to share their experience.

Medium also understands that recruiting and retaining talent is about the long term.  This summer Don has a group of incoming interns, and wants them to have the best experience possible.  Part of that experience is having me come and host a Femgineer Forum at Medium to discuss a rather sensitive topic: Overcoming Insecurities to Innovate.

While Medium is a young startup, its led by notable veterans, who have learned that the secret sauce to building a tech company is hiring the best talent.  There’s no secret formula to attracting top talent, startups have to become better at showcasing themselves, and creating alignment with a young company’s goals.  What’s working for Medium happens to be an extension of it’s company’s core experience, storytelling.

Tweet This Post

My friend Lydia introduced me to Poornima’s Lean Product Development Course. Lydia and I have had extensive conversations about my desire to expand my skills and she was confident the class would be a great fit. For the past few years I have worked in social services in a direct service role to low-income youth. I enjoyed my work but often found that I wanted to find different and unique ways to be challenged professionally.

With my background the options for branching out professionally often feel limited unless I go back to school. I studied psychology in undergrad and received a master’s of divinity immediately after; hence, I have never taken a business, marketing, or tech courses in school. But, because I already have a master’s degree I am not in any hurry to take on additional student debt. I usually turn to General Assembly or other spaces to add to my skill set. The first of Poornima’s classes that grabbed my attention was offered through General Assembly, but I wasn’t able to take it, so Lydia helped connect me to Poornima so I could take classes directly from her. I have only sat in on one class and I am so glad I did! I chose the class on Market Research because of my interest in going into fundraising and marketing full time, and my need to have a better understanding of the markets I want to reach out to.

Through the class I learned about Competitive Analysis, Differentiation Techniques, and User Segmentation. A good deal of my time at the moment is dedicated to volunteering for a small nonprofit in San Francisco. We offer financial support to projects in the developing world and a large part of how we do that is by asking for people to contribute to us, so we can pass the money along. More than any other question I am asked is: “Why are you any different than other NGO’s and non profits?”  I hadn’t thought about it in the exact terms listed above but listening to the class I realized that what people want to know is: “Have I done market research? Do I really know who else is doing what we do? And why are we the best organization for them to support?”

Most nonprofits don’t like to think of other nonprofits as competitors, but listening to the class I see that the same understanding of the market applies. We are asking for money so I need to be able to tell people why us. I can’t tell people why we are the best option if I don’t know what the other options are. Also, as I think about our organization’s future knowing the history of other nonprofits like us helps me think about why they succeeded and failed. Everyone makes mistakes and if we can learn from theirs (and ours) we will be a better organization. We also need to know who the market is and we should ask. Finally, as we think about the future of our organization we need to know if there is room in the market for us and how much room.

The class covered all of these issues. In addition to all of this, I know that our approach is different than other organizations. It is an approach that we hope will redirect international development, if we are able to push the development community towards the approach we are taking it will impact the way people choose who they give to, so we need to know if the market is ready to change. We need to be doing market research and we are.

The class helped me think about the parts of research we might be missing, and gave me language for what we are doing and need to be doing. Using the information from the class will enable me to better understand what people are asking me when they ask why us. It will also guide me as I do my research to be better prepared to answer their questions.

Sarah Montoya loves to learn and wants to make the world a better place. As the event manager for Do Good Lab she hosts fabulous events to support sustainable development. She also volunteers with Old Skool Cafe, and is passionate about human rights. Before moving to San Francisco she received her Masters of Divinity from Truett Seminary at Baylor University. Sarah loves traveling, running, crafting, and playing with her dog.

Tweet This Post

Founders for growth stage startup and executives in a larger company know that the war for technical talent is intense.   They also understand that they need to differentiate themselves is to show that they care about their employees, career growth, and development. They want to provide training workshops, mentoring opportunities, and other skill development options.

Employees also suggest such programs, but too often don’t know how to answer the following questions posed by management:

• How will these offerings make a difference?
• What return will the company get on their investment?

As a consultant for companies who want to hire and retain female technical talent, I often hear these questions. While it may seem challenging to measure the return on investment of a career development workshop, a group mentoring program, or a coaching package, I’ve found some straightforward approaches to take. It’s not as hard at it looks! My methodology is based on skills I learned as an executive in the software industry, where we used metrics to measure the impact of just about everything we did.

To calculate and communicate ROI, I follow these 5 steps:

Identify the business problem that you want to hire a consultant to solve. For example, many of the companies I advise want to retain their female technical talent, reducing the turnover or “regretted losses” of this highly-sought after demographic.

Simplify the problem. Instead of measuring the full impact of the program, recast it in simpler terms. E.g., What is the ROI for this program if it helps retain just one female engineer?

Measure the cost. While retaining an employee doesn’t have specific costs, replacing an employee does. To measure that cost, I searched for information from highly rated research groups. I found estimates reporting that it costs from 50% to 250% of a person’s salary to replace them (source: Catalyst). I decided to be conservative and go with the lower number. Based on my experience managing software development teams in Silicon Valley, I decided to use $120,000 as an average salary for my calculation. So, 50% of $120,000 = $60,000, or the average cost to replace a software engineer.

Calculate the ROI of the program you want. Simply divide the cost of the problem by the cost of the program. If the fee for the project is $10,000, the ROI would be $60,000/$10,000, or 6:1.

Compare the ROI to other initiatives. Ask management about the ROI they’ve seen for other career development programs. Or, find published examples for other companies. Assuming the ROI being offered to you is comparable or better, this data will showcase the impact the program can have for your organization. For example, I found that Sodexo measured reduced turnover and increased productivity to assess their mentoring program. In 2007, they reported a 2:1 ROI. (Source: Catalyst).  If I can provide mentoring with a 6:1 ROI, my program will benefit you well by comparison

Have you seen other ways to measure ROI for career development programs? Please leave a comment. I’d love to hear from you.

After a successful career in the software industry, Karen Catlin now focuses on developing powerful women leaders. She draws from her experience as an executive to coach individuals, lead workshops, and advise companies on hiring and retaining female talent. Karen also writes “Use Your Inside Voice,” a blog about the intersection of parenting and leadership.

In her prior role, Karen was a vice president in the CTO’s office at Adobe Systems. She co-founded the “Adobe & Women” initiative, focused on attracting, retaining, and providing career development opportunities for women at Adobe. Karen joined Adobe as part of the 2005 acquisition of Macromedia. While at Macromedia, she held a variety of management positions across engineering, including establishing the program management discipline for the company. Earlier in her career Karen worked for GO Corporation, Hitachi Europe Limited, and Brown University.

Karen holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Brown University.

In her spare time, Karen enjoys being outdoors, playing tennis, and designing hand-knit accessories.  She resides in San Mateo, CA with her husband and their two teenagers.

Tweet This Post

So if you’re a newbie to public speaking, but want to eventually be like me and travel the country speaking, here are some steps to get you started:

Tweet This Post

She also teaches entrepreneurial product development and marketing at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

Before joining Rethink Robotics, Elaine, similarly, has worked at several other Boston area startups, which built products with a strong human interaction component, including Zeo, Zeemote, and SensAble Technologies.

Her work in the field of human machines interface and systems engineering, wasn’t her chosen path when she was studying mechanical engineering at MIT. Instead she was interested in rehabilitative engineering, but an opportunity came up when she was working on her second thesis on human machine interfaces for rehabilitative robots.

While working with her thesis advisor, she was introduced to Exos, a startup at the time that designed, developed, and manufactured haptic devices that provided a sense of touch when interacting with various applications, including surgical simulation, teleoperation, and video gaming in arcades and on home PCs.  She ultimately joined the company upon graduation.

At Exos she was originally hired as a machine designer, but went on to write all the firmware running kinematics code that controlled each haptic device developed at the company, and to manage application software development on the PC.  Her experience in this startup taught her two things:

1. Startups are a great place to push yourself beyond your comfort zone: you are usually free to do anything you want even if it is not technically within your job function.
2. Engineering is only part of the puzzle, which is only part of the puzzle in product development, which in turn is also only part of the puzzle in building a business.

“I learned to look at the broader problem of building a viable business by solving real problems with enough market pull that makes those problems worth solving, instead of being attracted to the pure technology sides of things.”

Exos was eventually acquired by Microsoft in 1996. Taking the experience and lessons from working at Exos, she wrapped up her tenure as a software development manager and went on to take leadership positions in several other high tech startups.

Today, the same passion and intensity can be seen at in her work on Baxter, a humanoid robot with 7 degrees of freedom on each arm, at Rethink Robotics.

“It’s awesomely hard core and 100% related to everything I learned about engineering and product development to date. It’s got at least four engineering disciplines rolled up in the same product: mechanical, electrical, controls, and software.”

Elaine’s position as the head of engineering in a hardware startup is fairly rare in the technology sector, where engineering is traditionally male dominated.

In a survey done in 2008 by the National Science Foundation of the 10 million scientist and engineers who are employed in industry, only 3 million work in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields. Within just engineering, the gender gap is vast – 20% and 80% men. The gap is a bit smaller for computer and math related professions (36% women and 64% men).

Elaine does think that the landscape is changing. “Women on the whole know they can achieve anything men can, and obstacles are slowly coming down. However, things in the trenches are improving so slowly that sometimes it’s hard to tell.”

With the media angling stories on female tech executives such as Marissa Mayer and Sheryl Sandberg on their roles as women and mothers rather than on their careers, it has been harder to tell if the landscape is changing.

“The reality is that it took hundreds of years for cultural attitudes to get here, and it’s going to take a very long time to get out of here.  What we can do is to make sure the next generation hears a balanced narrative, and we take extra steps to encourage girls to nourish their interest in STEM to compensate for the very ambivalent messages that they are hearing from everyone around them.  It can be as simple as encouraging a girl to take part in the FIRST Lego League or teaching a girl and her friends to program a game in Python, along with their male counterparts.  Another thing we can do is to proactively mentor young women in tech to invest and continue to invest in their careers, regardless of the signals they pick up from the workplace and from society.”

“We also need more female role models in leadership positions.  Seeing is believing and a successful female leader who is clearly thriving and loving her work and her life is worth a thousand words.”

Elaine is an embodiment of the true definition of a Femgineer. Her passion and accomplishments in engineering, and her passion to help change the prevalent mainstream attitudes about women in STEM is what being a Femgineer is all about.

Tweet This Post

These three people thought that reaching out to someone they didn’t know and asking them for a favor, standing up to a boss, or asking for what they needed to advance in their career would somehow burn a bridge.  My response to their remark was, “The funny thing about bridges is that they go both ways.”

What I meant by that remark was that if someone is going to shoot you down or be unresponsive then do you really want to continue the relationship with them?  The problem is that too often we think that if we reach out to ask someone for a favor they will be annoyed or burdened. It’s because we’re so conditioned to getting rejected or thinking that we’re not good enough. We forget that we also have values to offer to others, which includes or talents, skills, and experience.

As smart and honestly overqualified as the people are that I mentor, their biggest problem isn’t finding a job, or even leveling up in their career. What’s really holding them back is that they don’t understand their own self-worth.

On paper, I have been under-qualified for EVERY job I have applied for.

My first job right out of college was as an R&D Engineer, the job description read something like: 5 years experience or a PhD in Electrical Engineering. Must have experience in ASIC verification.

I didn’t have 5 years experience, nor did I have a PhD, and I sure as heck didn’t know what ASIC verification was (if you’re curious: it’s an application specific integrated circuit). During my interview, I didn’t sit there and feel sorry for myself. I knew my interviewers knew that I had limited abilities and experience. But they were willing to fly me across the country, put me up in a rather nice hotel, take me out to lunch and dinner, and spend the entire day interviewing me, so I figured I must know something. During the interview, I just did the best I could, I answered every question I knew, and mentioned what I didn’t know. That was enough to get the job, and be one of the highest paid engineering graduates back in 2004, when tech was still recovering from it’s previous dot com bubble burst!

Fast forward to 2006, when I started working at Mint. Being a founding engineer meant that I had to interview both my bosses: the director of engineering and the VP of engineering. Clearly these two men had many many years of experience on me. At the time, I didn’t even know what they would do in the roles. But I just marched on up to the white board, and had them solve problems.

In each of these situations, I knew that I had limited capabilities, but it didn’t stop me from trying and reaching out to people. The biggest thing I had going for me was knowing that sometime before I had been presented with a challenge, and had figured out a way to tackle it.

And yes rejection is part of the game.  They way in which someone rejects you is important.  If they don’t respond at all or are overly harsh, then you’re better of not working with them or for them.

So instead of second guessing your own abilities, take the time to quiet your mind, and let your mouth do the talking. Know that you have something to offer, and if people want to reject you, give them the freedom to reject you.  And know that you also have the freedom to pursue other opportunities.  Don’t hold yourself back by coming up with some excuse like, “I don’t want to burn any bridges.”

Tweet This Post

Alyssa Ravasio was chosen for a project that she is building called CaliforniaCamping, a search engine for campsites in California.

CaliforniaCamping will solve the problems of “Where can I camp next weekend?” or more specifically, “Where can I camp next weekend by a beach and within a 3 hour drive from SF?”

The project came out of her experience just this year, when she went camping with her family and had to go through the frustrating process of making a campground reservation.

Alyssa went to sites such as parks.ca.gov and reserveamerica.com, but they offered no additional data or pictures. This forced Alyssa to go to additional sites like Yelp for campground reviews, as well as doing a Google image search for pictures.

After much work she was finally able to make her reservation at Andrew Molera State Park. But when she arrived, she discovered that it was home to the sweetest left breaking waves, a relevant piece of information that was missed from her research.

Driving back home to get her wetsuit, Alyssa was determined to build something better that would take the pain out of finding and reserving a campsite.

In addition to time-based search, Alyssa is planning to develop maps, photographs, and video into CaliforniaCamping.

Alyssa’s project has been an example of Github and Femgineer’s efforts to get more women into tech and build a more female-friendly engineering culture.

Github recently held their Passion Project series that highlights prominent, smart, and interesting women in the technology/startup/developer world.

Their sponsorship of this scholarship is an extension of their efforts to promote women who are doing outstanding work in software engineering and following their passions to build products.

Right now Alyssa is at the ideation stage. But with the Femgineer Lean Product Development course, Alyssa is hoping to take it to the next level under the guidance of Poornima.

Alyssa Ravasio recently graduated student from Dev Bootcamp, the nine week intensive web development course. She also graduated from UCLA where she created the individual major Digital Democracy, which focuses on how the internet is changing the world. She worked in Internet policy at the US Department of State, sales/marketing for the iPad startup Revel, and operations at the outdoor adventure startup Xola.

Besides the Internet, Alyssa is also passionate about journalism, film, art, and the ocean. She believes that the Internet’s potential to change the way our world works lies on a magnitude that can only be compared to language itself!

Stay tuned to see Alyssa’s progress by following her @alyraz and checking out CaliforniaCamping!

Tweet This Post

Even when catastrophe strikes I cannot quit.  My freshman year, my dad lost his job.  I had to choose between taking out a rather large student loan to fund my education and pay it back, leave college altogether, or apply to one that I could afford.  I took out the loan.  I successfully paid that loan back 3 1/2 years ago.

Then there are times when people tell me that I’m not good enough or try to get in my way.  Once again not quitting.  My junior year of college I wanted to add Electrical Engineering as a major.  The dean at my engineering school was opposed to me entering with 2 years left, and not having completed half the curriculum.  She suggested that I do a fifth year.  Oh sure let me just take out another loan…  I don’t think so!  I finished both my degrees with just 2 years left.

I know what you’re thinking,”Thanks for sharing your story of perseverance Poornima, run along now…”

But here’s the thing, each time I faced a hurdle instead of letting it completely paralyze me I took it in stride.  And in those college years I didn’t even have the strong support system I have today.  In fact, my parents who were at this point providing very minimal financial and emotional support were still breathing down my neck to finish school.  I didn’t let my peers who were smarter, more experienced, and didn’t have to worry about money bother me.  I just put my blinders on and plugged away.

I just have two things that keep me going: “Will an older Poornima feel regret for quitting?  What immediate discomfort will quitting avoid that I can learn to live with just a little longer?”

Here are some additional choice moments in my adult life when I could have quit, but I just pushed through:

2006 I wanted to work at Mint.  Aaron said I couldn’t because I didn’t know web development.  I asked him for one month to prove that I could learn and be a productive engineer.

2010 My first BizeeBee co-founder left for personal reasons.  Usually a great excuse to close up shop, right?  I pushed myself and the team to launch the product months later, making revenue from day one with a handful of early adopters.

2012 While most startups were closing shop or getting bought up in talent acquisitions due to the Series A Crunch, I used up the rest of personal savings to bootstrap BizeeBee and start Femgineer.  I’m still building and pushing the businesses closer to profitability everyday.

Now this isn’t me passing judgment on those who have quit things.  In fact, you might not even have really quit, you may have just taken a timeout.  But just know that quitting is an indefinite timeout

Tweet This Post