Always be Uncomfortable featuring Taz Minadakis (Podcast & Transcript)
“I think one of the things that comes with a V-zero product is that you really do not have a clear sense of what or how to achieve success, right? It's a journey. You learn along the way. You experiment, you try things to understand what will work, what will not work. There isn't a recipe cut out for you that you can follow. And so there needs to be a mindset of being willing to deal with that ambiguity, being willing to embrace that unknown.” - Taz Minadakis
Taz Minadakis is a Director of Engineering at YouTube with more than 15 years of professional experience building quality products and 10+ years of experience building high-performing teams at Google, Uber, and Microsoft. She led a development team building a touch-first browsing experience for Windows 8 and Surface SDK at Microsoft when touch screens were still an emerging technology. Taz is passionate about community building and professional development initiatives for women in tech and spearheaded early women's ERGs at Yelp and Uber.
Please note this episode includes discussion of pregnancy loss.
In this episode we discuss:
Taz's career pivots and how she leveraged her connections to find new opportunities
Building zero-to-one products and growing teams from scratch
The importance of allowing yourself to be uncomfortable and curious
Good stress vs bad stress
Networking advice for introverts
Transcript has been edited for clarity.
Karen Ko: Hey there. Welcome to Engineer Your Career, a podcast brought to you by WEST, a learning community empowering women technologists through mentorship. Join us as we hear from inspiring women tech leaders who are challenging stereotypes and paving the way for future generations.
Today's episode features Taz Minadakis, and her story is truly inspiring. However, we want to acknowledge that her journey includes a discussion of pregnancy loss, which can be a sensitive topic for some listeners. If that's something you're not ready for right now, please feel free to skip this episode or come back to it later. Taz's insights are invaluable, and we hope that her story empowers you with new ideas to engineer your career. Let's get started.
Heidi Williams: Hello, everybody. Welcome to our latest episode of Engineer Your Career. I'm Heidi.
Karen: And I'm Karen.
Heidi: And I'm excited to introduce our guest, Taz Minadakis, who is Director of Engineering at YouTube Shopping. They are building a new business model for YouTube creators where they can sell their own products and earn commissions on millions of products when viewers shop on YouTube.
So welcome, Taz, so happy to have you here.
Taz Minadakis: Thank you. Thanks, Heidi, for having me.
Heidi: So Taz and I had the pleasure of meeting years ago at Grace Hopper, and we actually also met with Sarah Clatterbuck, who was an advisor for WEST in the early years of WEST. So I love that we have stayed connected over the years, and I'm super excited to hear more about your career journey since we first met, of course, and what you've been up to. So really, really happy to have you here on the podcast today.
Taz: Thanks, Heidi. And yeah, it's really exciting. It's really awesome to see how threads connect between you, Heidi, and then Sarah. And Sarah and I work together now on YouTube Shopping, so it's really nice to watch the connections grow.
Karen: And I know that Heidi's been looking forward to this podcast all week, and I've been hearing that you've had a really fascinating career so far, doing a variety of different things. I'm curious if you could share some of your key highlights from your career so far.
Taz: Yeah, well, why don't we start from the very beginning? I basically started my career right around the dotcom crash, and I started as a developer at an ERP company called JD Edwards.
And honestly, that was a funny story. I got my job when I was desperately looking, and I called a recruiter that had given me an internship, which I had declined, and as luck would have it, the recruiter wasn't willing to get me the hiring manager, and the hiring manager liked to chat and offered me the job.
But then there over the years, there was multiple acquisitions with PeopleSoft and Oracle, and my boss got laid off. I became paranoid, I started looking for another job, and a friend of mine actually put me in touch with a hiring manager at Microsoft. And the next thing I knew, I was on a plane to Seattle.
And again, I think this is a theme. I do end up having connections that lead my way through in my journey throughout my career has been people that have been able to connect me with opportunity, which has been fascinating.
So I started at Microsoft on operating systems, so working on Windows, and through that, I got a chance to work on my first touch product experience. It was a research product then called Surface. This was pre-iPhone, so you can imagine touch was brand new.
And this was also around the first time someone, my manager tapped me on my shoulder and said, Hey, would you like to take a manager job? And I kind of said yes, even though I wasn't sure I was ready for it. It ended up working out. It was very, very tough, but it ended up working out very well for me in my career.
I worked on Windows 8. I worked on touch applications for Windows 8 over the years, and then ended up, after Windows 8 launched, switching completely into a different domain in advertising, basically.
So went from operating systems package products to client-server advertising products and worked on product ads, which was also a V-zero product for Bing. At the time, Google had just launched product listing ads, and Microsoft and Bing was trying to play catch-up.
And then there, basically worked on launching product ads to general availability about nine years in at Microsoft, had sort of built this team up to 30-plus, and started, I needed to kind of test out the waters if I could be successful anywhere else than Microsoft.
So left, went to Yelp, started as an IC for the first few months, which was actually very rewarding because got to learn a lot of the infrastructure. And then I transitioned to working on the ads teams. I worked on the bidding teams and the infra team.
I also ran Yelp, the women in engineering group. Awesome Women in Engineering, we used to call it. I think when I started, I was the first female engineering manager that they had hired, which is shocking in the time that Yelp had been around for about eight or 10 years, I believe, if I'm right.
And then I think over the course of the time I was there, and the Yelp Women in Engineering group, when I left about a couple years in, there were about four or five Eng managers, if you will, in the company in that room. So it was really, really rewarding to see.
I joined Uber after that, ran the rider side, the rider growth team, as well as the driver growth team. So I got to see a lot of marketplace. Again, this is from advertising to marketplaces, so of course, Uber is a two-sided marketplace.
I also ran women in engineering there and got a chance to see a lot of the structural changes, actually participate, and run, really, a lot of the structural changes that the company was going through.
About in 2018, is when I came to Google. And I would say my journey at Google has not necessarily been a slam dunk. It's been a bit of a rollercoaster. I've tried a bunch of different things, which has been fun, but also challenging at times.
I started again with a completely different domain called cloud identity. We were trying to build a product, an identity product, for Google Cloud. But then, through some changes, we decided we're not going to do an identity product for Google, and it became an internal infrastructure team.
And so at that point I decided to try out something new, which took me to Munich because we were working on a new business model for ads and there's kind of the concept called co-op or brand ads, and this is supposed to be the next product act, if you will, but then a reorg occurred across Google, where it basically invalidated my role.
So I moved to Munich without a role, pretty much, but then rebuilt the team. It was probably one of the most fascinating phases in my career and also life because I had my first child then. I got a chance to run Women in EMEA, and that's where I met Liz. I'd love to talk about that in the future.
Then we moved back as a family after the first kid, and someone I knew, Sarah, actually tapped me on my shoulder and said, Hey, I might have something for you and we might be doing something with brands and monetization. Would you like to come on board? And here we are. Fast forward two years later working on YouTube Shopping.
Karen: Incredible. Well, thank you so much for running me through JD Edwards, Microsoft, Yelp, Uber, Google, leading teams, taking on opportunities, new babies. It sounds like there was so much that has been in your career so far, probably already enough to have your own memoir.
So I'm curious, as you're looking back at your career, do you feel like you see any themes emerge? And if so, were they planned, you think, when you first started?
Taz: It's a good question. I mean, I would say I have had definitely a few domain pivots. So, from packaged product to advertising marketplaces, really a lot of spinoff starting off business at Surface with a V-zero product. And so was the product I went to move to Munich for, of what we were doing in Uber was V-zero launches.
So a product called Monthly Passes was something that we launched on Uber that was like a V-zero product. Even right now in YouTube Shopping, it was a first launch, if you will, of YouTube shopping affiliates, a lot of spinning off of businesses. That has been very core to my journey.
And as a result is building teams. So starting from very small teams, zero to 10, to growing them to 60 or 80 or a hundred or 150. That's been sort of the career arc. And I would say part of, and you asked me if it was planned or not, I'd say one of the things that I gravitate towards is finding a way to build something new that makes money. And I think that's been the rationale and the reasoning for the pivots or the changes in my career.
Heidi: That's really fascinating. And honestly, besides domain pivots, even the life pivots that you talked about: joining the industry at the dotcom bust, moving to Munich and having your team disappear and having to start over from scratch, or being at Yelp and coming back as an engineer from being a manager and then becoming a manager again.
You did mention finding something that makes money, but do you think there's something intrinsic that motivates you to seek out this kind of change? Or are there more extrinsic factors, like, there's a business opportunity that feels interesting for you?
Taz:
Yeah, it's a fascinating question, Heidi. And I would say for those extrinsic factors, I think there are intrinsic factors, and I think it goes back to my core value system. There has been, of course, core values that have been added and removed, but there have been a few that have been core and consistent over my journey, or over my life, I would say.
And I think three of them that I think are consistent for me is, challenging the status quo, being resourceful and proactive with anything that comes my way, and being uncomfortable.
So being uncomfortable and being willing to learn and challenging myself. I think that has been part of the equation that has kept me thinking about what is it that gets me excited? What is it that challenges me? What is it that I haven't done before that I would like to do next? And so every opportunity I look at, I look at from the lens is like what is it that I can offer to the job, but what is it that is new in the job that I will get to learn when I take it on? And that's part of the core value system.
Heidi: Those are all super fascinating. And actually, when I think about those three, those feel like the perfect elements to being an entrepreneur. So maybe just question whether you've ever thought of starting your own startup, or do you really like the opportunities of doing the kind of V-zero within larger companies?
Taz: Yeah, I have thought about a startup. I have thought about joining early-stage companies and/or potentially founding. I have to say the founding part is still a bit of a question mark for me because I would need to find the right partners to found a company, and that's something that maybe I will find in the next phase of my career.
But the founding piece in my mind, well, is very much dependent on the network of people that you work with, the core team of founders, and then being really, really passionate together about something. And that, to me, is the unlock.
I haven't necessarily found that unlock yet. Doesn't mean it won't come about, but that would be something that I would like to challenge myself on. I have definitely considered early-stage startups, and when I say early stage, anywhere between series eight through C or D.
For me, that would be sort of starting as a head of engineering in those companies and building the team, building the product, and business together. Those opportunities will come about. It's not something that I am closing the door to, but it's also not something that I'm desperately looking for at the moment.
Heidi: Awesome. Well, I think you'd be amazing at either one, so we'll keep an eye out for what you do next.
Taz: Thank you.
Karen: I actually also have a question around V-zero launches that you mentioned earlier. Do you find doing those V-zero launches to be really high-pressure and stressful, or are they exciting for you?
Taz:
Both. I would say. I think one of the things that comes with a V-zero product is that you really do not have a clear sense of what or how to achieve success, right? It's a journey. You learn along the way. You experiment, you try things to understand what will work, what will not work. There isn't a recipe cut out for you that you can follow. And so there needs to be a mindset of being willing to deal with that ambiguity, being willing to embrace, if you will, that unknown or that uncomfortable, or you don't really know what will work, what will not work.
But then I think the challenging part usually comes into play when you have some constraints, right? When I was at Yelp and even at Uber, you didn't necessarily have countless resourcing capacity. So how do you sort of deal with those constraints?
Even at Google, there's constraints in terms of how quickly can we get it out of the door, because it's Google, it's a big company. What are the checks and balances do we need to put in place to get something out of the door, and how do we navigate that? So those sort of pressures, if you will, are unique depending on the environment you are in. That can lead to an element of stress.
And then the question is, how do you convert that stress to good stress versus bad stress? I'll often talk about good and bad stress with my team, and it's like, what induces bad stress, and how do you sort of counterbalance that with good stress? Because oftentimes, there will always be stress in environments that you are in. It's a question of how do you manage that to be good stress so that you can handle it better?
But I think to round it out, I would say you got to be able to be of the mindset of embracing ambiguity and embracing the unknown, but then balancing the stress and managing the stress in a way that it doesn't turn into bad stress because that can actually lead to more challenging outcomes, not just for yourself, not just for myself, but for my team as well. And so how do I sort of help the team do that? It's often a question I ask.
Heidi: I think that question, that comment around good stress versus bad stress is so fascinating. And it actually reminds me of a time when our team fully sort of gelled and came together as a group when there was a competitor that should not have been beating us, but it was. And we had this weird two-product structure with separate teams. We didn't work very well together, but all of a sudden, putting our eyes on that competitor and saying, we are going to crush them so that no one ever even talks about them a year from now.
And we've motivated as a team, we unified the product, made some big branding decisions, and all came together and shipped the best product, which absolutely crushed the competition. It was a fantastic stress that really unified us. And so I think those moments, that really resonates that there is such a thing as good stress, it does happen for sure. I love that.
Taz: There is absolutely, and I think to the point you made, Heidi, I think it's so much about people believing in what they're doing and why they're doing it. The why they're doing it is a key indicator of people getting excited about like, okay, I could see the roadblocks along the way, but I understand why I'm going down the path that I'm going down, and I'm excited about the path I'm going down.
I have to say that one of the most fascinating experiences of my time at Uber, even though it was the most challenging, probably hands down the most challenging time in my career, at a longer stretch in time. We can talk about Google as well, but that was challenging in a different way.
Uber was challenging from externalities as well as internalities. There was a lot of PR pressures on the company that was stressing us as well as internalities of building a business. The one thing that was constant was the why. The why we are at Uber and why we are there to help the drivers in our ecosystem, and giving an avenue for these drivers to make money on the platform. And that was a huge motivator for folks to be able to do what they did on any given day.
Karen: Amazing. So I'm hearing a lot of embracing the unknown and dealing with ambiguity, understanding what your why is and being really true to that, and also the good and bad stress. And I'm curious, as you're thinking about your career, if you feel like those elements that you've been practicing in your day-to-day at work also bled into how you saw your own professional growth and maybe inspired courage to make switches along the way and pivots within your career and having to start over from scratch every once in a while.
Taz: I think so, Karen. I mean, I think part of it's this inherent desire to want to learn and understand. Through all these pivots, it was sort of this inherent desire to, when I pivoted from a packaged product or Surface, like a touch product, to the advertising product to marketplace product, or going from engineering to product to engineering, or going from a small company—JD Edwards was a relatively small company—to Microsoft that was very big to Yelp. Again, it was very small and the small company to the big company dynamo was also all with the mindset of just being curious to wanting to learn the other perspective.
And when I joined Google, it was really this inherent desire to want to understand what Google does internally that gives Google the brand externally. It was really this fascinating desire to want to understand Google as a culture.
Because I was coming from Uber as a company where there were lots of things about the culture that we were trying to change, right? There were lots of good things, there was a lot of good DNA, and there was also things that we were trying to change and make better.
And there was this perception that Google has it together, and Google was a massive company. And so I was very curious to understand what Google was, really, from the inside. And so that was also a motivator, if you will, in me moving within Google because not all of Google is the same.
So it was really, again, from this mental model and mindset of really just trying to understand. And that sort of then builds my, I would say, intuition on what to look for in the next thing when I'm looking for it.
Heidi: And once you're thrown into all of these new opportunities, how do you approach learning everything you need to know, maybe even before you take the opportunity? What is your approach to learning all that new stuff and sort of ramping up so that you can lead the team?
Taz: I could say a couple things. First, I would say is, read everything. Look at everything. Meet as many people as you can and ask a lot of questions. So don't be shy of asking questions.
And then, when you're asking questions, this is something I learned the hard way: be very explicit about the fact that you're asking because of curiosity. You are holding judgment. You're not really trying to ask the why because you are judging. You are asking the why because you want to understand the history and the context behind those decisions. And then you're going to be inundated with information.
So you have to kind of decide and prioritize where you're going to spend your energy to really dig in and understand. And once you've prioritized that top list, if you will, then it's a question of you really digging, digging till you understand. And the digging can come from again, like I said, reading, through meeting, through growing your aperture of information to be able to understand the root causes of some of those decisions so that you can make better choices for the future.
So that's just generally how I've approached problems in engineering. You classically do a postmortem, and a postmortem in my mind is really that. You're really trying to find the five whys, right? You dig, dig till you understand.
And I tend to use that approach with a lot of my learning. So it's like, at least I want to make sure if something does not match my sniff test, it's like, okay, I really just need to dig till I understand better. That leads me to get a better framing and understanding of the problem space.
Heidi: I have to say I'm rapidly taking notes since I'm starting a new job on Monday. I'll use all of those as I ramp up. Thank you.
Taz: Oh, Heidi. Again, too kind.
Heidi: Let's take a quick break to hear from our sponsor.
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Heidi: And now back to our discussion.
Karen: So, changing the topic just a little bit, you mentioned earlier your philosophy of good and bad stress, and I'm curious if there was a particularly challenging period for you that taught you that particular philosophy.
Taz:
I would say Uber was very stressful, but it was stressful in an interesting way. So my personal life was very much in order at the time. I had no personal life stress. I think the stress that Uber induced was really more from the externalities that the company was hitting.
And in some ways, that ended up being really good stress for me because even though I was working 80-hour work weeks and sometimes a hundred-hour work weeks during that time, I never felt that I was burning out from the work hours that I was spending at Uber.
I realized I was burning out because every conversation I was having, every dinner, every friend I was meeting, was challenging me as to why I was still at the company. And it was really me trying to figure out how to convince them of why I was there. And genuinely, I enjoyed all my time at Uber. I look at that time as one of the most rewarding times in my career.
It was the hardest but rewarding, but that was good stress. That was stress that I felt like I could handle in a way, even though it was leading to a weird type of burnout where I felt like I continually needed to prove myself as to why I was at the company.
And so genuinely at that point, I evaluated if I wanted to consider a different choice. I never considered leaving Uber, but circumstances over six months or so resulted in me landing to work for someone I had actually worked at Uber with at Google, but then I was actually having a really good time. My boss was actually a huge sponsor and advocate for me. He was setting the org up for the next level promo and everything was working out well.
But again, it was this inherent feeling that I wasn't happy with what I was doing because it was an infrastructure product. It wasn't really challenging me in a unique way. I'd done infrastructure many times over.
And when the opportunity to go to Munich came about, building this new business model, I was like, oh, that sounds cool. And I decided to sign my family up for it. So we literally packed our bags and we were ready to go. My family was my husband and I at the time. So we were fortunate enough he also ended up taking a job at Google. We ended up going to Munich.
But a week before I was landing, the reorg basically shifted my role entirely. So I was landing into an environment where I needed to figure out what the team was going to work on and then eventually figure out what I was going to do, but also at the same time, and this is something that I can talk about now that is behind me, but at the time it was extremely challenging.
I was also going through a lost pregnancy. I was in this situation which was really unclear to me as to where we were going to take the org and the team and the product. It was unclear to me what was happening to me. My brain was not functioning. Nobody told me that when you're going through a pregnancy, you forget stuff, you get emotional, you get extremely, your highs and lows are all over the place. Your hormones are all over the place.
And all of this was happening to me around the same time. And for the first time in my career, I was told that I was underperforming. It blew my mind. It blew my mind that that is possible. And I reacted in a way that I guess, in hindsight, I'm like, I could have done better, but I reacted in a way. I was like, there's no way I'm underperforming. I literally set this team up for success. You know what I mean?
It's like I literally got this team up [inaudible] the ground and tried to figure out what they're going to work on, and we set up a roadmap and a charter and all of that for the team. And I think the underperformance was less about the delivery. It was more about the frame of mind I was bringing to the table, and some of the folks were reacting in a way that maybe I could have handled better.
So in hindsight, when I look at the situation, I was like, there was lots of things other people could have done better around me, but there are things that I could have done better as well. And I think that to me was this induction of bad stress because I was going through a lot of personal shifts in my life that were just shocking for me to deal with.
And then I was also going through work pressures that are out of control. And I didn't realize it at the time, in that six-month period, how much it was affecting me.
And after my lost pregnancy, I actually had a, we conceived and I had a good pregnancy after that, and I have a healthy baby. It all worked out fine.
But that journey of the year when I was going through a lot of this hormonal shift and changes in my life, it literally led me to second-guess me and second-guess what I was able to bring to the table.
And I have to admit, throughout my career, I've had many coaches. This coach that I met, Rachel Simmons, she literally saved me. And I think in this three months or five months that she coached me, she was my therapist, she was my psychoanalyst, she was my coach, and she was able to literally make me see, it wasn't all me, but it was also that there are things that I could have figured out how to do better.
And I feel like I'm much better leader on account of that journey that I went through. And I would never regret the work pressures that I had, even though they were very bad for me. I don't regret going through that experience because I learned a lot about myself through it.
Heidi: Thank you so much for your vulnerability and sharing that. I know that those are hard things to talk about and amazing that you were able to come out the other side with so many positives and so many learnings and be able to reflect on that. I think that's very hard. I think some people go through those lows and can never reflect on their role in it and what they could have done differently. Sounds like you've taken advantage of that and put that together and helped propel you forward after that. So thank you for sharing. I know that's a lot.
Taz: Yeah. I'm hoping it helps someone who listens to this because nobody told me what your body and mind and brain goes through when you go through a life experience like this, whether it's a successful or an unsuccessful pregnancy. And I was feeling all of it literally by myself. Of course, my partner was with me through it, but there was no other support system. And it made me realize how much support system matters.
And so my humble request for folks that may listen to this and might be going through changes like this is, seek out a support system because it's so, so important and so helpful when you're going through that low.
Heidi: And especially in another country where your friends and family are not nearby.
Taz: And through COVID.
Heidi: Through COVID. Through COVID. You can't even hug people. Oh my gosh, I cannot even imagine. Wow. Wow.
Taz: It was an interesting time. I'll say that.
Karen: Thank you so much, Taz, for sharing about your story and especially about the loss. I think a lot of times when we see leaders and we see their LinkedIn, it's just pristine. Everything is going perfectly to plan and there's nothing wrong. And you're like, wow, how did they do all of those things? And I just have no idea.
And it's really personal and genuine, and thank you so much for lifting that behind the scenes and allowing us to be able to share in some of the trials that you've had to go through in order to get to where you are today and how much you've been able to grow in that process and how difficult it can be being someone that is also a birthing parent. And then once you have birthed the child, then you have to actually figure out what to do with them and keep them alive. So that's its own different complexity. So thank you so much for sharing that with us. I really appreciate it.
Taz: Thank you, Karen. Appreciate it.
Karen: So moving forward, I'm curious, actually, as we're thinking about all of the different sides of you, I kind of see people as a prism. You see different things from different people based on your relationship with them. I'm curious how you might define your personal brand or how you show up in the world.
Taz: I hope that people see me as someone who is willing to, and able to, see beyond the now, not just in terms of business opportunity or what product we could build, but also in terms of what people bring to the table and where they are in their journey in terms of professional growth and where they could be in terms of coaching and sponsorship that they can be offered to be able to build a brand for themselves.
And so I have been fortunate enough to work with some amazing people through my journey. Some of them have been amazing to me, and I hope that folks that have come across and have worked with me see me as that for them, see me as someone who can experience them beyond the now and create that opportunity for them beyond the now.
Heidi: I love that. I think that's really amazing. And I can see that you have both the sort of yes, peering into the future and sort of seeing the potential and also maybe that positivity that there are good things here. And I love thinking of those two things together. Are there things that you spend time on to cultivate being able to see beyond the now?
Taz: I mean, I think from a business opportunity or the product perspective, it's a little bit easier in my mind because it really goes back to understanding where you are. So understanding the domain you are in, whether it's the technology or the business model or the industry, understanding your competition, understanding what you're good at, what you're not so good at, how can you manage, if you will, the known knowns and the known unknowns by essentially increasing your aperture of information.
So you're building the right connections, understanding the problems based, understanding who to get more information from and connecting the dots. So from my perspective, I think the ability to see beyond the now from a business or for product comes from these elements of better understanding of the problem space.
I think when it comes to people, it's a little bit more nuanced because I do hold very, very true to this concept of leaning on strengths. So, StrengthsFinder is a very well-known resource and book, but I think the core of it is, really, you could build on strengths, you can empower people on strengths, and you need to make sure that weaknesses don't get in their way, but essentially, leaning on their strengths.
And I think for me, when it comes to understanding people beyond the now, it really comes down to understanding their core strengths, understanding who they are, why they operate in a certain way, and what they're good at when they approach problems.
And I think when you tap into that understanding, you can create opportunity that matches, if you will, with that portfolio of strengths, and then you can enhance their ability to be successful. And so to me, it really comes down to that chemistry of understanding who they are and why they operate a certain way. Sometimes people don't see it in themselves, and if you are able to be that mirror for them, it can actually be a net win-win, right? A win-win for them as well as for you.
Heidi: That's awesome. I do remember at one point we realized we had a team of five people who were all strategic, but no one who was good at execution. We had to change up who was on the team.
Taz: So it's a very good point you make because I think what I realized about myself is that my strength was really being able to learn with curiosity. That was one element of my strength. But I think my weakness was being detail-oriented. I found it really, really hard to be extremely buttoned up on the details.
But over time, I've realized as a leader, you kind of do need to be, in certain times and cases, you got to be strategic, but you also have to be detail-oriented. You have to dig in and understand. And so I've compensated maybe for some of that weakness. And so over time, it's unclear to me where my strengths lie anymore. I'll have to go look at them.
Heidi: But we'd love to hear. That's fantastic.
Karen: Heidi, do you know what your strengths are from the StrengthsFinder point of view?
Heidi: I think the last time I did it was more than seven years ago, and it was maybe even eight or 10 years ago. I think at the time they were connector, which we have talked about on another podcast. And Karen is also a connector and strategic, and I think I was actually shocked that strategic was on there because I think most of my career, I never thought of myself as strategic. So that was a fascinating one.
Taz: That's amazing.
Karen: I love that. And I have no idea what mine is, but I would guess connector is probably one of them. If creative is on that list, probably the direction I would lean as well, instead of the strategic. I don't know if I'm always strategic, but I definitely try to approach with out-of-the-box solutions when I can. It's just more fun.
Taz: That's awesome, Karen.
Karen: So, all right, when we're talking about building connections and empowering on strengths, and maybe we're not talking about either of those at all. I'm curious when we're thinking about getting to meet new people, because this is something that you talked a little bit about earlier when we were talking about you starting your own startup in your next chapter and finding the right co-founder or the right team of people around you in order to put together something like that. How do you go about meeting those new people and growing your network?
Taz: Especially when you're not very extroverted. That's a very interesting challenge. I will say I'm not necessarily an extroverted person, and I tend to love to hang out with one or two folks that are close to me than a group of 15 people in a conference room. So then my natural tendency is to cultivate more deep relationships than shallow.
So in some ways, you could say I do not like the concept of networking because it feels a little bit more shallow, right? It feels a little bit more fake. I tend to approach the relationship building or the network building with the mental model of really understanding that person and building that deeper relationship, and approaching it with curiosity of what is it that they're looking for? What does win-win look like for them? What does success look like for them? Again, what do they bring to the table that can counterbalance maybe what I bring to the table?
So if I do not have the technical expertise and I'm in a new domain, the other person does, that could be a really good fit, if you will, in terms of the counterbalance and strengths that we can bring to the team. And so that's the approach I normally take. I try to really understand where people are coming from and what they're bringing to the table, what they're looking for, what they're excited about, to build that connection.
Karen: If we're turning this into advice for introverts who are looking to network, is maybe instead of trying to network with large groups of people, really just developing that relationship with one or two people and leading with curiosity and learning more about them.
Taz: I would say so. I think that that is the way that I have benefited, at least for myself. And I could say that could be an avenue to try, especially if you are nervous about networking. I approach, again, if I'm in a new problem space or a new domain, and I know little about it, I'm usually seeking out people who are experts, who understand the domain better, who understand the technology stack better.
It's not about the level, it's not about the title, it's not about any of that. It's really just, again, approaching it from a problem-solving mindset of like I'm trying to increase my aperture of learning and understanding. How do I find the right people to help me with it? And then really just trying to build that connection and relationship through that desire and aspiration of wanting to learn and understand.
And usually when you approach folks with this mindset of, I want to learn, I want to understand, and they feel like they can provide that expertise and knowledge, they're going to be more willing to have a conversation with you. And that leads to then building more of a connection with 'em that can build at the core of it, a sense of trust in each other, which to me is the litmus test of your relationship or your network is how much trust there is in that relationship. And when there is trust, your ability to then solve for hard problems becomes easier because there is that apparent trust.
Heidi: I love that. Thank you. Well, I think we're ready for our last couple of questions. Thank you for spending so much time with us today. Maybe to start with, what is a piece of advice you would give to your younger self?
Taz: I would say if in my younger days I would have encouraged myself to again, continue embracing change, continue staying positive. Especially during a crisis, it's really, really important to be optimistic and positive. At the end of the day, generally speaking, as humans, we love to look at situations and say, find avenues to not make it your problem or not make it— essentially find a way to judge a situation or a person.
And my general advice would be avoid that judgment, avoid judging either the person or the situation, but really figuring out what it is that you could have done in that situation. How could you have approached it differently, and how could you have solved for it differently?
And I think that mental model helped, at least over the years, has helped me think about problems more from the mindset of maybe my leaders will be thinking of, and it helps me understand better what maybe two or three layers above me, they may be thinking, and translating that for my team. And so if , as my younger self, I understood that better, I feel like I would have made better decisions throughout my career.
Heidi: Love it.
Karen: Following that, who is someone you look up to in the industry, and alternate question, whose career story would you like to hear on a future WEST podcast?
Taz: So I have come across many awesome folks in the industry. I would say in the last few years, I came across a woman named Elizabeth Reed, who's Senior VP at Google. She's running all of Google Search now, and we've not actually worked together. That's the funny story here.
We've tried to work together for years together now, at least three or four years now, because we crossed paths and we really, really, I felt such a connection with her, and I admire her as a leader. And she's so empathetic, such strong will, so much expertise that I look forward someday to crossing paths with her again and working together. But she would be someone amazing to bring to the podcast and hear her story and journey. I'm sure she'll have a lot of good advice to share for folks.
Heidi: Thank you. That's amazing. Well, I just want to say thank you so much for sharing everything you shared with us, amazing bits of advice and perspective for folks to learn from. So thank you so much for your time today.
Taz: Thank you. And I really appreciate you asking me to come chat. It's been such a pleasure.
Karen: And that wraps up another great episode of Engineer Your Career. Engineer Your Career is produced by WEST, a learning community that empowers women technologists through mentorship. Special thanks to our audio production team, Heidi Williams, Amanda Beaty, and yours truly, Karen Ko.
If you enjoy our work, we encourage you to share this episode with a friend. Want to hear more from Engineer Your Career? Subscribe on your favorite podcasting app. We look forward to having you back for our next episode. Thanks for tuning in.
