Especially in the modern workplace, titles don’t mean everything. Employees often engage with work in proactive ways beyond those outlined in their job descriptions, and everyone plays an important role in moving a company forward.
“Being a leader is not confined to whether or not you have direct reports,” said Lucy Lei, a lead customer success manager at conversations platform Sendbird. “It’s about stepping up and driving changes that positively impact the company.”
In her role, Lei does just that by creating and refining multi-tiered success plans for customers and staying in constant communication with her clients, her colleagues and even senior leadership.
Meanwhile, as a data analyst at contract automation platform Ontra, Keyu Huang shows leadership initiative by excelling in all areas of her work, from collaborating across teams to delivering impeccable code reviews and expanding her product knowledge.
“I’ve also learned how to better prioritize,” Huang said. “I show leadership as an individual contributor by thinking strategically about product goals and proactively identifying problems and opportunities.”
Lei, Huang and individual contributors at two other fast-growing San Francisco companies discuss thriving outside of managerial roles while pushing their companies forward.
Ethos Life leverages data science across its online platform to make getting life insurance faster and cheaper.
Describe your role at Ethos Technologies and the most exciting project you’re working on right now.
As senior product manager for consumer growth, I own the “upper funnel.” That means taking users who’ve just landed on our site and making sure they are educated and prepared to begin a life insurance application, no matter what knowledge level they came in with. I work closely with our marketing team to ensure that the various types of audiences we engage with are getting the right experience to support their needs. When we do this right, it leads to growth for Ethos and the best coverage for our policyholders.
Right now, I am working on our life insurance needs assessment experience. The average policyholder has a lot of decisions to make about their personalized policy. It’s up to my team to help users understand which decisions apply to them while offering the best guidance possible as to how they can make those decisions. At the end of the day, we want people to be confident in their policies, so they can enjoy the peace of mind that comes with protecting their loved ones.
How have you shown leadership in your current role?
I’m currently working on needs assessment across the entire user experience, which is handled by a few different specialized product teams. The most crucial part of cross-team collaboration is written communication. Collaboration via written documentation helps us to clarify and align on our shared goals, which in turn allows us all to contribute our unique perspectives and areas of expertise. Ultimately, we are able to work together toward a much bigger end vision than if we were constrained to working only within our formal team remits.
I see myself continuing to grow at Ethos. It is truly the kind of role you learn best by doing.”
What do you see as a potential career path in the near future?
I love product management, especially for consumer experiences, and I see myself continuing to grow at Ethos. It is truly the kind of role you learn best by doing, which is why it’s great to have so many other strong product people to learn from here.
Life360 is a family safety platform with driving, location and digital safety features.
Describe your role at Life360 and the most exciting project you’re working on right now.
I am a senior software engineer on Life360’s optimization team, which looks for ways to optimize system performance and cloud spending. My most exciting project right now is re-architecting our messaging system.
We decouple the microservices on our backend, through the use of queues that pass messages. At peak load, our internal services handle more than a million messages per second, combined. We are currently re-architecting our queuing deployment from having a distributed queue instance running locally with each producer to create a more centralized cluster. This solves two major problems. Firstly, it allows us to continue scaling as throughput increases. Secondly, it allows for intelligently handling traffic within AWS availability zones, giving us more uptime in the rare case of service disruption. It also opens up the possibility of using AWS spot instances, with huge potential cost savings.
This project touches almost every microservice on our backend and requires us to have a real depth of knowledge in Kubernetes, AWS and Life360’s overall system.
How have you shown leadership in your current role?
I have found clear communication to be the cornerstone of successful leadership, especially in a remote-first environment. A previous project involved migrating a large number of microservices to Kubernetes, and the cornerstone of that project’s success was constant communication, both with my fellow team members and with management.
In a similar vein, the importance of collaboration cannot be understated. I am not sure that any one person knows the “best” solution to every distinct piece of a large-scale project. I rely heavily on the expertise of others, both on my immediate team and in the broader organization. What we build together is always better than if we silo our projects.
I have found clear communication to be the cornerstone of successful leadership.”
What do you see as a potential career path in the near future?
Life360 has a well-defined growth ladder for engineers with clear performance expectations at each level. I am also very fortunate that Life360 has a wonderful group of seasoned engineers who provide great feedback, direction and inspiration.
The people who thrive at Life360 like working in our fast-paced environment, which has lots of opportunities for developing deep technical expertise. I enjoy the high stakes that come with being an on-call engineer, and leaning into that led to a leadership opportunity working with our newly formed Network and Systems Operation (NSO) team.
Ultimately, I think the biggest help comes from my relationships. At Life360, we have a culture of direct communication. Our fast-paced environment requires sharing knowledge and teaching skills so people can contribute quickly. We have scaled our systems so much that we can’t buy bigger computers to solve our problems; instead, we have to solve them with better engineering. Building my technical skills and engaging with the team are the best ways I’ve found to get to the next level.
Sendbird builds scalable chat APIs that empower engagement in apps over chat, voice and video.
Describe your role at Sendbird and the most exciting project you’re working on right now.
As the lead customer success manager at Sendbird, I manage our top enterprise customers for the Americas region. In addition, I’m involved in cross-functional initiatives as a representative for the customer success/customer experience (CS/CX) organization. I’m currently helping launch our customer success plans (CSPs). It may sound straightforward, but that would be selling it short. There are a multitude of factors that determine the threshold for success, which vary by customer, such as where they are in the customer journey, success criteria such as KPIs that matter to them individually and even organizational changes on the customer’s side that affect their strategy and long-term vision. Along these lines, creating a success plan for a customer involves several groups, including sales, product, CX and even engineering. As we begin this initiative, it isn’t going to be perfect. But the process of creating and refining repeatable, scalable programs to promote value attainment and business growth for customers, and by extension our own team, is invigorating.
How have you shown leadership in your current role?
I was in a people manager role in a previous life. I am currently in an IC role, as that is my personal preference. But with that background and as one of the more seasoned members of the team, I naturally gravitate toward and enjoy providing mentorship to my teammates. Not just for the CS org, but also for those adjacent to the team, I present myself as a well-meaning resource.
I’m also not afraid to DM those within senior leadership to ask questions and share my two cents about what’s going on with the company, whether it’s addressing a new project we’re starting or bringing attention to overlooked items that have been plaguing my team. I personally believe that everyone is well-intentioned and, when you work on a small team, it’s every person’s responsibility to make an impact. What we have to be comfortable with at the end of the day is putting our best foot (and leg, and whole bodies) forward, despite uncertainty.
I naturally gravitate toward and enjoy providing mentorship to my teammates.”
What do you see as a potential career path in the near future?
What I love about Sendbird is the fact that every day could bring a new challenge, which naturally promotes personal growth and evolution. What’s even better is having a support system in colleagues and teams to help execute on those ideas and vision.
I’m also very much a people-person. In that respect, I’d love to stay involved with customers, advocating for their success, while simultaneously helping shape the way in which we achieve those things operationally. This could include aiding the implementation of those changes internally while vocalizing and not losing sight of the smaller-yet-still-important things (messaging and communications, mental load, impact on team workflows, etc). As with all things, you are stronger as a unit, so having a supportive system (both from senior leadership and peers) is paramount to achieving my and our collective goals.
Ontra is a contract automation and intelligence platform, empowering law and simplifying legal workflows by combining artificial intelligence and software with highly-knowledgeable lawyers around the world.
Describe your role at Ontra and the most exciting project you’re working on right now.
I’m one of Ontra’s founding data analysts, having joined the company a little over a year ago. Currently, I’m embedded in multiple product teams working to empower data-driven product development.
I am lucky to have a knowledgeable, supportive manager who patiently mentored me and empowered me to grow in analytics leadership. Additionally, I feel very lucky to work with a truly amazing team; with them, I’ve gained confidence, creativity and freedom. I’ve worked to match their excellence. And I’ve been able to be myself in every way possible. Through observation and experience, I’ve contributed to the company’s rapid growth.
I’ve been working on a collaboration with our product and engineering teams to make better data-driven product decisions to improve our summaries of legal contracts. For example, we deploy AI predictions to contract summaries in an effort to cut down the time attorneys need to spend on this type of work and to also use that data to inform product decisions, like future AI feature development.
How have you shown leadership in your current role?
As an individual contributor, I try to influence decisions by giving the right information to the right people at the right time. I also try to acquire as much product and domain knowledge as possible to serve better insights to stakeholders and brainstorm ideas after exploring user behaviors.
It’s essential to focus on not only short-term successes but also long-term victories by contributing to hiring and onboarding. I also advocate for Ontra everywhere applicable, such as at conferences and through social networks.
Recently I’ve been reading What You Do is Who You Are by Ben Horowitz and I think the biggest takeaway I’ve had from it is to lead through actions. If I am very thorough in code reviews every single time, I’m contributing to a culture of delivering high-quality work.
As an individual contributor, I try to influence decisions by giving the right information to the right people at the right time.”
What do you see as a potential career path in the near future?
I see two career paths available to me. The first is to gradually work toward a management role in analytics. The second is to become a data scientist and work on more research projects. There are a lot of interesting data science problems ripe for solutions in contract automation from Ontra.
I’m blessed with several resources to help me get to the next level for my career. I have the best manager who has mentored me throughout my time at Ontra and the best team with healthy cultural dynamics and strong skills to learn from each other. We are bringing on more people with growth mindsets and skills to help expedite our growth. This is a place where we highly value knowledge sharing and open collaboration. Additionally, I’m taking company-sponsored courses to help boost my skills. Ontra really makes things easy.
