In early 2019, Stella Rossi had planned to visit a nearby shopping area with her infant son. But, after learning of a gunman in the vicinity from a local moms group and using the public safety app Citizen to find out more details, she forwent the trip.
“Citizen was the best place to get the ground truth,” Rossi said.
The experience moved her, Rossi said, and when the opportunity arose for her to join Citizen in July as the company’s director of engineering, she jumped at it.
“Having used the product prior, I was inspired by the company’s mission,” Rossi said. “Transparency of information is important, especially for public safety, so I really liked the idea of trying to build on that.”
One of the first projects the former Google and Nest engineering leader helped execute was Citizen’s August release of SafePass, a free COVID-19 contract-tracing tool.
By its launch, SafePass had already helped more than 10,000 users report test results to notify other users if they’ve come in contact with someone who tested positive, according to CNBC. It’s another step toward Citizen’s mission to make the world a safer place, Rossi said.
In a conversation with Built In NYC, Rossi explained how Citizen’s engineering philosophies have enabled the company to deliver meaningful impact around public safety.
In addition to your own interactions with the app as a user, what else inspired your move to Citizen?
The people I talked with during interviews. I had a deep conversation with one of our product managers about her philosophies on working and interacting with engineers and designers through the software development cycle from concept to launch. I also chatted with our head of design whose design principles are aligned with mine, and with our head of engineering on how to tackle challenging engineering problems while helping our engineers grow. These conversations were memorable and helped me gain insight into the product and organizational challenges we would have as Citizen continues to grow.
You were onboarded during COVID-19, and one of your first projects dealt with responding to the pandemic. Talk to us about the contact tracing tool you and your team rolled out.
In keeping with our mission to help everyday people stay safe, we built SafePass to support contact tracing, testing and symptom tracking. We realized that we as a company couldn’t ignore COVID-19, and this was a unique challenge because we have to work with the limitations of Bluetooth technology on iOS and Android. We innovated to make sure our users have the ability to contact trace and receive potential exposure notifications.
Company Cultural Shifts
What are the engineering considerations you and your team face at Citizen?
We address two broad categories. One focuses on finding ways to improve, optimize and scale with the types of data we work with, like the research, experimentation and launch we did to evaluate 911 audio response systems to better detect incidents. We also continuously aim to increase the capacity of our systems as we grow to new markets and welcome new users onto our platform.
The other category is learning to think like our users and fully understand their needs as we develop features for our mobile apps. Safety means different things to different people and can also vary based on gender, race and socioeconomic factors. It’s important to understand that as we develop new features. This also points to how important it is to have a diverse team to help reflect our user base.
How do you think like your user base?
When we develop a feature, we use personas as a way to introduce the concept and tell the story of how it will benefit the user. We conduct user research periodically so we learn a lot from talking to our users directly. We also have several community outreach representatives who share the experiences of the members of the Citizen user community.
As a woman, it’s easy for me to empathize with people’s concerns around safety because I have experienced them many times over. As an exercise, we imagine the different situations that can happen. In all of these scenarios, the common thread is feeling unsettled or scared and wanting to have a sense of security or the desire to be informed to take necessary actions to be safe. Everyone has this innate desire, so it’s a matter of understanding that and being mindful of it as we build software.
What does success mean at Citizen?
It means enabling someone to avoid a dangerous situation or help someone else. To build and maintain features and systems that yield that result for our users, we have to have a growth mindset. This equates to more than learning new programming languages and tools; it means finding meaningful solutions to business and engineering impediments that we come across.
The best teams I have been a member of found creative ways to get through the roadblocks to build an outstanding product. At Citizen, that’s the same sentiment that we have when building teams. Building and launching successful products is not a straight line, and we often have to adjust our approach. We try to foster a learning culture by iterating quickly to find impactful solutions.
