Engineering and technical jobs are some of the fastest-growing and highest paid jobs in the United States, but women remain significantly underrepresented in these roles — especially in management.
These four women leaders of NYC-based companies are engineering experts who have embraced vulnerability, trust and curiosity to successfully ascend to management roles — and they have valuable insights to share.
According to Zippia, women account for just 7.4 percent of all U.S. engineering managers and 10.1 percent of senior engineering managers.
The issue of women’s representation in engineering begins at entry-level positions. Published by Lean In and McKinsey and Company, the Women in the Workplace 2022 report found that women in technical roles are twice as likely as women overall to say they are frequently the only woman in the room at work.
The report goes on to state that the “only-woman” phenomenon in part explains why women in technical roles are more likely than women in non-technical jobs to have their judgment questioned in their areas of expertise. They’re also more likely to say that their gender played a role in being passed over for promotions.
At NS1, Senior Engineering Manager Lisa Hagemann encourages fellow women leaders to focus on growing their teams’ technical skill sets and career paths rather than constantly trying to prove themselves on male-dominated teams.
“Don’t try too hard to ‘be one of the guys’ and don’t waste effort trying to prove your bona fides,” Hagemann said. “In the end, giving your team the tools to advance is your primary contribution.”
Built In New York connected with women leaders from NS1, Chainalysis, Check and Cockroach Labs to learn more about their impressive career journeys and gather advice for women aspiring to manage tech teams.
Chainalysis helps banks, businesses and government agencies track and investigate cryptocurrency practices.
Briefly describe your career journey and current role.
I have been in software engineering for my entire career, mostly at high-growth NYC-based tech companies such as SeatGeek and Zola. I spent about six years as an engineer before jumping into my current role as an engineering manager within the core services group at Chainalysis. Chainalysis is the world’s leading blockchain analytics company, providing intelligence for the Web3 era.
My job is mainly to support and hire great engineers, as well as to act as the engineering voice in medium- and long-term roadmap planning, working cross functionally with product and design.
What’s one important lesson that you learned as a people manager, and how did that make you a better manager?
It wasn’t until I became a manager that I really realized how many different approaches talented people can take to be successful. Everything from communication styles, problem-solving methodology and preferred tradeoffs can be really different but equally effective among individuals.
There are two main ways this observation has impacted how I’ve built out and continue to improve my team. For one, I try to articulate the impact or goal we want to achieve instead of giving engineers instructions, so that people can adapt the “how” to what seems best to them.
Secondly, this observation has underscored the importance of a balanced team, where the styles of the team members are diverse enough that we can challenge each other from genuinely different angles but can also feel comfortable that our individual style is valued and represented in our team culture overall.
I try to articulate the impact or goal we want to achieve instead of giving engineers instructions, so that people can adapt the ‘how’ to what seems best to them.”
What advice do you have for other women who manage or aspire to manage tech teams?
I would focus on becoming a fantastic engineer and really honing your leadership and business skills as soon as you start to build confidence in executing engineering projects autonomously (typically after a couple years in engineering).
If you learn the hard and soft skills to influence product direction and roadmap as an engineer, you will be set up for success when that is a more formal part of your job responsibilities as a manager.
Check is a fintech company that provides a payroll-as-a-service API.
Briefly describe your career journey and current role.
I started my career as a software engineer at a big tech company. I had the unique opportunity to work on a very early-stage cross-functional project. Through my tenure on the team, I saw the project grow from prototype to global scale and deployment.
This taught me the value of sticking with a problem and wrestling with it for years. It challenged my thinking and forced me to be creative and keep my perspective fresh, while creating opportunities to wear several different hats and roles. Midway through my career there, I moved into a management position.
A year ago, I joined Check looking for a new challenge to obsess over and a company where my passion for developing engineers and team building would thrive.
What’s one important lesson that you learned as a people manager, and how did that make you a better manager?
The value of transparency. Trust and vulnerability are at the center of how I can most effectively communicate and influence my team. Transparency starts with trusting my team with my vulnerabilities: how I’m growing, where I face challenges and where my motivations lie.
I learned that if I want my team to come to me with raw feedback, to use me as a sounding board and to feel comfortable sharing their struggles, then modeling that behavior is the fastest way there.
Trust and vulnerability are at the center of how I can most effectively communicate and influence my team.”
What advice do you have for other women who manage or aspire to manage tech teams?
Seek out leadership attributes that you admire and want to emulate. So much of my early leadership style was a reflection of the leaders who molded me, whether they were my managers, leaders of my organization or mentors.
I encourage any women aspiring to lead teams to seek out more exposure to women in leadership roles through their companies, mentorship networks, podcasts or even books. It can be a valuable tool in stretching your definition of what leadership can look like for you and finding the style that suits you best.
Software company Cockroach Labs is the creator of a cloud-native, distributed SQL platform called CockroachDB.
Briefly describe your career journey and current role.
I began my career working as a developer at a marketing software company in New York. At the time, the company was a startup with a small engineering team; by the time I left, it was a large public company.
I worked on several teams across the entire stack, gaining experience working on their core product, various third-party integrations, billing and subscriptions and their API and platform. My transition into a leadership role began there as a technical team lead and eventually a people manager. By the end of my time there, I was managing several teams in the platform product area.
After leaving that company in 2020, I joined Cockroach Labs, where I currently manage our observability teams. We work to make the complex distributed system that is CockroachDB easily understandable to our customers.
What’s one important lesson that you learned as a people manager, and how did that make you a better manager?
Trust by default. Psychological safety is the foundation of a healthy team, and establishing this culture begins when you trust that your teammates are capable.
Prioritize not just establishing this culture, but protecting it on an ongoing basis and modeling it yourself. Be vulnerable so your team knows it’s OK to have weaknesses and struggles. Acknowledge your mistakes so your team doesn’t feel they must hide their own. Share incomplete ideas and imperfect information so your team knows they can engage in open dialogue.
Try out something new so your team feels comfortable experimenting and innovating. Involve your team in decision-making so they feel empowered. These are the sorts of behaviors that encourage psychological safety and provide the basis for a team to do their best work.
Psychological safety is the foundation of a healthy team, and establishing this culture begins when you trust that your teammates are capable.”
What advice do you have for other women who manage or aspire to manage tech teams?
Be curious and ask questions. In male-dominated environments, a frequent piece of advice for women, especially as they move into leadership roles, is to be more assertive and vocal. I think it’s important to dig deeper.
Why is being assertive considered important? Is it actually that you need to do a better job advocating for your team so that you get appropriate resources?
Why do you need to be more vocal? Is it because you’re not sharing your teams’ successes?
Be curious about feedback, seek to understand your opportunities for growth at a deeper and, ideally, actionable level and be authentic in your implementation.
As you spend more time in a leadership role, you may find yourself removed from certain technical details. Being an effective technical leader is less about having all the answers and more about knowing what questions to ask when.
Finally, advocate for and support other women and underrepresented groups. As a woman in a leadership role, use your experience and any privileges you have to support others. Consider coaching or mentoring. Advocate for those who want to move into leadership roles or are seeking promotions.
NS1 provides domain name systems and traffic management software.
Briefly describe your career journey and current role.
Briefly describe a 35-year journey? It’s quite interesting (to me, anyway). I went to college as a communications major in journalism, and I took computer science courses to fulfill my science requirements. In my last two years of college, the world of desktop publishing was just opening up, and this fused my interests in computer programming, editorial layout and magazine design. Throughout the 90s, I transitioned into web development as the industry evolved.
One day, I needed to update hundreds of tags on a website and I was introduced to the magic of RegEx; the rest is history. I became a fan of Perl and found myself more and more drawn away from front-end development and into the world of web server administration and operations.
I’ve been in the DNS industry now for the greater part of my career — in full-stack development, DevOps, platform engineering and management. As a senior engineering manager at NS1, I manage a team of engineers ranging from DNS protocol pros to site reliability engineers. It’s a gas to run the internet.
What’s one important lesson that you learned as a people manager, and how did that make you a better manager?
I learned that being an engineering manager is, in fact, being a people manager. The job isn’t about managing technology, owning the technical vision of a product line, or keeping a project board updated or burndown charts.
A lead developer is much different from an engineering manager. I struggled in a past role to convince the C-team of this, to avoid the trap that the only way an engineer can advance is to enter a management track. Fortunately, the industry has evolved its thinking in this area over the last decade.
Owning the delivery of the product roadmap is a critical element of an engineering manager’s job. I’ve found the most influential way to do that is to grow your team as engineers. What skills do we need to up-level? What blockers can I remove? I call that “moving furniture.”
Also, don’t ignore those interpersonal relationship elements that aren’t technical. They matter a lot. Focus on growing your engineers in their craft and as professionals; success follows.
Focus on growing your engineers in their craft and as professionals; success follows.”
What advice do you have for other women who manage or aspire to manage tech teams?
Most of my advice is gender agnostic — focus on your people. Grow your individuals in their craft and think strategically about what traits or skills you need to round out your team.
Career pathing is owned by the employee and not the manager. While a manager can guide an employee along a path, they do not need to lead them. Prioritize getting employees access to opportunities for growth, training in areas that they need more focus on and exposure to mentors.
For women in tech management, I would advise: don’t try too hard to “be one of the guys” and don’t waste effort trying to prove your bona fides. In the end, giving your team the tools to advance is your primary contribution.
Unfortunately, there is a generalization that women are nurturing by nature. Therefore in tech, women managers may shy away from the more human elements of management in order to focus on the “hard” technical elements. The truth is that managing people is hard. You are a people manager and engineers are, after all, people.
