Ep 154: Building the pipeline for more women leaders in tech

Jennie Lewis is the Senior Manager of Customer Insights at Airship. In this episode, Jennie shares her experience and positive approach to navigating male-dominated tech fields, such as solutions architecture. She and the host, Maria Lannon, discuss how to build a more diverse pipeline of executive leadership for the future.

At Airship, Jennie helps brands understand the economic impact and quantitative results of their mobile app strategies. Airship is known for its push notification, in-app messaging solutions, and for mastering mobile app experiences to engage customers and win their loyalty. Previously, Jennie worked at Epsilon in custom email development and CrowdTwist in solutions architecture.

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• Tell us about Airship and your role there.
• What does a typical customer look like?
• Solutions architecture is typically a male-dominated role. How did you get into that and how did you navigate that as a woman?
• Did you have any mentors that encouraged you to speak up when you were second-guessing yourself?
• Do you feel women are better represented in our industry today or is there still work to do?
• How can we encourage more diversity in the tech space?
• How do you navigate work-life balance with children?
• What are you excited about in regard to the future of mobile?

• 1:05 Airship & Jennie’s role
• 4:38 How brands have transitioned in thinking about their apps
• 7:33 Navigating male-dominated domains like solutions architecture
• 10:50 Allies and career coaching
• 13:49 Building the pipeline of women & diversity in tech
• 16:51 Work-life balance with a kid
• 18:40 Jennie’s two biggest pieces of advice
• 20:55 The future of measurement
• 23:54 Resources

(5:10-5:34) “Now that we’re talking about business value, what I’m seeing more from brands are things like, ‘I want to create an in-app experience that’s exclusive for the app and the only way our customers can interact with this is by coming in and being a part of the app community.’ Whereas before it was, ‘Oh, we’ll do a promotion on email or we’ll do a promotion on the web and we’ll also do it in the app,’ I’m seeing a lot more app-exclusive content, which is pretty cool.”

(13:49 14:06) “Have we made progress? Yes. But are we where I want us to be? No. I think in the tech space in general, we’re looking at probably roughly another 15 years of pipeline building before an executive staff landscape looks different.”