Welcome to my first ever “Decoding the Developer” blog post! This passion project has been a long time coming, but I’m excited to finally be kicking it off.
In this first post, I want to dive into the inspiration behind this blog, and the journey I’ve been on to get here. To put it simply, my mission is to merge my own technical and sales backgrounds to help my fellow salespeople walk a mile in the shoes of their product and engineering counterparts.
From Small Town to Corporate America
Don’t worry – we’re not going to start at my childhood. This was just an excuse to share a cute picture from the 90s!
Growing up in middle-of-nowhere Illinois, I never could have dreamed of studying Computer Science or working in Sales. Those career paths just weren’t paths that most adults around me in my small town had taken.
This gave me quite the identity crisis in my first semester of Bioengineering at the University of Illinois. I was surrounded by 54 kids in my program that had taken every AP course known to man and learned much more than Microsoft Office in their high school technology curriculum.
I took my first true Computer Science course that year and struggled my way through it forcing every new college friend to teach me everything they knew. It wasn’t until my junior year that I found my own love for the study. A friend taught me Python, and I got to immediately put to use my new programming skills the very next semester in a Medical Device course I was taking.
It was a little late to switch majors, so I finished my degree in Bioengineering, vowed to keep learning to code, and jumped into an Inside Sales role right out of college at Wolfram Research (yes – like Wolfram Alpha). It was selling Mathematica powered by Wolfram Language that fueled my hunger to go get that Computer Science degree. Enter Oregon State Ecampus.
Marrying Sales and Software Development
It was when my SHPE (Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers) Penpals came to visit University of Illinois that I finally pulled the trigger on going back to school. Their own passion and excitement to be “a woman in engineering just like Sam” inspired me to follow my dreams as well. Working full-time, Oregon State Ecampus was the perfect fit!
I’ve spent the last 4 years continuing to hone my Sales skills and putting my Computer Science education to work to be the most technical Salesperson on every team I’ve been a part of. With an end goal of getting into Revenue Operations, I soaked up all the programming, project management, and general technical skills that I could.
Continuing to marry my more technical education with my work experience helped me create so many resources that improved not only my abilities in Sales but also those on my team. I was able to create reports, scale processes, and do so much more based on the technical skills I was learning in my Oregon State courses.
I finished out my direct selling career at LinkedIn and finally made the leap into Revenue Operations, a space where I felt like my unique skillset would allow me to better the lives of those around me, move up quickly, and leave a lasting impact on the Sales teams I was part of. I joined Bluecrew, a small startup of just under a 100 employees, and quickly carved out a special place for myself as the Senior Revenue Strategy and Analytics Manager just a year after joining.
Decoding the Developer
This brings us to current state. I’m taking my Capstone course while serving as a leader for the Revenue team at this growing startup. Consistently, I’m interacting with both our Product team and Revenue team trying to communicate and escalate improvements for our customers to a Product team with very limited resources.
In doing this, as you can imagine, there’s always a light tension of Sales wants/needs and Product team capacity. I’ve even found myself frustrated or confused due to slow progress or mismatched expectations with our cross-functional partners. It’s in these frustrated moments, that I often try to take my Revenue hat off and put back on my Product Manager hat.
Courses like Capstone with projects that force students to be not only the Developer but also the Project Manager and even sometimes the customer have completely changed my work behaviors. I’ve improved not only my effectiveness in my own role but also improved my relationship and communications with my partners on the Product and Engineering side.
Why start blogging about this now? I’d like to use my current Capstone project and future projects to help my dear friends on the Sales side get a simplified look at what goes on over on the Product and Engineering team. It’s my hope that this will not only spread the compassion I have for my Product Manager and Developer friends but will also help other Sales folks communicate their concerns, needs, and product visions more effectively on behalf of their customers as well as themselves.
Join me in “Decoding the Developer: A Salesperson’s Guide to Software Development”. It’s going to be a fun journey!
