From Code to Coaching: Grace Francisco’s Journey in Tech Leadership – Techstrong Unplugged EP43

Welcome back to Textron Unplugged. My name is Cassandra Chin, and today we're here with Grace Francisco. Hello.

Can you introduce yourself? Sure. I'm Grace Francisco.

I'm originally from San Francisco. I did work for a company called Cisco for a little while as well. Um, I am now working as an advisor to a number of different startups.

Uh, I have my own advisor from called MTY, and I am also, uh, spending time thinking about my own startup, but mostly working on, um, helping to coach and mentor other startups. Right now, I I have had a long career in tech. Um, so I've worked at companies like Microsoft, Atlassian MongoDB, Cisco Roblox.

Um, so I've had a, a very long 20 plus year career, mostly working with developers. I did start my career off as a software developer myself though. Um, and, you know, I started my career not knowing what I wanted to do.

I went to school, I knew I was good at math, and I thought originally, well, I'll go be an accountant. And I found out what accountants actually did. I decided that was a really, really bad idea.

Um, but because I had to work my way through college, um, I had the sort of lucky accident working for a software startup that was in San Francisco, and that's where I got to observe other software developers. And that's when I had that aha moment of I wanna be a software developer, because that's where I started my career originally. But I've now had a long career as a leader and was called developer relations, or developer ecosystems and leading teams to help drive adoption of developer tools or platforms.

You said you worked for a lot of companies before. Is that all as a software developer or No. Most, most of the companies I've worked with in the last 12 plus years have been companies where I led initiatives to drive adoption.

So I was a, uh, developer with college developer relations leader and executive and running developer programs to drive adoption and education of technologies and tools. Can you tell me more about what you mean, like adoption of education, adoption of tools, is really getting developers excited and interested about whatever platform or tool that you're representing at that time? So, you know, at MongoDB it was their, their data platform.

At Atlassian, it was Jaron Confluence platform. At Roblox, it was the gaming platform that developers would build on. So depending on the context.

And so understanding the different types of developers and their needs is really important and key to understanding how to get them excited and engaged and how to educate them properly. Like how did you go from being a software developer to like, uh, guiding other developers? That was accidental.

And I, part of it was that I had spent a bunch of my software development career working long hours coding. Um, I, one of the startups that I worked at, at, I was starting my day at 6:00 AM and ending at 11 o'clock at night. Many days, not every day, but a lot of days I was doing very long days so much that I was having three, um, triple shot espressos a day.

And then that made me very jittery. So much so that if I went around the corner, somebody was coming around that corner at the same time I would be on the ceiling because I was just so, um, jittery from all the caffeine in that timeframe. I observed other people in the company who were technical but weren't coding.

They weren't at the office all the time. They were going out and about and meeting customers, going to conferences and doing demos, demonstrations of the product. And I thought, well, I could do that.

And they got to go travel the world and go meet customers and not just stay at their terminal coding away. And that's where I started developed an interest in exploring other avenues of leveraging my technical skills. Um, and so that's, that, that was the sort of path that I took.

It's first started in what's called technical marketing and helping the marketing team and another startup to craft their content and their samples and demos to be used as part of their marketing campaigns. And then shortly thereafter, I ended up becoming a sales engineer for a little bit and understanding how to help the sales, uh, team demonstrate with the technical tools that we were representing. So I was the technical arm of a sales pitch and I was able to translate that really easily when I went to Microsoft as a a developer evangelist.

There weren't that many developer back then back in the early two thousands. And so I got to learn the craft of evangelism at one of the places where developer advocacy or evangelism was born out of. Uh, so that's where I started my career in developer relations and ecosystems.

It's interesting how like your coding skills can translate to that many jobs. Absolutely. No, if you don't talk about that at school, and even today, not, not much.

I mean, they teach you the academic portions of coding and algorithms. Um, then they're teaching like really deep, uh, technical topics, but they don't really help you carve that path to the different kinds of roles you can have. There's always this, essentially you're gonna go and just be an engineer, but you can go be a sales engineer, you can go be a technical marketing person, you could be a technical writer.

There are lots and lots of other opportunities now where if you don't necessarily wanna be coding all the time, you could be doing some coding and teaching. You be doing some coding and demoing, you could be doing some coding. And just as so many so much variety that we don't talk about in school.

I'm currently a computer science student and I think we're still missing that. Yeah, yeah. That, that, that hopefully will change.

Especially we've got generative AI now, um, generative AI to some degree. I know there's a lot, a little bit of mass panic. And I actually had someone recently asked me for their, for their, uh, college-bound kid, should he still be studying computer science?

Are there gonna be programmers in the future? And I said, absolutely. They're not going away just because its generative ai.

That's like saying the, like a decade, more than decade ago, there was this mass panic in the IT sector where the cloud came about and they thought, oh my God, my job is going away 'cause everything's going in cloud. Well, that wasn't sure either. Their, their work was transformed and some of the things they just shifted a bit, but they were, they're still there, they're still an IT organization.

Their responsibilities may have changed a little bit and they had to probably develop other skill sets, but they're still an IT department. And so it's similarly, uh, while deriv AI is helping, uh, to actually accelerate this, this notion of citizen developer, uh, for anyone can actually build things without being a, a heavy coder that just offloads sort of the mundane things that developers don't wanna do anyway, so they can do the creative, innovative pieces of programming. Yeah, that definitely makes sense.

Yeah, I think a lot of programming once, you know, the basics is all the creative part. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, you know, I would say don't be afraid of going into that track just because some people are in this panic that, you know, we're, we're not gonna need programmers.

We're always gonna need developers who are thinking creatively and thinking about, you know, how to innovate and not just doing the mundane tasks that maybe some developers are doing today and might get replaced by generative ai. But that only means that frees you up to do much more creative, more challenging projects that will really help build your skill sets. So it's not like, it's not like their jobs are truly going away.

We still need the manpower and power. Yeah, yeah. Um, aside from just technology, what do you enjoy doing in your spare time?

Uh, in my spare time, I'm often in the kitchen. And in the kitchen I am often doing sort of experimental cooking. Uh, sometimes when I don't have time, I'll just walk into my kitchen and I'll take whatever is there to build a quick meal without using a recipe.

So it's like my sort of cooking challenge of the day, and I'll just piece things together and think about like what flavors will go together and how to assemble, you know, the meat portion with the vegetables and the, the carbs that are gonna be on the plate. Um, and I find that fun and I usually will do that while got jazz in the background playing, like, what's a fun hobby to do? So yeah, I mean, I, I find it's, um, a nice way at the end of the day to sort of transition from my work mode because I work at home, so transitioning from work mode to like my, my home mode and spending time with my family.

Um, and it gives me that sort of showtime that if I were going to an office, it would've been my drive home. I don't have a drive home, so my transition time is being in the kitchen, creating something new, and listening to my jazz music before I spend time with my family dinner. I also enjoy cooking, but usually I try to follow a recipe, but I might end up not following it along the way.

Yeah. Well, in the beginning when I left home, I didn't know how to cook anything. I mean, I was living on Top Ramen for a while, which is very, very bad fear, heart health, by the way.

Um, so I eventually learned how to cook some really simple meals. Um, mostly I was forced to when I had a family, but when you're single and it's just you, it's kind of hard to want to cook for just yourself. Uh, but I'm, I'm glad I was able to figure out how to make certain recipes and, and even sort of backwards engineer certain, um, dishes that my mother would make or that I would have at a restaurant.

So it became like sort of fun challenges for me, sort of like, you know, backwards engineer, uh, certain recipes. Yeah, I think that's a lot of fun. And like, going back to technology, like how do you feel as a woman in this career?

Well, it is challenging. I am not gonna, you know, fluff that in any way because it, it has been challenging, but I would not deter any woman from going down this road simply because it's probably one of the most empowering careers that you can have. Technology really is such an enabler in many ways.

For me, when I was coding, it gave me so much, uh, happiness to be able to build something and run it and see it running that I was always really, really happy about. Um, it, it's just that sort of creative process of building gives you a sense of empowerment. I think that that's really great.

I think the one thing that I would say to other women who are potentially pursuing this career is to not be afraid. And it can be daunting to walk into a group where you're the only woman on the team, but to, you know, really go in with, with some sense of confidence that you're just as good as anybody else on that team. And in your early part of your career, everyone early in their career is learning still.

And even as you're much more mature and seasoned, nobody knows everything. And so being willing and vulnerable to asking the questions is important to accelerating your learning. The biggest mistake that I made when I was just starting out was to feel like I had to know everything.

So I had to like learn it on my own. And while I was smart, I learned a lot on my own. I would've learned so much faster if I was willing to be vulnerable and ask the questions.

And yes, there are gonna be some jerks on the team that may treat you like you asked a dumb question. But the reality is I've met so many nice, sincerely helpful engineers that would've also politely answered and helped coach me on whatever the solution was. And that's, that's a true issue in any kind of work environment where you're gonna have some jerks, you are gonna have some nice people.

Um, but the, the benefit of asking that question is that ability to really accelerate your learning cycle and just continually moving forward and knowing that no one knows everything. And so, you know, thinking about it through that lens is important because it's not like, especially when you're coming out of college that anyone is, no one should be expecting you to know everything. You're in a learning process and that is the expectation.

And so people who have been there for a while should have truly an obligation to help coach and mentor. I think I can relate to that 'cause it feels like we go to college to learn and we, we come out of it. We have a big degree, so maybe we think we should be experts.

No, actually in the job, we're still learning all the time. Yeah. I mean, the hands-on experience though is so different from the academic experience.

You learn so much in a real world environment. Just getting really hands-on being in the pain points of the development life cycle and just really understanding what that day-to-day truly is in the real world is so different than what you learn in an academic environment. And so it, it's really applying some of that academic learning into a real world context and then realizing okay, it's not as black and white as what you learned in school can definitely see the difference there.

Yeah. Yeah. I think we've had a really good talk today, so thank you, grace.

Oh, well it's my honor a pleasure to be here. Thank you. Nice, nice to be here.