PowerWomen Speak with Jennifer Tejada

Speaker A: Hello, I'm, um, Tanuja Randuri, founder of the Power Women Network, a network that's committed to developing the next generation of female talent and advancing women in leadership. Welcome to Power Women Speak, a, uh, podcast about what it takes to be successful as a woman in business. We will be sharing career tips and tricks from our network of inspiring business leaders and discuss what needs to be done to address the gender problem in business.

Speaker B: I'm delighted

Speaker A: to be speaking today with Jennifer Tejada, chairperson and CEO of PagerDuty, the global leader in digital operations management. Jennifer brings to the role 25 years of diverse experience, spanning mass consumer products to disruptive cloud and software solutions. She is also an active tech investor as an LP in multiple firms, including Penny Jar, which I'd love to learn more about, and Harlem Capital. And prior to the role at Pager Duty, Jennifer was CEO of Keynote Systems, where she led that company to growth before its acquisition by Dynatrace. And then before Keynote, she was EDP and Chief Strategy Officer at Mincom, leading its global strategy up to its acquisition by abb. There seems to be a little bit of a trend there, which we'll get into. Geneva's also held senior positions at P and G&IT Technology, serves as a board member of the SD Lauder Companies.

Speaker B: And a little bit about her background. She holds a bachelor's degree in Organizational Behavior and Business Management from the University of Michigan. She's a proud member of the Michigan Women's Golf team. And outside of her professional roles, Jennifer enjoys spending time with her family and is an avid skier. And I understand just coming off a very interesting and successful yacht race. So welcome, Jennifer. That's a phenomenal career, and I really appreciate you taking the time, despite having a very, very, let's say, physical weekend.

Speaker C: Yes, very physical weekend. Well, thank you so much for having me, Tanuja. It's a pleasure to be here today.

Speaker B: Oh, no, it's lovely to have you. Absolutely. Fantastic. Look, I really love getting started on these podcasts with a bit of a, uh, going back to where you were and what were some of those early influencers or influences that kind of shaped your choices in terms of your career and in terms of the leadership roles you took on.

Speaker C: Yeah, well, like so many people, I think I was influenced by my upbringing and my family and my own family values. I grew up in the Midwest, and we moved around a lot. My dad is Filipino. My mother is from a, uh, very small town in Minnesota. And my dad, after serving in the US Navy in Vietnam, decided to pursue a career in healthcare administration, in hospital administration. And in doing so, that led to us moving, you know, to small towns and smaller cities in the Midwest every couple of years. And I think, uh, you know, when I reflect on that, we were just together, my whole family, celebrating my mother's 80th birthday, uh, a week ago. And we were just talking about how much we moved around and how we did not know, uh, as kids that our family was different and that we showed up in a new town every two and a half years. We're all very, I think, adaptive as a result of being dropped into a new school, new situation, you know, new church, new sports, new teams, new uh, communities. And at the same time I think I developed a love for meeting new people, for experiencing and throwing myself in kind of 100% into whatever environment that I'm in. So it's funny because I hadn't thought much about that lately, but with my family talking about it, uh, we have some introverts in the family, some extroverts in the family. I'm quite obviously one of the extroverts. But uh, just that was my way of, of growing up and learning to find a community, to find people with common interests, but also to learn how to assimilate into a community where people didn't know who you were. They, you didn't. Uh, I remember being in sixth or seventh grade and the kids in my sort of friend group were talking about remembering kindergarten or first grade when we had Mrs. Smith and we did this and we went on that camping trip and I always, I realized that like I didn't have those common memories, that I was constantly having to introduce myself into these communities and build trust quickly and become connected, even if I did not have that long history or those, those shared roots. And that served me very well, frankly, as, as an executive where you have to drop into different situations where people don't know your reputation, they don't know who you are, they don't know what you bring to the party and you have to quickly build rapport. Uh, the second thing that really influenced me was my, my dad and my mom to, to a certain extent believed that regardless of what you had financially, you had something, your talent, your time, your skills to contribute to the community. And it was uh, your responsibility if you were gaining something from a community, to always be contributing to it. And so, you know, when we were little it was participating in the 50 mile bikeathon for the American Heart association, singing in the choir at church, you know, being an altar girl or volunteer teaching, you know, in the school or in one town we lived in, you know, being part of a literacy program near the prison. And uh, that was just really part of our, our family value system, was that, you know, as a community member, you should be spending equal parts of your time gaining value from the community as you did giving back and contributing to the community. And, and I didn't realize until I was much older that that also said a lot about our work ethic because we were all expected to have jobs. I mean, I had my first job when I was seven and, uh, to contribute to either our own pocket money or if you got your sibling a birthday present, you were expected to pay for it yourself. She wasn't coming from some family fund. Um, and so just, uh, the idea of being self sufficient, but also being a true contributor to whatever circle or community that you were in, and that really lends itself to being a good team player, I think, to really feeling like it's not just what do I get from this experience, but, uh, what am I giving? And I think when you think about servant leadership, which is a model for leadership that I feel close to, it's really about what do I put in, um, what do people expect from me? And as a result then what may I gain or the company gain or shareholders gain as a result of that ongoing contribution, that ongoing personal investment.

Speaker B: I really love a lot of things you've said there, by the way. I think the introducing yourself into new communities every time probably gave you a ton of confidence as well in terms of who you are and how you come across and how you communicate. Built a network over time that was extraordinarily diverse. Right? I think that's

Speaker C: very much so.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, no, I know. And I always tell my, A lot of people I'm mentoring, you know, I always say go do something in the community, like go sing in a choir, don't take part in drama school thing, whatever, because that's going to just open up more people and more context for you. And then I think that the point in terms of giving back is a really big one. Uh, in terms of even defining who your sponsors are. Right. In your career over time, given ship. So, so much to unpack there. Uh, I'm curious, how did you pick the world of. Let's just say it, I know that's not where you started. I mean, there was

Speaker C: no

Speaker B: consumer products. I mean, in the end, everything is it now. But walk me a little bit through that. How are you here today? And

Speaker C: again, I

Speaker B: mean,

Speaker C: my, my Career is, it's just a series of kind of happy accidents and me uh, being very open minded to different opportunities that came my way and also realizing that I want to surround myself with people that I respect and I believe I can learn from. Um, and likewise in communities where I feel like I can make a uh, really strong investment and strong contribution. And so when I started my career coming out of college, I planned to go into healthcare administration. I had seen what my dad did growing up. Um, one of his things was to bring cosmopolitan level care to much smaller rural towns. In fact when I was a kid if you didn't live in a city and you had cancer, you had a two hour drive to get treatment, there were much higher infant mortality rates because you had less neonatal and postnatal or prenatal and postnatal care. And you know, he, he was really on this lifelong mission to, to bring a higher quality of care to smaller communities. And this was before the healthcare uh, industry um, deregulated. Well it actually went through deregulation when I was graduating from college and it would have been kind of a wild time to go into that industry because you didn't really know how the, whether the systems were going to take over the big payer systems or the big university healthcare systems, et cetera. So a lot of people, including my dad and including someone who was teaching in the school of public health gave me advice like maybe I should go into the market and work a little while, get exposure to other types of um, industries and then decide if it was still my heart's desire to come back to healthcare. So kind of scrambled uh, because of planning to go straight to a master's program and managed to get a job with Procter and Gamble. And I mean I still look back at that. That happy accident is one of the greatest gifts in my career because I got pulled uh, into a leadership development um, organization that invests very heavily in building classical management skills, um, but also layering in a lot of experiential learning to develop your true leadership skills. And I often just on a day to day basis finding myself pulling from some of that foundational learning. And I always tell young people when they ask me like, where should I work right out of college, you know, what should I do? Should I go to a startup, should I go to a big company? You kind of doesn't matter, but you should try and choose a company that's going to truly invest in your development. Whether it's by pairing you with people who are ahead of you in your journey for mentorship and coaching, or by aligning yourself with a company that has leadership development clear like training, et cetera. Because I do think some of these skills, they're hard to learn in an academic setting. You really need to learn through doing and being coached and practicing and having somebody comment on the quality of your practice and what you could do differently and having people challenge you to stretch yourself into less comfortable, uh, places or zones. And so at P and G, um, while I was there there for over almost seven years, the Internet sort of happened. And I remember there were kind of two schools of thought inside my company. One was like, oh, this is just a new form of like marketing. It's a digital billboard instead of a physical billboard. And then the other end of the spectrum it was like, mind's blown. This is going to change everything. And I sort of thought to myself, if that's true, I need to be where the action is. I need to be, you know, on the pointy end of this. And, you know, compared to a lot of people, um, that I worked with at the time, Proctor and Gamble was a promote from within culture. And so a lot of people were there their entire careers, you know, 20 years, 30 years, et cetera. For someone to leave before they got to 10 was sort of odd. But I sort of felt like if I didn't jump out and try something really different, um, I might miss a, uh, really important market transition. So I, instead of, I had opportunities to go into consumer marketing jobs because I'd come from this big classic consumer marketing branding company, uh, but also to look at enterprise software. And I met, uh, somebody, one of the early leaders of a startup on a plane, uh, and the company was doing supply chain automation. And I knew a lot about supply chain automation because I'd been through a leadership rotation at P and G. And I really interested in this because the idea that you can add a huge amount of quantifiable value to like back then, a manual supply chain was very complex with a lot of handovers from suppliers, logistics players, you know, your customers, vendors in the middle. And using software, you could consolidate a lot of that and create real financial value very quickly. So I loved the measurability, I loved the quantification of the value proposition. But it was scary. Like, when I got there, you know, they were like, what do you know about software? Nothing. What do you know about supply chain? A little bit more than nothing. But I knew a lot about marketing and I knew a lot about the retail industry because they had been my customers at P and G. I knew a lot about manufacturing as a result of the rotation that I'd been in. And I just kind of dove in head first. And the company grew from, you know, sort of in the tens of millions of dollars to several billion dollars in the uh, in the four years I was there. So I got a very, um, fascinating, you know, experience with a steep learning curve in a very high growth environment. And it was part of, I think, a seminal moment, several seminal moments for that company. And so it took a big risk that was orthogonal to what people were used to. It was the deep tech company. I have a liberal arts degree and I had to prove to people that I could not only learn the technology, but also explain the technology and our value proposition to non technical people like CFOs who were signing checks or CEOs who were trying to understand why they're CTOs that were spending um, $10 million on our software product. And so it was just a really good way to learn how to translate the skills that, you know, you learn in one place, uh, in a way that adds value into another and get the benefit of learning in the process.

Speaker B: And listen, I think, my gosh, first of all, great story. Love it, love it. You took the right call. You absolutely made the right call. Um, although I'm sure you agree with the end, you would have been equally fantastic and amazing. Um, but the thing that you mentioned here around, um, you know, this translation, um, of value and applying technology to business situations, um, you know, really helping them understand how that's going to drive X outcome or Y outcome in what period of time and what they need to change about process and uh, workflows and I mean we find ourselves slap bang in the middle of this, right? Not only with AI, but even when the cloud came around, you know, many years later after the Internet, um, and it's such an important skill, right? I love that you said that you don't have to be a deep engineer or techie to be in the tech sector. I think there's just this, people think that all about tech is coding and clearly it's not right. I mean a really bad explaining tech to non tech people by the.

Speaker C: It's actually, it's almost, I find it can be a little complacent. We're so technical that we're going to explain this feature in really technical jargon and if you're not technical enough to understand it, well then you probably wouldn't want to buy our products anyway. Couldn't be further from the truth. The Vast majority of my customers are actually looking for ways to reduce their operating costs, increase the velocity of their innovation, all in service of better serving their end customers and building competitive advantage. And like, we build really technical, you know, products and platforms to do that. But at the end of the day, the value proposition is a financial one. And uh, and so being able to, you know, as I said, translate and make those connections in a lot of ways requires a lot more effort than just describing a technical feature in technical terms. Right. You really have to translate that feature into true business value. And you often have to, um, adjust to people in different levels in the organization, people coming from different disciplines. And so it's sort of like being multilingual. Uh, it requires intent, it requires effort, and it sometimes it requires patience, but it also requires adaptability, being willing to like, learn how a customer experiences the value your products build or not, and what you have to do to adjust to get them there. Because you can't force a customer to succeed. You have to light the path for them. But then they're on that journey and you can determine whether that journey is a fast, uh, and efficient one, a comfortable one, or one that they look back on and say, wow, this really added. This was a net positive in my career and certainly delivered more value than what I had to invest to get it right. But we often don't think about it that way. We want to ship prod, we want to see people adopt and use our products and then we want to ship the next thing.

Speaker B: No, I couldn't agree more. And this is why it's so nice to have teams of people or soon, agents and people working together with multiple diverse Personas, capabilities coming together to solve real world problems. Um, it's going to be exciting. We're going to get it in a little bit. But I did want to just stay on your career for a bit. If I may, when you reflect back on the journey, as I was saying in my introduction, I mean, it's really incredible. Companies, so many incredible exits now at pager duty. Was there a time along the way where you kind of were offered an opportunity? You kind of went, you know, despite your huge learn and be curious, which I can feel you were really in two minds. Like, how did you unpack that?

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, frequently there are not a lot of female CEOs running public tech companies right now. So you can imagine I get a lot of outreach and opportunity to do something different. Even today and throughout my career, I feel very lucky that people I've worked with in the past have reached out or people who know me have given my name to other folks. So there's, there's been a lot of opportunity. But I think the hardest, the hardest decisions sometimes are one really trying to weigh up what's important for your career, what's important for your financial wherewithal, what's important for your family, you know, your partner, your children, as I get older, my parents, um, and what's important for yourself personally, your, your well being, your, your mental acuity, et cetera. And most roles aren't perfect in all of those categories. And so you have to sort of work through the trade offs and, and I feel like it's easy to get really excited about something, um, that can be, that can be really overweight in an area like financially, um, incredibly provocative, um, or compelling. But the trade offs for your family, are they too big, the trade offs for yourself? And I'll give you example. The guys have rules where I, my job has actually not been in the city I lived in before the days of hybrid and remote work. So I was literally like on a plane Sunday night, back on Thursday, you know, running around to the soccer fields on the weekend and you know, rinse and repeat. And when you do something like that, you as the executive bear the wear and tear your, your body like, you know, you're, instead of slowing down on the weekend and taking time for yourself, you're making up for the lost time you missed during the week you're covering so that your partner can have some time off because they held down the fort while you were gone, et cetera. And so you're in this sort of constant race. And, and I remember learning that like, while you can push yourself through that, that doesn't mean it's a good idea. Like, I often would sound like, oh, I can make anything work for 18 months or two years. But like, that doesn't make it the best decision. And so as I've gotten maybe a little wiser, uh, you know, and a little more experienced, started to weigh sort of all those things up together and often think of a Venn diagram, you know, if you overlay your personal goals with your professional goals and your financial goals and maybe, you know, your goals for your family and the people around you. The magic is when you can find that overlap in the middle where it all sort of works and, and sings. But like, I've certainly made decisions that in hindsight I've looked back and gone what was. I think at one point in time I moved to Australia. Um, I, I got into officer yacht racing, met my husband who was living in London at the time, but, um, is Australia and I was living in LA and we, we put three M&Ms. In a cup and let an airline stewardess choose where we would live. I ended up living in Australia. That's a story for another day. Um, and that made for a lot of trade offs for even before I had children because my whole family, my brothers and sisters, my parents, all my friends were in America. I was in Sydney, which is this beautiful place, but there's a 15 hour flight and a, you know, nine hour time difference between you and the people that you love. To stay connected to the US I worked for companies that had American investors or that wanted someone that had exposure and experience in a network in the us but that also meant I was on a plane back and forth all the time. I was global services on United for decades because I was constantly commuting back and forth to Australia. And even though my husband and I could make that work and my daughter learned how to make it work, my family supported me in that. Some of my friends supported me in making that work. Like, I realized that some of the most unhealthy, physically unhealthy times, uh, in my life were when I was just on and off a plane and living in a constant state of like, I don't really get jet lag that bad, but like a little bit of a brain fugue where you're just kind of always a little sleep deprived and you're functioning well. I was a high functioning sleep depriv for person for a very long time. And now, uh, you know, I'm almost 55, I'll be 55 this year. And I'm like, I really prioritize sleep. Like, I really need seven to eight hours of sleep a night. And I will give up a night out with my friends. I will cancel a workout, uh, I will insist on a later start some mornings, you know, with my team. Because if I'm not well rested, like everything else just doesn't work as well. Like that's just the way it is.

Speaker B: Thank you for being so open about those choices and decisions because none of which is easy, by the way. And you know, there are periods in your life, as I've done, as you've done, where you will not get that Venn diagram to work. And that's okay. You're gonna, I'm off and running and I gotta do it. And then there'll be periods when they do work really well. Um,

Speaker C: and sometimes that trade off is really worth it. Right? But you can't do it all the time.

Speaker B: No, you can't. And I really appreciate that you brought up the. I can't be Miss Wonderful or Mrs. Wonderful all of the time. Like I just can't yet. Right. Like we all attempt to do everything we totally things running right. Sounds like you've made some really, really phenomenal prioritization decisions. And you know, I huge kudos to you because I think especially in the role you are in now, I'm sure, which I'm sure is not easy, public tech company CEO, uh, if you're not prioritizing your time and what you do with it and as you say, getting that time to sleep and reflect, it's good.

Speaker C: It really slips away. I mean it's the deep thinking time, the um, really focusing and making sure that you know, I always tell my um, friends and colleagues like don't wake up in the morning and look at your phone immediately. I mean, yes, if your phone's your alarm clock, great. But like wake up in the morning, give yourself and your brain time to think about what is important to me today. And just by sort of starting with that level set before you jump into your inbox, like the minute you open up your inbox, your text messages, your slack, your teams, you know, know, pick your poison, you've ceded control of how you're going to approach your day, what you're going to truly prioritize. And like I like that is I always feel like first, first thing in the morning, that is the moment where I still have like the con on how the day is going to get spent. And it, it's, it's a, uh, it slips through your fingers very quickly. So you've got to take advantage of that moment while you've got it.

Speaker B: Can I, can I ask. And I, I love this question, right, because as leaders we're all like wrestling and juggling this all of the time in all of the by the way time zones we live and you know, everything. Um, practical tips for how. So I love this morning. One great practical tip, right? Don't get out of bed. You know, they start getting you phone. But I am um, I have to admit openly that I am guilty as charged often. Uh, and the day I don't, you feel like I'm a different person. Right. So practical tips. Any others that you swear by?

Speaker C: Yeah, I am a, I'm like very old school, old fashioned fan of time blocking and really trying to reflect on how did I intend to spend my time during this week. Or this month or this quarter. And how did I actually spend my time? And my assistant Rochelle, my chief of staff, Lauren, my chief of the staff before them, Rachel and Catherine, like, one of the things that they are charged with doing is trying to make the most productive use of my time, which often means that, like, you can physically shove a lot of things into those rectangles in the calendar, um, but you as a human being can't physically undertake them all with a high level of quality or at a high level of performance. And so over the years, we've really tried to adapt to how do we time block and really protect space for deep thinking, you know, strategic work? How do we protect space for me to review content that requires thoughtful feedback and coaching? Right. Um, how do we, how do we find time for me to have even 10, 15 minutes of rest between blocks of meetings so that I can go to the restroom, get a bite to eat, you know, et cetera? It doesn't always work. You know, the. My team will tell you, oh, my God, she's eating hard boiled eggs, um, on zoom again, why is she doing that? I mean, there are, there are times when, like, you just are in survival mode. But, but my team and I feel like we're really. We try and stay well aligned around what are the most important things. How do we, how, uh, do we make good use of my time? Because there are certain things that, you know, only a CEO can do in a company. On the flip side, there's a lot of things that I can do or I could do, but other people in my team should do because they need the exposure, the experience, or they're more equipped or they should make the decision, et cetera. So there's also this sort of willpower of pushing back or delegating an opportunity to someone else to give them the chance to do something that, yes, of course I could do it, but maybe they would do it differently and maybe that different would be better. So also, you know, Rochelle is really good at giving, giving work away. Right. And Lauren has been working with, uh, a woman, Lisa, on our team, who manages all of my customer engagement and seeing through, like,

Speaker B: um,

Speaker C: does generally need to have a meeting with this person? Or could somebody else in the company, could the CTO take that meeting? Could the head of sales take that meeting? Like, how do we create a broader network? So, um, having a great team around you or having partners around you who support your effort to make the best possible use of your time, get the highest return out of your time, I think is really Important. And it's like anything else. Like yoga practice. It's like weightlifting. It's like playing the violin or the piano. Like, you have to keep practicing, stopping to reflect. Like, how did that go? Making improvements and going again. Like, we're never perfect. I'm sure my team wants to kill me, you know, two days of the week. And so they should. I'm a real pain in the butt. But like, at the same time, I feel like every year we get better and like, they're just so. They're so masterful at what they do. I pretty much do what I'm told at this point in time and go where I'm told. Other hats that I think have been important have been like. I think of myself as a bit of a plate spinner, like somebody you'd see in a circus act or, you know, in a street fair. And I really try and figure out which of my plates have a fine china that I just could. I really want to try to never drop. And which plates are disposable or the, you know, um, target, uh, you know, the lower cost plates that light block. If they, if one falls to the ground and shatters, like, it's okay, we can get another one. But like, number one is my personal health. If I am not well, if I'm not taking care of my back, if I'm not getting exercise, if I'm not getting at least half the amount of fresh air as I get circular circulated air inside in an office all week. And not only do does my body start to break down, I become really grumpy. I become like, not a good version of myself as a leader. And the rest of the team feels that. So number one is your personal health. We talked about sleep. Number two is my family. Like my daughter's now in college, but when she was home, it was being able to be part of school drop off, to commit to being a chaperone on field trips, to be a part and know what was going on at school, but also to surround myself with friends and family who would help. Like, text me the night before, you know, Sam needs this in her backpack. Don't forget her. They're going somewhere. Make sure she has a packed lunch or my kids bring in an extra lunch because I know you're out of town and I don't know if. Michael, remember to pack, relax. Right? So like really choosing your partners wisely, um, to support your family in when, when those, when you're busy, when those trade offs are high. And then the last thing really is my Team like I, we have a performance coach who works with our team throughout the year. There's never a good time to do executive development, but I try and make it a priority with each of my team members. So a lot of them are working with coaches right now. I really support people in doing board work because I think it's a wonderful version of executive development. And my team members can learn from being on other boards with other CEOs and other chair people in a way that I can't coach them day in and day out. And they can see the world through. They can see a, uh, world very similar to theirs from a very different lens at a higher altitude. And I think that can give you a lot of perspective and self awareness that can one make you better at your own job, but also help you see your job and what you do through a lens that maybe is kinder and more empathetic, you know, being good to yourself. So those are all things that, that I think are important. But if I had to prioritize like one right now under the umbrella of really being intentional about how you spend your time, it's sleep. And it's because sleep is so restorative and we learn, we have so much more data to prove. This too is kind of irrefutable, that sleep is something that can make everything else work better.

Speaker B: Yes, I love that. Gosh, there's this amazing tips. Um, thank you so much.

Speaker C: Mostly from learning the hard way.

Speaker B: That's fine. You're sharing the gift now. Just building a bit on public company, you know, CEO. Public tech CEO. Few women in this role share a little bit about how you got to your first CEO role or even this one at pager duty. Like what, what were the things that you did? What were the sponsors or networks or boards? How do we get, I, uh, don't know many of us out there doing this, right? Like what is it? What is the secret if there is one?

Speaker C: Yeah, I don't know if there's a secret, but I, I grew up playing a lot of team sports and individual sports. Golf's kind of an individual sport, but I played team sports as well and I found that I was never the best at anything. I'm, I, um, am. I can become proficient in a lot of things, but I was never somebody to be like a savant or prolific prodigious person in any one of the sports I played in. But what I was good at was bringing a team together and really trying to help the team shine, like help other people on the team succeed. And, uh, when I think about my path to becoming a leader, so much of it was this m mindset that I wanted the person I worked for or the board of my company or my company's brand to look great, to succeed in its mission. And I felt a really deep responsibility to make that happen. You know, almost to the extent that, uh, in. When I was younger, I was like, failure is not an option. And now I'm like, fail all the time. You know, your learnings from failure are so much better and stronger and deeper than your learnings from winning. But. But that. That led to people wanting to sponsor me because they could see me really trying to put them in a place of success. And, uh, a CEO who I worked for back in, like, 2008, a long time ago, Greg Clark, um, sat me down one day and he said, you know, Jen, like, you're doing most of the work of the CEO, and I'm kind of getting the credit for it. You really should d a CEO one day. And I had a young baby. She was a tam of a toddler. My husband was an investment banker. He was traveling all the time. And I was like, you know, I number two, like, I like this number two job. I'm good. I can, like, delegate all the big hairy stuff to you, and I can go home and take care of my family. He's like, you say that, but you never do that. Like, you're so responsible. You, you know, you, like, you're handing me the big hairy problems, like, with a solution plan. And so listen to him. But I wasn't ready to sort of pull the pin or put myself out there. And I really didn't think I was qualified. I was, you know, I probably doubted my own skills. So he started giving my name to recruiters. Like, he literally. People call him a CEO kicks, and he's like, you should talk to Jen. And. And that is. I mean, the best version of sponsorship is somebody who feels so passionately about you and your skill set and your partnership that they would unsolicited go and present you to others, you know, in power networks that you don't have visibility to or that you're not in. And he and I are still very good friends to this day. And, um, you know, he's somebody I learned a lot from over the years because we, at that time, we were working in a really diverse global company and traveling all over the world. So it's probably tell me a lot of life hacks. Uh, I don't just travel and stay alive no matter where you were going, but you know, then it was like, okay. My first CEO job was the most nerve wracking job I've ever had. I felt like I was constantly failing. I put a lot of pressure on myself to be perfect. I had the worst case of perfect girl syndrome in that role. The stress that I put on myself probably certainly emanated to others. And then I realized like, okay, I screw a bunch of stuff up. Like things, everybody's still fine, people are still employed, companies still fine, customers are still fine. Like there's room for error in these things. And one thing you have to be really choiceful about as a CEO is knowing the difference between when something's actually a crisis and when it's not, and not moving into crisis mode when this is actually just a small set of problems we can solve. My second CEO job just felt easier because there were miles on the tires. You know, there were things that I'd seen like actually had that confidence of like, no, we're going to be able to screw stuff up and it'll still be fine. And so taking the company this time from 50 to 500 million and taking it public and learning, you know, getting through the great resignation, the, the pandemic, the, you know, the, the cloud transition, the smartphone, the now AI, you know, uh, all of the different sort of transitions we've been through, I just see those chapters as new challenges and they're fun because the one thing that's unique about the CEO job is you don't really get promoted. Like there isn't like the next thing. So you have to find joy in learning in the different chapters or the different stops along the journey. And for me, that and the diversity of the role, the diversity of the stakeholders that you serve, like that's what makes makes the job so exciting. But there are a lot of women that I call on on a daily basis, whether it's Elena Gomez, who was our audit chair for many years and is the CFO at Toast, or Sarah Franklin, who's the CEO of Atlantis and was the former CMO at Salesforce. Uh, she's on our board. Bonita Stewart is my nominal gov chair. Teresa Carlson, who ran all of public sector for AWS for many years, is helping us with our um, move into the federal business. I am also surrounding myself with not only strong and powerful men, but women who have done things that are different, bigger at scale, more amazing than me, and still willing to be part of our board and help move pager duty forward. Right. And so there's not one way to win, I guess. But I don't think you can win alone. That's something that I have learned. Like you have to surround yourself with incredible mentors, coaches, sponsors, directors, you know, even my m. Investors. I talk to my investors and every time they may be angry with me, they may be happy with me, it doesn't matter. Every callback I'm like, thank you for the feedback. What else can we do differently? What do you see working in the marketplace that maybe we could adopt? And so it's, you can learn in it from any conversation, you can learn from any stakeholder. My employees give me a lot of feedback too, which I, which I appreciate.

Speaker B: It's being open to, um, to your point about feedback and input and asking the questions actively to get that, calibrating them, not getting all like, oh my God, what am I going to do? Like crisis, I've got feedback, I don't know how to do it. Like you said, right. Really calibrating and executing on the things that make sense. Actually making those judgment calls a lot there actually. Um, question, um, age of AI leadership in the age of AI. I'm sure you're thinking about that a lot as we all are. How is it, um, how are you thinking about it? Personally,

Speaker C: I m am so incredibly passionate and enthusiastic about AI because I'm using it in my daily life, right. Uh, every day. And I'm learning from other, uh, Rukh Meaty Reddy, who's our head of engineering. She's connected ChatGPT to her Gmail to her wardrobe and ChatGPT chooses an outfit for her every day. And uh, I used uh, a combination of Claude and ChatGPT to plan my mother's entire 80th birthday weekends, all the way to finding vendors, setting appointments, et cetera. I'm a time starved person, but by doing that, instead of using an event planner, I had to learn how to use different modalities within, you know, the solutions and at the same time, uh, like learn. Okay. There's some places where my judgment's going to be better than the AI. I recently have been trying vibe coding and uh, it's frustrating because I want to be better at it faster than I am. But it's amazing how quickly you can kind of move up to the continuum from something really basic to something that looks like a very slick website or an application, et cetera. And I'm um, hoping to get my whole team by coding in the next couple of months. Professionally and for PagerDuty. Like AI has been core to what we do as A company almost since right after I got to the business. The reason I joined PagerDuty was we were collecting uh, like incredible data and learning a lot about how people manage unpredictable unstructured high value work. And that data that we've been collecting over the last decade has served to become a foundational data model that has led us to machine learning based AI that automates and speeds a lot of decision making, filters a lot of noise to generative AI that basically becomes an assistant to you in a very stressful high business impact, um, mission critical major incident to using AgentIC AI. We're releasing agents this quarter. Four different agents that are actually part of your team doing the work with you and for you. Uh, and again just reducing the amount of not just human effort but human stress that's undertaken in these major incidents. We've all seen, we've all you know, been in the airport when an airline has a data issue or an IT issue and has to ground planes or when a cloud provider goes down and there's a domino effect of you know, your rideshare, your banking, your education, your food delivery, which is very important and my important priority in my life, you know, all those things don't work when their cloud provider doesn't work. Um, so, so it's, it's changing the way our platform executes work and workflows on behalf of our customers. But there's still a tremendous amount of room for human judgment, for human coaching, for model training, for empathy, um, for priority setting. And even one area where I see people maybe underestimating the human to agentic team effect is if you don't have a well engineered process and you set AI loose on it, they just amplify and accelerate a crappy process about your business. Right. You actually have to really think about the design of what you're deploying to those agents and then you also have to be intentional about how you operate and manage those agents in the wild. And that's where I see a huge opportunity and growth for Patriot to help our customers manage their agentic platforms as well as their generative AI, but also their data operations, their infrastructure operations, their model operations and even their human operations over time. So you know, I really couldn't be more excited about it. It's some days it's, it's moving so fast that some days it can be intimidating. Uh, but at the same time like I, I think that ah, so long as we stay close to our customers and where they are in this process and really try and understand where their Priorities are you can really deepen your human partnership by aligning your priorities with your customers priorities. And that's one of the things I'm really focused on from a strategy perspective right now. If we build this, but is it truly going to create value? And can customers articulate that value? Can they measure it in a way that the cfo, the CEO, is really going to care about it,

Speaker B: which I love. It brings us right back where we started around, um, the value creation and focus on the technology. Okay, we. 10 seconds or so to go. Best advice you ever received that you would share with our listeners. There's a lot today that you've given us. Yeah, but

Speaker C: don't try to be anybody but who you are. Like, uh, one of our values is bring yourself. I wasted a lot of emotional energy over the years trying to assimilate to, you know, teams where I was the only woman and felt like I had to be a certain version of myself at work and a different version of myself at home. Like, that that just consumes so much energy and that I need to be pointing at other things. Whether it's raising my daughter or being a decent life partner to my husband or being a great member of my community or a friend to my girlfriend or a daughter to my mother, like, wasting that time. It is hugely time consuming and energy consuming to be someone you're not. And so trying to be the best version of who I truly am, both as a leader, as a team member, but also as a mother, as a wife, as a daughter, as a friend. Like, it's much easier if you just let people see who you are. Right. And. And if they don't like it, like, it's a free country, they can find other friends, they can work somewhere else. They can, you know, but likewise, I want to. I want to be open enough in my own journey that I want people to feel comfortable saying to me, like, hey, I know you're being the version of yourself, but, like, I don't like that version. Could you not do that? Like, that's hard for me. Or could you be less critical? Could you, could you, um, help me manage the priorities? Because my team is struggling under the weight and the strain of everything we're trying to do. So, like, also being open to the fact that, like, what you think might be the most easy version of you isn't the best version necessarily in the moment for your team. So being open to how you have to adjust.

Speaker B: I love that. What a wonderful place to end and to begin. I'm sure, again, where we meet. But Jan, it's been fascinating conversation. You bring so much energy and just so much of yourself, as you say, to listen. I know our listeners are going to be highly inspired. Obviously, get a cup of tea and get listening. So thanks for joining us.

Speaker C: Thank you so much for having me. And thanks for making the time. I really appreciate it.

Speaker B: Thank you. Have a lovely day.