Okta’s 2021 Tech Up-and-Comers

Natalia’s impact:

Natalia led a six-month vision and strategy project that reimagined the future of Confluence Cloud, solving key problems and updating the look and feel. She also introduced Confluence’s first-ever dedicated customer delight week, known internally as “Love Sprint.” She led the ideation and project team to deliver innovative visual-first thinking, focusing on showing rather than telling what the future of the product should look like.

Why she’s an Up-and-Comer:

Along with her unconventional approach to product strategy, Natalia brought together more than 100 engineers, designers, and product managers to focus on implementing a wide range of important customer asks, from accessibility to emoji adoption. Her team focused on crafting a compelling user-protagonist narrative and building a comprehensive visual prototype that showcased the complete product. She followed this up with a comprehensive three-year plan that dramatically shifted Confluence’s value and expanded its appeal. Natalia also brings a diverse history to the world of tech—her first job was as a street artist, selling her oil and watercolor paintings on the streets of Moscow, Russia.

Natalia’s advice for the next generation of up-and-coming tech leaders:

"Be relentless in developing your strengths, and help others discover theirs, as doubling down on strengths always compounds over time. Open doors for others, literally and figuratively. If you want to deliver magic to your customers, learn how to discover magic in the world."

Khanh’s impact:

Khanh Nguyen is a Senior Engineer who has brought his creative thinking to various Atlassian products and services during his five-year tenure, from Jira, Confluence, HipChat, and Stride, to now at Trello. He was also one of the original developers who helped create Forge, Atlassian's app development platform. 

Why he’s an Up-and-Comer:

Khanh brings creativity and out-of-the-box thinking to everything he does. He often spends free time on pet projects that quickly become external releases, driving huge fan loyalty and giving Trello a fun personality that differentiates it from competitors; his latest and greatest contribution being Link Cards. That flexibility and seamless experience across tools keep users loyal to Trello, and fun features like confetti and Giphy stickers continue to delight them. Outside of Atlassian, Khanh creates interactive lighting art installations for festivals around the world, including Vivid Sydney, i Light Singapore, and Kaleidoscope Perth.

Khanh’s advice for the next generation of up-and-coming tech leaders:

"Don't be shy about shamelessly pitching your work and ideas—your passion will spark passion in others to help you achieve the goal. Always be open to feedback and criticism while assuming positive intent, and ask for help when you need it."

Chitra’s impact:

Chitra is responsible for designing and assuring secure products for Box customers. Using her forward-thinking vision, Box has created a continuous validation framework, allowing them to detect and reduce product security bugs. She’s also created a sourcing community of white-hat security researchers and accredited security validation partners who have become an extension of Box’s trusted ecosystem. Finally, the accountability she has established with product owners to have transparency and visibility on their security posture, through metrics, has helped to reduce post-production vulnerabilities and total cost in remediation. 

Why she’s an Up-and-Comer:

After joining Box, Chitra quickly created alignment between product and engineering leaders, which has increased accountability on shared outcomes. An innovative technical leader, she has efficiently managed cross-geographical teams to successfully deliver secure development lifecycle, penetration testing, product development, and release management initiatives. She is also an active volunteer in her community and spends her free time teaching the Hindi language to Bay Area children with Indian origins.

Chitra’s advice for the next generation of up-and-coming tech leaders:

"Focus on cultivating an inspiring culture with a shared leadership philosophy. This helps team members mutually influence one another and catalyzes team synergy. Make a point to establish collaborative work environments that encourage constructive discussions, resulting in secure solutions."

Shilpa’s impact:

Shilpa joined Box with a charter to build a new data platform and the team that supports it. She was also in charge of the technical strategy, and the product roadmap. She did all this within a short, two-quarter deadline. And she solved one of Box's existential challenges: how to migrate Box’s infrastructure and services to a public cloud while also enabling product differentiation with architecture uplift—all without a "big bang" or dedicated workforce. Shilpa also helped to transform the Enterprise Architecture Council from a review body to a working body with senior technical leaders across all domains in Box.

Why she’s an Up-and-Comer:

She is extremely resourceful and pragmatic while also challenging leadership and teams to think outside the box to come up with creative, scalable solutions. Her leadership enabled the launch of security, reporting, and insights products in the Box platform. After only about a year, she was promoted to Chief Architect to scale her impact and drive Box's migration to public cloud tech strategy. 

Shilpa’s advice for the next generation of up-and-coming tech leaders:

"Listening is leadership. Lead with curiosity to learn from diverse perspectives across levels, functions, and domains to build the most creative solutions. And, be able to adapt. Bring flexibility and resilience into everything you do."

Elvis’ impact:

Elvis and his team have tripled Cornerstone's learning product from $100M Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) to $300M ARR and contributed to the growth of its content subscription business to more than $50M ARR. His team has been responsible for the release of nine major products and features, including Connect, Collaborative Learning, Learning Assignment Tool, Learner Home, and Playlists. By leveraging his connections across the business, including within engineering teams, Elvis instituted a holistic set of objectives centered around customer-centricity.

Why he’s an Up-and-Comer:

As Senior Director of Product Management at Cornerstone, Elvis leads and coaches the product teams for Cornerstone's learning management, learning experience, content, e-commerce, and mobile capabilities. His global team impacts the upskilling journey of 75 million learners across more than 180 countries. Elvis is passionate about exploring innovative technologies, including the role that enterprise VR can play in improving corporate learning functions. During his tenure, he has been recognized as a Top 100 HR Tech Influencer by HR Tech Conference and named an Employee of the Year finalist by Cornerstone.

Elvis’ advice for the next generation of up-and-coming tech leaders:

"Reflect on the specific set of skills you bring to the collaborative table and then cultivate how those skills can help deliver on, exceed, and even subvert customer expectations. Align goals across the organization and limit the number of goals team members focus on at one time."

Himanshu’s impact:

When the pandemic hit India, doctor volunteer group StepOne reached out to Freshworks to build a free telemedicine service. Using a mobile app, citizens would be able to connect with doctors for mobile visits and treatment. Himanshu worked tirelessly, often putting in 18-hour days, and was directly responsible for conceptualizing the product. He planned the project and oversaw a large cross-functional team to collaborate on building and maintaining the project. His leadership and collaboration were essential to making Project StepOne a reality.

Why he’s an Up-and-Comer:

Throughout Himanshu’s 15 years of experience in cloud software implementation, he has helped thousands of companies with their digital transformation journey and transition to the cloud. He is passionate about healthcare and education for all and regularly volunteers for these causes with local NGOs. 

Himanshu’s advice for the next generation of up-and-coming tech leaders:

"A leader should look to inspire innovation. Instead of 'telling' people what to do, give the team independence to ideate, be open to 'asking'. Guide them to make a real impact, both commercial and social. This will accelerate both innovation and performance."

Lindsey’s impact:

As companies quickly moved to an entirely remote work environment last year, Lindsey and her team wanted to create a product to help teams more quickly gain more clarity in their remote work environments. In less than four months, Lindsey’s teams developed and launched a virtual whiteboard solution, Lucidspark. Lucidspark was built on the same technology as our Lucidchart product. Lindsey’s insights and whimsical designs elevated the product to stimulate a sense of play, and to encourage creativity and connection. Alongside this innovative approach, Lindsey’s unique sense of design has engaged and delighted customers within the platform, directly impacting user retention and providing more meaningful customer experiences.

Why she’s an Up-and-Comer:

In Lindsey’s first two years at Lucid, she overhauled the design process to give designers a seat at the table in driving business decisions and interacting more frequently with customers. She was also critical in setting up the design research process at Lucid to better inform usability and user experiences within Lucidchart. The way Lindsey coaches her teams and iterates has led to micro innovations that have a massive impact on overall product design. She also draws design inspiration from a variety of sources, such as literature or video games, which all inform her smart, lively approach to the Lucid brand. 

Lindsey’s advice for the next generation of up-and-coming tech leaders:

"Follow your intuition. Worry less about doing something correctly, and focus more on what you believe is important. Learn through inspired experimentation. A human-centered approach is a mindful approach. Show up, ask questions, listen actively, and become comfortable with the complex and uncomfortable. The payoff is authentic insight and a broadened perspective."

Sara’s impact:

Sara Asher created Einstein Prediction Builder, a way for Salesforce admins without data science experience to create custom AI predictions in Salesforce. The challenge was to completely automate the model-building process and express its results to users without using data science terminology. Einstein Prediction Builder uses a simple, declarative interface, and its users do not need to know how to code or how algorithms work. 

Why she’s an Up-and-Comer:

Sara has a keen eye for user experience and a knack for simplifying complex problems, and these skills were critical to pulling off a product as audacious as the Einstein Prediction Builder. Sara’s background is unique. She holds an AB in Mathematics from Princeton University and a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Northwestern University. She has the rigorous mathematical underpinning to deeply understand how machine learning algorithms work.

Sara’s advice for the next generation of up-and-coming tech leaders:

"Don’t be afraid to try something new. Either it will work out, or you’ll learn a thing—both outcomes have value."

Rukmini's impact:

Rukmini’s work has opened up several new markets for Slack’s platform. In October 2020, Rukmini’s team launched Workflow Builder Steps from Apps. The feature builds on the power of Workflow Builder, Slack’s visual tool that lets anyone automate routine tasks in Slack—without code. On top of her leadership abilities and long-term vision, Rukmini brought a high level of technical skill that was perfectly suited for reaching her team’s goals. She led the technical strategy and execution of API improvements to improve system scalability, resiliency, reliability, and performance of events on Slack. Specifically, she scaled the Events API significantly, improving resolution times by approximately 90%. 

Why she’s an Up-and-Comer:

Rukmini Reddy is a seasoned engineering leader with over 15 years of experience. She moved to the United States from India at age 21 to study computer science at the University of Arkansas. While in Arkansas, she created a cultural exchange program to teach elementary students about other cultures, address stereotypes, and promote a more inclusive community in Fayetteville. More recently, she launched an internal mentorship program for women engineers and has developed career archetypes to make professional growth more understandable and accessible.

Rukmini’s experience as an immigrant woman and her robust technical expertise have prepared her to lead large and diverse teams and forge authentic human connections. Rukmini believes that Slack will champion and drive the systemic change that the tech industry needs and connect people, partners, and systems to enable a workspace for a digital-first world.

Rukmini's advice for the next generation of up-and-coming tech leaders

"Being a leader is hard, now more than ever. In our data-driven culture, it’s easy to focus on metrics and overlook context. But it’s so important that you invest in understanding the humans behind the metrics. Empathy is a muscle we all need to exercise more often. That starts from the top, and I’m committed to being an empathetic leader."

Varsha’s impact:

Varsha managed the team that led a platform overhaul called EonStore. As part of EonStore, they needed to replace old technology with new ElasticSearch technology, which simplified their codebase and ensured a simple, clean, and performant platform. Varsha’s team built a solution that worked for the smallest and largest customers and transitioned the systems with zero downtime. These systems process billions of messages per day and provide real-time tooling to customers at scale. She also kept the initiative on-time and on-budget by creating an organized five-phase plan at the onset of the project. 

Why she’s an Up-and-Comer:

Varsha is an engineering leader with more than 20 years of experience building world-class products. When her teams run into a challenge, she gets in the weeds to help creatively problem-solve. Varsha mentors many engineers from underrepresented genders and marginalized communities on how to achieve success. As a member of Sprout’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Leadership Team, Varsha works to improve Sprout’s engineering organization to be more equitable and inclusive, which leads to a more diverse team.

Varsha’s advice for the next generation of up-and-coming tech leaders:

"Be a strong advocate for engineers and encourage a feedback-rich environment. Focus on growing team members’ leadership and management skills."

Shayani’s impact:

Since joining SurveyMonkey in 2013, Shayani has built multiple high-growth and strategic product lines, while also overhauling the survey creation and respondent experiences. Her leadership in building the team’s product line and up-leveling analytics has played a crucial role in SurveyMonkey’s transformation from a self-serve tool to a serious player in the SaaS enterprise software space. Shayani and her team also introduced AI-based capabilities to uncover insights from unstructured responses; drove viral adoption through data stories; and launched sophisticated, easy-to-use analytics. These features have increased self-serve revenue, increased spend on enterprise accounts, increased customer satisfaction, established competitive differentiation, and helped close strategic deals.

Why she’s an Up-and-Comer:

Shayani has earned an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business, a Masters in Aeronautics & Astronautics Engineering from Purdue University, and a dual degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Drexel University. With this distinctive background, Shayani brings a uniquely valuable perspective to SurveyMonkey’s product development teams. She has a knack for tackling complex customer and business problems from a technological perspective and galvanizing cross-functional teams to find creative, scalable and delightful solutions.

Shayani’s advice for the next generation of up-and-coming tech leaders

"There will always be less information available than you think you need to make a comfortable decision. However in most cases, waiting for certainty, which may never arrive, leads to inaction, which is costlier than mistakes."

Gary’s impact:

Between December 2019 and April 2020, Zoom’s average daily meeting participants rocketed 30x. It fell to the IT team, led by Gary, to enable the company to shift to fully remote work, handle unprecedented demand, and onboard record numbers of new employees from a distance—all while up-leveling security at scale. In response, Gary’s team builta more robust employee self-service and automation model. Now, new computers for new hires are automatically set up to Zoom's security policy, employees can order IT equipment through an online portal, and team members can use an  AI chatbot to answer common questions and requests. Gary’s work enabled Zoom to respond to record levels of product demand and onboard 1000+ new employees while still making Zoom a great place to work. 

Why he’s an Up-and-Comer:

Gary is a seasoned IT leader with over 25 years of experience in the IT field. As Head of IT Infrastructure and Employee Services, he has a dual mandate: secure the company's core infrastructure and enable employees to perform their functions in the most efficient way possible. Gary has a track record of building best-in-class teams and scaling IT capabilities to drive business growth.

Gary’s advice for the next generation of up-and-coming tech leaders:

"While it is important that we work hard with focus, we also need to take care of each other. When it comes to my team, taking care of them also means empowering them to perform and to build their skills. I can't be successful without a great team supporting me."