Adrienne Shulman

Hi, I'm Adrienne Shulman, and I'm excited to be here today talking about two of my favorite topics: DevOps and diversity and inclusion.

But before we begin, I have a confession to make. So I'm here at a DevOps conference, but for the longest time, I didn't even know what DevOps was. And it's not because I didn't want to know. I actually really wanted to know, and I tried really hard to figure it all out, and it just took me a really, really long time.

Okay, so now that I got that out, we can start with some more formal introductions. But the reason I wanted to tell you that, it's going to come out later in the talk, so just file that away for now.

Okay. So like I said, formal introductions. I'm Adrienne Shulman. I am AVP of Business Systems at Cornerstone. If you're not familiar with Cornerstone, we're an HR tech software company. We make software that helps organizations recruit, manage, and develop their people.

Cornerstone is a 21-year-old company, and we started from the beginning as single-code-base, multi-tenant SaaS. At some point in our adolescence, we got to the point where we had much bigger teams. We wanted to do a lot more, but it felt like work was harder to do. We had more people, but it seemed like we were going slower. We couldn't do as much. And this may sound familiar to a lot of you.

So we've been on a multi-year journey to implement DevOps practices in our engineering work. We are moving from on-prem into public cloud hosting. We are breaking up our monolith architecture into microservices, and just generally moving from big-bang quarterly releases into CI/CD. So you can imagine also different parts of our organization are at different phases along on that journey.

Now, as AVP of Business Systems, I lead a team responsible for operationalizing our product. That's a fancy way of saying what you might know of as tooling. So think things like process automation, business intelligence, data privacy controls, support tooling, fun stuff like that.

So why I'm here today is to share my experience leading diversity and inclusion in tech. So what happened about two years ago: our CTO looked around, noticed a lack of diversity. He knew me as someone who was really passionate at the time about expanding opportunities for women in tech. I'd been a longtime volunteer for Girls Who Code. I mentor a lot of women in tech. I'm just kind of loud and vocal about advocating for women's issues at work. And I was also the most senior woman in engineering at the time, so he tapped me on the shoulder and he said, "Hey, Adrienne, we got to do something about this."

So we did. We've been on this journey for about two years. What's most interesting, and what this talk is really about, is along the way we found a lot of similarities or synergies between our diversity and inclusion work and our DevOps practices and DevOps adoption. So I'm most excited to share those connections with you today.

I'll talk about my experience. I'm going to give you some lessons we learned, things that you can implement back at your organization to advance both D&I and DevOps, and I'll make sure at the end I tell you how you can get involved.

Now, if we were at a conference in person together, I would give you all a piece of paper to take notes on. But next best thing, if you have a notebook and you want to scribble some notes, feel free, or screenshot this. These are just some questions I want you to be able to answer.

So the first one: if you're at this conference, I'm assuming you're already passionate about DevOps. You may not be, but this is something you're going to want to be able to answer already or by the end of this conference. Why is DevOps so critical to your organization?

Now, by the end of my talk, I'm hoping you can also answer these questions about diversity and inclusion: why D&I is really critical to your organization, and then also maybe a place to take some notes where you've got specific tactics you can take home.

So I'm going to say our industry has a diversity problem. I'm not going to waste my time trying to convince you of that. I'm just putting that out there as fact.

One of the things I think is good, though, is we're seeing more and more organizations really invest, either start a diversity and inclusion or diversity, equity, and inclusion journey, or invest even heavier.

So I think it's important to note that diversity, equity, inclusion: not new concepts. Decades and decades old. I want to say D&I goes back maybe 40, more than 40, 50 years.

Organizations, though, are getting more involved these days, I think, for one of four reasons. The first one being social pressure. So these are the CEOs or CTOs that are embarrassed about their lack of diversity. Everybody else is doing it. They may be getting pressure from their board to do something, and they don't really know why, but they're going to do it anyway.

The next is justice. This is a really strong motivator. We're seeing a lot of CEOs really feel a moral obligation to address the inequality in our communities and society. They feel a responsibility to really use their power and platform to make change.

Third one, which is interesting, is that even if you're not that motivated, the talent market today is really demanding it. And what I mean by that, and this is especially true for millennials and Gen Z, are people only want to work for companies that are really committed to diversity and inclusion. There's a lot of research that shows this. We've actually seen this in our company as well. We have examples of people who have taken jobs at Cornerstone because of our commitment to D&I. They said, "Hey, I have other offers, but I'm choosing to work here."

By the way, this is the first connection, I think, between D&I and DevOps. So I told you I didn't know what DevOps was. I do now. I've been practicing it. And I'm never working somewhere that doesn't adopt DevOps practices. It's a better way of working. It's less stressful. I'm happier. And I feel also the same way about D&I.

And the fourth reason are the companies or the teams that really understand that diversity, you can use it to your advantage to spark innovation.

In my case at Cornerstone, I'm going to say the reasons were a combination of one and two. I said at the time, the CTO had long known there was a diversity problem. He wanted to do something about it. He knew it was the right thing to do. I don't think it really matters why you start your journey. It can be any reason. What matters really is what you do next with it.

So we started for those reasons of, "Eh, we should do something." And we've really went all in. And we've been on a two-year journey really embedding diversity, equity, and inclusion into all aspects of our engineering org.

I like to say we're trying not to just do D&I, we're trying to be diverse and inclusive. Similar to what you think about when you think about Agile. You don't want to do Agile, you want to be Agile or have agility, and that's the approach we're taking.

I led the work, but I didn't do it alone. I had a team of five or six people with me leading the work. But we also had 50 volunteers driving D&I through various committees. My point for this talk is really not to walk you through everything we did. I'd rather focus on the lessons we learned. But I have my contact info here, so if you do actually want to get into this, because this could be a four-hour talk in itself, please feel free to reach out to me. That's a genuine offer. My email's there. You can find me on Twitter as well.

So here's what I want to start with: explain where we found the DevOps connection. Like I said, I started this two years ago. I was leading a lot of the work, which meant I had a very visible role in this. So I was joining our CTO all-hands meetings. We have a global tech team of 1,000 people. So I was talking to a lot of people. I didn't know what DevOps was at the time. I was talking about the importance of diversity and what we were doing.

And after every time I would talk about D&I, I would have people ping me afterwards. So Slack, email, phone calls. "Hey, Adrienne, I really like what you're doing. How can I help?" These are people I wouldn't normally work with. I had people pinging me from New Zealand, Paris, California. I'm based in New York. They're not people I knew in my day-to-day. They were just people who said, "I love what you're doing with mentoring. How can I help?" "I love the ask-me-anything events you're doing. Let's do more of those."

So only later did it occur to me that every single one of these people who would come out and offer their help were what you'd call our rebel alliance, or the DevOps people, who were really pushing DevOps practices.

So what I realized is this culture that I'm pushing to improve diversity, which is really about inclusion and psychological safety, it's the same culture that the DevOps guys, and they were all guys, I should say, but the DevOps guys were really pushing to modernize our engineering practices.

So I'd say I had this aha moment, and we've really been conspiring together to create this optimum culture. So what follows, I'm going to give you the five lessons we learned along the way that you can take home to help advance diversity and inclusion and DevOps at your organization.

All right. Lesson one, and this is important no matter where you are in your journey. So if you're just getting started with D&I or DevOps, or you're well advanced, many, many years in, you need this. Okay, so nothing else matters at any point in time if you don't have your leadership bought in.

And let's see, I'll give you two pieces of advice if you're starting your journey. So one of the things we did, remember I told you the CTO tapped me and said, "Let's go do D&I." I didn't want to just jump in and get busy. I said, "Well, let's make sure we're really doing this for the right reasons." So I had a pre-launch checklist.

For me, for D&I, it was I needed to make sure we had executive commitment. And not just at the CTO level, but the entire tech leadership really had to be bought in. I needed to make sure we were doing it for the right reasons, not just because we were embarrassed about a lack of diversity. And for this, I also needed to make sure there was diversity in the diversity team.

So I told you I was the most senior woman in tech at the time, so I was very visible, but I had to make sure that it wasn't my problem to solve. Increasing women, it's not a woman's problem to solve. General diversity, it's not really the minorities' or underrepresented groups' problem to solve.

It took me six months to do this. I took six months to make sure we were really, really doing it before we really rolled up our sleeves and got our hands dirty.

And the second thing is going to say that words invite action, and I'm going to talk to the CTOs out there. When we first announced this a couple of years ago, the CTO was going to announce that this was going to be one of his priorities, and he offered me. He said, "Adrienne, why don't you tell everyone about it?" Which I appreciate, because give people visibility. I was going to do a lot of the work. And I said, "No, you know what? I want them to hear it from you." And this was really important because when the CTO spoke about it as one of his personal priorities, people really listen. People listen to your words.

And it turns out you have a lot of passionate people in your organization who want to get involved with diversity and inclusion, and they're really just waiting on a signal from you. So as soon as the CTO said, "Hey, we're going to start doing it," we had volunteers coming out we didn't even know existed, and they were really getting involved. They're calling out microaggressions, they're calling out bias, sharing inclusive best practices, organizing events, panel discussions. There's just been a lot of employee engagement because the words kind of came from the top.

So make sure you have leadership commitment through the whole way.

Lesson two, and this will also sound familiar if you've read a lot of DevOps literature or just any sort of transformations. You want people to change behavior. You need to sell them on why it's important, right? You don't do DevOps for DevOps' sake, and you don't do diversity for diversity's sake.

I'm sure we've all read about the D&I programs that fail because the majority aren't bought into the value. If you're just getting into D&I, I'm going to tell you it's very difficult. And same with DevOps. I told you, my company's been on a multi-year journey, and we've had lots of success, and at some point, it still feels like we're just getting started.

So a lot of research will tell you that diverse teams report work being harder. It's easy to work with people just like us, and less diverse teams say work is easier. But you get better work, you get better outcomes when you have diverse teams. So you really want to convince people why diversity and inclusion is so important. Otherwise, it can backfire.

So I think the key for you, your challenge: there are a million reasons why D&I is important. You have to find the ones that resonate most for your organization. At Cornerstone, I used three things.

The first being that diversity increases team intelligence. What do I mean by that? Look at me. I'm an engineering leader. I'm great at writing software. I've got 20-year history of building technology. I'm good at what I do. Imagine I want to create a new product, and I hire a team of developers who are just like me. What am I going to get? I'll probably create really good software for a middle-aged, working mother of three kids who lives in the Northeast of the United States of America, and maybe who likes to listen to EDM and go on long walks in the woods by herself.

You see where I'm going with this. If you want to build technology, digital products, software solutions for the world, you need to have the diversity of the world baked into your teams. Okay? So that's the idea. The more diverse your team, the more your team has intelligence.

However, diversity alone doesn't get you the results. You need inclusion. Inclusion means you've got the diversity in your team, but people need to participate. So I have good ideas in my head. I don't always share them if I don't feel included.

Remember I told you I didn't know what DevOps was? This is why it's important. I wanted to know what DevOps was. This was several years ago. I had heard it from everywhere. So how did I find out? I Googled it. I bought books. I tried to read about it. Do you know what I didn't do? I didn't ask all the men around me what it was. I had people at my work practicing DevOps, and I didn't ask them.

Looking back now, it seems silly, but at the time, it was just that's what I did. So what that means is I didn't have enough psychological safety, or I wasn't included enough to feel really comfortable. And you have people at work, and they're not just the low performers. I'm a high performer. I'm good at what I do. I'm a former employee of the year, and I still didn't feel comfortable saying, "Hey, what's DevOps? I want to learn."

Now that's all changed. So we've been on this two-year journey. We're practicing more inclusion. We're increasing participation. And then the third reason is about justice. So I said before, this is an intrinsic motivator for people. People want to do the right thing. People want to make the world better, and this is absolutely something you should talk about as well.

So now you have your leadership bought in. You've told everyone why it's so important. People are ready. What do you do? Every research, every professional out there will tell you, you must invest in training and outside experts. I agree. This is critical.

So keep in mind also, I'm not a D&I professional. I'm an engineering leader. So I went to the experts. I went and learned D&I, and this was one of the number one things they recommend. So you absolutely have to bring in outside experts. It's hard to look in a mirror. Do your unconscious bias training. Do your inclusive leadership training.

But you're not done. Okay? It's actually really easy to do training. Think about it from that compliance mindset. Okay. You have to pay for it. It's expensive. I say it's expensive, but easy. What you really need to do is elevate the consciousness of your entire organization, and the way you do that is by creating a learning culture.

What we did at Cornerstone, we just have lots of what we call kind of social learning, informal learning, and we're doing this with our DevOps practices as well. So think about all of the lunch and learns and the ask-me-anythings, Slack channels dedicated to these topics. So it's really fostering a place where learning is more important than being perfect.

I'm going to give you two hacks for this that I've done with my team about six months ago that worked really well to increase psychological safety and create a learning culture in my team. These aren't new, or these aren't my unique original ideas, but they work, and it's surprising how easy they are to do.

So number one, when you go back to your organization, if you are a leader, if you have a team, the first thing you're going to do is change your team's goal to not be the best. You're going to say, "I don't want you to be the best. I want you to be the best at getting better." Simple little thing, and it just kind of unlocks that safety, and people can really get motivated around that.

And the second thing is I want you to throw out the word failure. So in tech, we have a habit of talking about failing a lot, and we celebrate it. Let's fail fast. Yay. We failed. Let's fail. But what I found is, especially in these large and complex organizations, when different people are at different stages of journeys, the word failure just makes people want to avoid it.

So I've changed the word fail in all of my vocabulary to learn. So I told people your goal is not to fail fast, it's to learn fast. We're not creating failure loops or feedback loops. It's just learning loops. So those two small hacks, almost immediately I saw an increase in psychological safety and more productivity in my teams, and then people are more free to share their ideas, and you can tap into the diversity within your teams.

Fourth lesson, and I think this is very interesting or one of my favorite ones, is this idea that doing more is easier. So you know how in engineering we have that idea that we want to start small, do an MVP, run a safe experiment? Throw that thinking away when it comes to diversity and inclusion.

In the beginning, my CTO said, "Hey, Adrienne, we need more women in tech." And I said, "We do. Let's go do that." So I would talk to women, and women really paid attention, and they said, "Yeah, let's do it." But then I would talk to other minority groups, other underrepresented groups, and you know how they felt? They'd say, "Hmm, why are women more important than me? I feel left out. Why are we starting with women?"

And then I'd talk to the majority, or I'd talk to men, and they were just, "Meh, what do I care?" So once I started talking about why diversity and inclusion is so important, the feelings of what it feels like to be excluded at work, everybody got on board because everyone has had that moment. It really created empathy.

So I went back to the CTO and I said, "Look, we can't really focus on women alone. And we can't just focus on diversity. You have to focus on diversity and changing the culture to be more inclusive." So we did that. Highly recommend it. If you start too small, if you think you're just going to increase one element of diversity, it's going to backfire. Deloitte recommends what they call a culture reset, not a tick-the-box program.

And that's very similar to what you might think about from a DevOps perspective. Right? You can't hire a DevOps engineer and say you're done. You really have to rewrite the whole system.

And the second lesson is shift left. So I'm sure you're familiar with shift left from a DevOps perspective, all about baking quality into your product, baking security in, and not doing handoffs to other teams. Same concept with diversity and inclusion. You can't centralize or outsource this work. So you should hire DEI practitioners or a chief diversity officer if you don't, but it doesn't mean you're off the hook. You have to do the work, and you have to bring these DEI concepts into how you do your work, and not wait to do it later.

Fifth and last lesson is all about data. So I can't come to a tech conference and not talk about data, right? Data's important. You must absolutely measure. You want to try to measure both diversity based on demographic data, pretty easy to do, and inclusion. That's much harder to do because how do you know how someone feels?

If my CTO asked, "Is Adrienne feeling included two years ago when I was scared to ask about DevOps?" He would say yes, because to his point of view, it looked like I was fully participating. And if he asked me, "Do you feel included?" I might say yes. But I wasn't fully there. So inclusion, much harder, but also really important to do.

So we do both. The mantra I want you to take away, especially if you're not already doing this, is transparency builds trust. I want to encourage you, if you have not yet already, to do your diversity reports and share it with your teams. You can share it externally as well if you want. I know a lot of organizations are doing that, but even if you're not ready for that, share it internally.

Sorry about that. But you may feel you want to improve the numbers first. You might feel a little embarrassed. Let's make them better. No. Put them out there. What we do is we use flow dynamics to understand how diversity moves into and out of the system.

This is a sample diversity report that we created that really just shows your total number of employees. What's the diversity? This could be on any number, any demographic measure you want to look at. This could be gender diversity. What is the total makeup of your gender in your department? But you also want to look at the diversity coming in. Who are you bringing in? You want to look at the diversity going out, and also very important, you need to look at the diversity as you move up in the organization in leadership, both in people management roles and your individual contributor roles.

And what I've done is I share this report every quarter with the tech leadership team. They're my peers, and in order to create psychological safety, I say to them, "This data is just observations. They're not judgments." So we're going to look at these numbers every quarter to look at how they move. We're going to use these to create conversations, but they're not really judgments now.

And for every step you take to increase diversity, which we should be doing, I tell them, "You have to take two to increase inclusion in your teams." Because if you increase diversity by bringing more diversity into your organization, if you don't address the culture, you'll have people leaving.

So to summarize: leadership commitment matters the whole way through on your journey. You have to sell the why. You have to get people really bought into why this is going to be better for everybody. Of course, create the learning culture, not just with training and compliance, but actually getting people to learn. The rare case where think big, do more is easier. Don't try to be too narrow. Always use data. My bonus lesson is buckle up and be patient.

These are all lessons. This says nothing about diversity and inclusion on this slide. These are all the lessons that our DevOps adoption, as we're trying to spread these practices, we're doing the same thing.

Now, how do we know it's working? After two years, our diversity numbers haven't changed that dramatically. We have a large organization, 1,000 people in our engineering org. There's pockets where we're doing a lot better diversity-wise. There's pockets where we're not. But what I like to say is there's kind of three elements we're tracking that we know we're on the right course and we're going to stay committed.

So the first thing: leaders are not only remaining committed, they're more committed now. When we started two years ago, it was really in the engineering department. My CTO was fully bought in. We now have all of his peers in our C-suite and executive team really bought in. Our entire company is very committed to doing the work.

Our employee engagement has increased. Remember I told you all it takes is for you to say this is important and people want to do the work? We have hundreds of people really getting involved, spreading diversity and inclusion, and really advocating for more DEI at work.

And from a culture perspective, again, hard to measure. I just have lots of anecdotes where people are emailing me, and these are minorities, women, people from underrepresented groups, people who feel like they're only saying thank you to me because culture has kind of subtly changed over the years. Our meetings are more inclusive. People are more open to ideas. It's just much more collaborative as well, which are, again, all the same culture you want for your DevOps.

So here's the help I'm looking for from you. Do you remember in the beginning I said it took me a long time to understand what DevOps was? So I finally came around, I get it, and I'm in love. It's absolutely re-energized my career in tech.

So I started in tech 20 years ago. I remember the high I got writing my first line of code, deploying it, seeing it on a website for the first time. Well, I thought I was missing that joy just because I got into engineering leadership, but I've rediscovered that joy. DevOps practices, Agile, CI/CD, and I'm going to say diversity and inclusion. I am in love with our organization, or our industry, technology again.

So if you believe that our industry is better with more DevOps, and if you believe our industry is better with more diversity and inclusion, and I think it's more equitable, more interesting, more productive, and just happier, then we need your help spreading the gospel. Evangelize this work. So you're here at this conference. It means you're a leader. Whether in title or not, you have influence. You're a learner, so spend your political capital, go back to your organization, and make it more diverse, make it more inclusive.

If you're in D&I area, go talk to your DevOps people. If you're in DevOps, go talk to your D&I people and conspire together and see how much you can do. So again, my contact info is here again. I do invite anyone to reach out to me. If you found other similarities between D&I and DevOps, I'd love to hear it. Otherwise, please say hi. I'd love to meet you.

Thank you for giving me the time. It's been an honor, and have a great day. Enjoy the rest of the conference. Thank you.