Yes We Can

Great. Hi everyone. Welcome to this week's installment of Yes We Can. I am so honored to have Airika Adams and Aneesah here today. Welcome ladies. Hi. I'm so glad to have you here and so Airika's joining us from Florida right now and Aneesah's from LA so it's great. Hope everyone's doing well everywhere and so we're going to dive right in. And so the two of you met while you worked at Wix. You both started on the customer support team and you've since graduating to new roles there but let's go back to your original roles on the support team at Wix. We see a lot of that at Cloudflare too where some people's first roles in technology start on our customer support team too. What was it like to work on the customer support team? Aneesah do you want to start? Yeah. Great. Thank you. It was exciting. Tough. I'm not going to say it. Customer support is tough but it's very exciting and there was a lot of opportunities and the company was just willing to let us grow and that is something that's really positive about Wix. So we definitely learned a lot. You acquired a lot of skills and you really honed in on listening to the users. Really listening to their complaints, good and bad, and you can also provide thoughtful solutions to the product team. I love that. How about you Erica? Do you have anything to add to the exciting and the tough listening to the customer comments that Aneesah made? Yeah, I know. But I mean overall the solution department at Wix is super great. We were really able to get the full scope of user issues which is amazing and it's also an amazing foundation to learn how to solve those user issues and also learning how to have empathy for the user as well. So Wix, like she said, is great and we love that they give us the ability to be curious about products and they have an amazing open door policy which allows employees to get involved with other departments to learn and we were able to just help out in that situation. I love that. So when customers were writing in or users were writing in and you were talking about how important it is to listen and to dig deep, what are some things that they would write in about? Maybe just give us one or two examples to help contextualize for the audience because I think a lot of people are like what kind of questions do people write in about? Maybe you can give us one or two examples. Yeah, I mean people write in about if you just think about building a website, any question that goes along those lines or how do I get my site on Google or how do I get my editor to run a certain way or how do I get something to look this way? Sometimes they kind of have a visualization of how they want their website to be and we kind of help them along the way. Oh, I love that. How about you, Anissa? Any others to add? That's a great, actually that's a good point. You should explain Wix is a website building tool. So if you're thinking about creating a website, Wix is a great platform to help do that. So that's an important point because not everyone really knows. Anissa, any other ones to add? Yeah, some of them would also be technical. It would be like hey, why is this not loading and they would provide screenshots or along the line of I think this is broken, can you help me fix this? That's what we learn through getting a lot of the customers support tickets. Definitely, good. We share, I hear that from our support team all the time. Actually, fun fact, Matthew and I were the first two support members of Cloudflare. We did all this. Oh, awesome. All of them for the longest time. Matthew was like number one on the leaderboard for a long time. He's no longer number one. We have since have a wonderful support organization who's overtaken his ticket responses but for a long time when you start because even as founders you want to be listening to the customer and there's no better way than the person who's written in and say hey, I have this question or I have this problem. You learn a lot. Yeah, agreed. Anisha, your point about it being both exciting and hard definitely resonates because I think it's both exciting and hard. You take your customers problems on the way onto your shoulders which can be really hard. Okay, so you listen to the customers, you heard all these sorts of things and you've since both moved on. Erica, your next role at Wix and we'll come to you, Anitha, next was to join the product management team. Maybe tell the audience what does a product manager do? Yeah, I mean so basically if you think about a product manager is basically responsible for the development of like products so we make sure that we're guiding the user. I mean not the user but we make sure like we're guiding the success of the product itself and we lead like these cross-functional teams and we basically make sure that they're building out these features correctly. Awesome, that's great. Give us maybe an example of a feature or product that you've helped design and ship for all of you. Yeah, no definitely one of my favorites would be the callback feature. So sometimes when users call into support they might have to be like transferred to an agent in a different department and users were kind of like experiencing going on like these long hold times depending on the volume for that day. So instead of the user kind of like waiting on hold with their phone like attached to their ears, what we did was we now give the user like this ability to press one and request a callback. They can kind of like hang up the phone and when it's their turn to receive that callback they would get that callback from us and we can just continue on the conversation. So it really helped users kind of like go about their day and not have to be stuck on the phone. I mean I feel all of us here can agree we don't like to be stuck on the phone waiting to be you know transferred and that was like a great feature that I was able to help ship out. Oh awesome, okay I didn't know you built this so I'm gonna ask you since I have you here and as a captive audience. So I love that feature. I've definitely been on the hold it's like press one for callback and I'm like yes call me back but there's a fear of me that always says what if they never call back and I have to go back line and so as the product manager who's built and designed and shipped this feature does that ever happen? No we always call back we all the system will always call the user back yeah definitely and the agent also has the ability to go ahead and leave a voicemail for the user as well. Good okay good well I'm glad that you because I think that little yeah the doubt of like I want you to call me back but you better call. Yeah no the system works it will call back definitely and the agent definitely is there to you know leave that voicemail sometimes also send emails to the users as well. Cool great I love hearing that good okay so now Anissa you took a different path so you again both start in support but you went down a project management and incident response now you're on the incident response team at Wix. What does that mean? What is incident response? Well to break it down we are tracking bugs or any drops that may impact users maybe be it like they're selling a product or they can't get a feature to turn on and we're responsible for kind of identifying any crucial bugs that have a wider effect and we want to minimize like the time to resolution so definitely want to make sure they can get back in logging to the editor or if they're selling products they keep getting gaining revenue. Yeah sorry I didn't mean to cut you off I was gonna say how did you decide to go down that path because I don't think that you knew about incidents response as a potential career from from college or high school I think it's probably something you more fell into well how did you decide that this was a path that that you were excited to explore? Definitely I am a very curious person I'm always curious about like why this broke why is this happening to the user what is how can we fix this so that constant drive for the why something is broken really like gave me this path this opportunity and also I was in the technical support side so I'm very detail-oriented always noticing trends and I'm like hey we're getting multiple complaints about this I think something's broken so I would have the opportunity to reach out to devs and say like hey I think this product on this system is broken and these are how many users I have that are affected. Just so people know devs is developers yes and you got the tech lingo down just want to bring everyone along but I love it okay so we're going to move to the podcast that you've created together and what it's like to create a podcast but before we do I just want to finish talk a little bit more about your time at Wix and you know you both clearly love your jobs you love the company you work at you're showing you're showing up every day putting your best foot forward how do you think about the impact you're making the world through the work you do at Wix does that something that you think about I'm just curious yeah how much time do you spend thinking about that Erica do you want to go first yeah no definitely it's a lot of impact I mean when I think about impact I automatically think about the ability to kind of like help small businesses and that's kind of like what Wix does as well it's truly amazing to be able to kind of like help people with their ideas and that's something that I personally love to do help people bring their ideas to life like no matter how small or how big their ideas may be we kind of like help people give that we give people that ability you know and we allow them to create their websites or for their businesses or for any idea that they might have very seamlessly so I think helping small businesses is it's something that can resonate with everybody really yeah yeah we gotta hug our small businesses yeah I love that I love supporting them and he said how about you how do you think about the impact that you're doing at Wix I definitely think I'm in line with with Erica saying it's just seeing the impact and the growth within small businesses and I also just like seeing the growth as the company grows more small businesses are growing along with us and some of them have really great success stories and I think that's really where I see the impact that I'm making you know and it can be small as someone writing in like this feature just doesn't work and they keep writing and writing so I keep you know I keep telling the product manager like hey we need to come up with a good solution and if I can just get one feature like resolved then I know I made an impact on someone that's great and it turns out you know who to call at Wix because you and Erica Erica, where's the priority feature? I got everyone's phone numbers right on speed dial yeah okay that's what you want it's like you kind of want to collect friends within companies I feel like having a product manager that you know is a good friend to have within a tech tech company because they really can prioritize a feature to help get it shipped and solved you know yeah and vice versa for her being working with like QA and stuff like I can kind of like go to her for certain things too yeah definitely definitely and so you know this last point about you're making about helping give people some to be creators could be small business owners a voice online that is really empowering and if somebody wanted to get started to create hey actually this I want that I have this hobby idea I want to start it like how hard is it to get started on Wix or how easy is it to kind of set up a landing page or a website is it something that takes months and months or or how long does that take like Erica? Definitely not it's something that can be done in like a day literally you can get started and I always tell people like your website is always going to change it's going to always be an ongoing project just like getting your site on Google would be like an ongoing project changing out like certain things with an SEO it's going to be super seamless and you're going to be able to drag and drop like whatever you might not you know might need you don't have to know how to code to use Wix if you do know how to code that's even better there's places on Wix for you to kind of like shine your light there but the average person can get a website up in a day literally. Awesome I love that well for all the people listening think about the hobby or the idea that you've been wanting to share with the world now you know I think Erica you just made me feel like I'm going to put something up on Wix today because today is not very much time that's easy I'm going to drag and drop okay awesome okay so you both met at work that's how you become friends and obviously you work you work on the sports team together you've both taken different career paths within Wix love what you're doing but you also decided to start a podcast together so you've created something together and it's called Fresh Melanin can you tell the audience the premise of Fresh Melanin? Anisha can you tell us maybe what that is? Yeah so Fresh Melanin is an on-air safe space for women of color it's basically like me and Erica were having these deep conversations about how it is to be women of color in tech but also having like life discussion as well so we just decided like our conversations were so good and Erica was like we should start a podcast and I was like well I don't know what that is but I do like talking so and I feel like the value that we have and the type of careers we have we can share that with more women of color in tech and get their experience about working in this field. Yeah I love that idea so you had this idea and you've set it up so how's it going Erica how's it going what are some of your favorite stories you've shared with the world so far? Yeah I mean it's actually going very well something that like she said just started off as like a patio conversation is now like a full-on brand and we have so much community around it we just opened up like our new merch store at like freshmelanin.com and like it's great milestone for us I would say like my favorite story it would definitely have to be like we did a we did an episode last season with a Google employee her name was Shayana and we met her at a networking event and that event was at the wing and we asked her afterwards to kind of like come on and like show other women of color like how they're able to kind of like get into tech and her experience and how she was able to be like a program manager at Google. It was one of the best shows that we've done she was dropping so many gems and she also was someone who kind of like came up not just in tech but she kind of like worked her way up it was like a two -part series so it was really great that would definitely be one of my favorite stories there. I love that I love that and you know it's so interesting you said a networking event where you met this woman you invited her on and she said yes which actually I think happens in tech all the time and that's why to me that's how we met through I think Cloudflare was having something for Black History Month last year. Yeah for Apple yeah my colleagues Vashti and yes I was we have a women's chat room at Cloudflare and I was saying hey who is I I'm looking for guests to bring on I guess we can just like actually I met these two awesome women and Issa and Erica they've got this new podcast they're creating I think they'd be great and she connected us so this is one yeah where it's amazing how you kind of throw out the ask and sometimes people say yes and it's I think people say yes more than we like to they do really do yeah that's great so are you just how do you find the other guests that you have on your show do you same thing networking just find list of people ask and people are saying yes yeah it basically is like we're out there networking we're asking people word of mouth friends of friends and some people want to come on they ask us like hey can we be on your show we're like uh yes like you have value you know you're valuable what you have would be great for our audience experience and and we would also get you know really great conversations out of it too yeah I love that okay so and Anisha one of the things you said was I didn't know exactly how to run a podcast but you like to talk so you said yeah let's do it which is kind of I think very endearing what's been easier than you thought about getting going and and maybe what's been harder than you thought easy part is uploading finding services that you can upload like sound cloud very easy to upload and then I guess the hardest would be you know just really still I guess finding the passion but I mean not finding the passion but the hard part is you know making sure you're doing this for you and for our brand and me and Eric have tried different schedules and we realized that just doesn't work for us like we like to record what we like to record and we like to put out good solid content that has great traffic versus like boom boom boom every day I mean that's successful for a lot of people but you can easily burn out and that's not what we wanted we wanted to have a long successful like right oh interesting so so this brings up an interesting point about the frequency of which you that you have your podcast so is it kind of best practices frequent and you're saying actually we go for quantity quality over quantity is that what I heard yeah I mean the best way to answer that is that we we have a schedule and when we feel like we're going to get burnt out we might feel like okay you know what maybe it's coming towards the end of this specific season and before we just like check out and put out not great episodes we might just like end the season and come back in like you know a month or two and we let our listeners know stuff like that so um and then during those seasons where I mean during those times when we are you know taking a break we might be sending out a lot more newsletters or we might be like you know talking to our um listeners just like on social media or something like that we might not physically be putting out episodes but we're still staying in touch with people um and yeah and working with Anissa on this podcast we obviously we have two different ways of thinking sometimes and if you listen to a show you'll hear like we don't always agree on things but um this format of the show and making it sure that like we both are um on the same page has been working out well yeah I love hearing that um you know when you're speaking Erica remind me I had a woman uh Tracy Chu Chow on a couple weeks ago and she's a designer incredibly creative type and one of the things that came up is this like importance of refueling your creativity so I think that what you said kind of reminded me of something I heard a couple of weeks ago where it's just when you're really creating and having these outlets it's amazing it's empowering but you also have to take time to refuel because you can exactly kind of run dry I guess yeah yeah and the listeners can hear they can hear it sometimes even before we do they they will hear something like that just doesn't sound right and they'll send us an email or something and let us know like how are you guys and we're like oh okay let me take a break so how do you refuel each other because it sounds like the this is something that's come up you kind of sometimes have to take a break take a step back and obviously one of it is okay well we just take a break from recording but is there anything else you do to kind of refuel yourselves and your creativity I take travel yeah we traveled we've traveled together yeah we went to Thailand podcast together then you when you're recharging you're traveling together yeah or we also hang out without talking about the podcast like we'll be let's hang out but we're not going to talk about work or the podcast okay so you like to travel you like to spend time together any other any other um uh habits or tricks to help others who maybe feel like hey I'm actually kind of feel maybe that maybe I'm out of my creativity I need to refuel any other ideas I think it's also just we communicate with each other we're like hey I need to take space you know like I need to focus on this and I'm also telling her like what's going on and she communicates with me like what what are her new projects and we just agree we're like okay like as long as you keep that open communication especially when we're working together yeah it makes a good solid recipe for success yeah that's awesome this is like a very good uh um it's pretty amazing that through work and that you've created this friendship and and working relationship and that you so much respect between each other um you know again I started club for two founders and uh two of us are still running the business Matthew and I and a lot of what you're saying is kind of I really appreciate because I feel like we've created the same sort of um partnership as you guys are describing or someone you can talk to and be open with and say hey like I'm down I'm up and someone to go to which is I don't know I wish everyone had that in their life yeah no it's really important for communication because the next time we meet up we might be recording an episode and the vibe might be off you know so we have to make sure that we're like aligned on if we're both okay to be recording or if we're both like not feeling well to record um it's good to be honest with each other about stuff that's good that's good okay so you know Anisha one of the things you said it was kind of easier to get started than you thought and you're using soundcloud what are some of the other tools that you use to get a podcast going because I know a lot of people hey I would like to start a podcast that does kind of sound daunting so I'd love to hear what other tools you use to get going so you soundcloud what else do you use uh we use garageband and we use canva for like marketing so those are the three things that we use three simple tools um and garageband is on mac but on windows there's other software editing like camtasia or castation um we've tried that and yeah those are just the three tools that we use to get our podcast up and running and who tweet oh and who tweet yes yeah we both know what's in this you know I love it so okay and then and then so you and I'm assuming your uh your website freshmelanin.com is on Wix yeah okay so you have a website freshmelanin.com which is built on Wix which was how much did that cost um how much did that cost it's on like auto so it's like yeah remember we're paying for a domain uh like roughly between like 200 it sounds like a lot but it's not yeah it's not compared to other places yeah and and they're two separate costs you know we secured our domain name which was like $14.99 it renews at that price every year so that's great um and then we just do a an annual plan versus monthly and yeah it's roughly like $200 okay so you have a website you bought the domain freshmelan.com you got your website and then use these other tools between GarageBand which is included in a Mac if you already own a Mac use SoundCloud um is that expensive to get going or also pretty no SoundCloud is about like $15 or 12 a month once you start um having a certain amount of tracks so start off you don't really don't have to pay so test it out see if you like it you know same thing cool and then and then you use Canva and Hootsuite for kind of the community management so-called managing the newsletter and connecting with your listeners to kind of create this community around Fresh Melanin yeah and those are both free as well sounds pretty simple it's like I will be remissed if I don't mention this just and and is that if you ever want to do your register domain registration with Cloudflare we also have a great and we we do it at cost so we can save you a couple dollars if you'd like so there you go just you know I have to have to represent Cloudflare well so there we go nice yeah anyway just FYI okay good so that sounds great I love that well I I'm really excited for you so if anyone wants to listen to their podcast it's freshmelon .com you can go you can subscribe and join and join the community and so you know we're down to the last five minutes and I do want to kind of turn into more personal so I what I've been asking everyone is as women in technology where has the industry lived up to your expectations and where has it fallen short so I've asked that to everyone and so I'd love for you both to answer that but I also would love to ask about being a woman of color in technology right and and they and maybe anything that you think is specifically different or harder or better because of that and so you know I know that's kind of a big meeting personal topic but I would love to I would love to hear both of both of you comment on that so maybe we can start with you know as women in technology where has industry lived up to your expectations and where has it maybe fallen short and then we can move to maybe being as a woman of color many reflections there does that sound good yeah awesome erica do you want to go first yeah no definitely um I mean the industry has it's lived up to my expectations by simply like allowing us just to be in the room you know and the room might look different for everyone but they allow us as just like women to basically stand and be a part of the conversation um when it comes to just like being a woman of color it's I feel like sometimes it's just falling short by like not giving us like a seat at the table in that room if that makes sense and I'm learning that in this industry I'm not I'm not waiting really to be given a seat at the table so most of the time I'm like coming in there like with my own chair um and I just I need to just like be able to kind of like put myself in that position and that's something that I've learned along the way I'm not waiting for someone to tell me like this is who I am and this is like what I can do kind of just like pulling up my own chair and sitting amongst everybody else and having those um ideas out there good for you that's awesome I love that you bring your own chair along good for you that's great and you say how about you uh for me I would say where it lived up to is definitely the community aspect as soon as you jump into a tech company you really can find your community there it can be someone who's on your team or not and you can also start building new creative ideas I think that is really important but where it has fallen short like Erica said is that women are there but sometimes we're not given a seat at the table um and sometimes we are it's just redirected in a way and I also feel like we're not using our voice to the full potential that it could be you know and really having people listen to us and not just saying not any longer like okay okay but really just taking the value and the perspective that we have um into consideration so but that's why we have our podcast as well like it allows us to you know use our voice and nobody can tell us like what to say or what not to say or how to say it at all well yeah like you it's a little bit of your chair analogy where you're like well I want people to hear our voice so we just created I brought my voice along with me very empowering and so Erica I love your chair analogy and actually Anisha your your chair analogy of it well might be faced the wrong way yeah right way and so you know you said it with such confidence of like I just bring my chair and I pull it right up and here I am and there's so I want to ask because there's probably some people who are like I want to do that but that sounds hard what if what if people react strange and so any advice for people who say well who who maybe find it hard to bring their own chair along any advice of how to think about it or things that you've kind of how you kind of got over that hump to do it yeah do it even if you're like trembling it doesn't really matter like there's plenty of times I've had to bring my own chair into the room and I'm like shaking so nervous but it always will work out especially if you have great intentions um it might well it will always work out in the right way it's supposed to so just do it anyway basically that's that's the thing do it whether you're scared whether you're nervous whether you are you know annoyed do it anyways I love that I love that you what when you said great intentions we were saying if you bring it with the great intentions it'll all work out why did you say with great intentions why did you say that um well I mean like if you're positive and you're thinking about things in a certain way um regardless of what anybody else is saying like you're either going to learn from this you're either going to gain some type of like networking from this you're going to gain some type of um intelligence from this whole situation overall so that's why I say do it anyway you never know what will end up after the situation I love that yes we can just do it I need to anything to add um I would add just because you've heard no once doesn't mean the next answer won't be a yes so two minutes don't let no stop you you know just always keep pushing forward that's cool and so like do you have a that that's where where maybe sometimes we hear no what you should really hear is not yes not right now yeah not right now but don't let that stop you I always feel like if people get beat down by the nose then you're gonna miss out on that that yes oh I love that well that's a great place to end and it's actually you know you're gonna miss it on the yes it's kind of the whole spirit of this yes we can and so thank you so much Nisa and Erica for showing up today and saying yes to being on the show I love meeting you I love having this conversation I cannot wait to listen in on the Fresh Melon podcast until I check it out and have a great great day and thanks so much for being awesome members of the technology community thanks for having us thank you