BlackWomenWork

Hi Yemi! Can you describe what you do?

Sure. My current role is Co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Civic Eagle. It’s a startup company that I co-founded with my business partners. We build software as a service, for companies and organizations that need to track legislation, and organize their policy management workflow. It’s a pretty niche product for people who are policy professionals – policy analysts, lobbyists, government relations, state and government affairs teams. We work with companies and non-profit organizations. As a co-founder, my role consists of a lot of things. But, if I were to say what my trade or skill is, it’s product design.

Product design is a relatively new category in the industry. It is the process of designing the technology tools that we use day-to-day, though it can include technology and non-technology products. Products can range from a software solution, like what my company designs and sells. Or, for example, it can be a notebook that is a product that you design and sell physically. Beyond just my job title, my passion is designing and developing great products. And what that really is about these days is usability. It encompasses a mixture of technology and also psychology because usability is about human behavior. Then there’s the visual design component of it, which I love as well. I do a lot of what they call user interface design (UI design). Because my company sells software, my role is to figure out how to market it, and put it in front of the right people to purchase it, use it, and enjoy it. So, it’s a mixture of creative arts but then strategy, as well.

Awesome. That’s such a clear explanation. And so, you mentioned that you have a passion for building products. Where did you develop this passion?

Growing up, I really wanted to be a lawyer. I actually started my career in policy and politics. My family was really engaged in my community, and we understood the value of the public sector. So I was always attracted to law, to debate, to right versus wrong. But in college, I had less and less of a passion to go into the legal profession. When I graduated, though, I did get a job in policy—a cousin of law—and I thought that was actually more compelling. Working in policy is really about coming to the table with all the interested parties, and figuring out a solution to the problem. Nowadays, of course, it’s political and can get nasty, and it’s not nearly as accessible to people as it should be. But, typically, what a lobbyist or advocacy organization or policy analyst is doing is designing a solution to a problem, via law. And so, I think I’ve always understood the product mentality.

How did you go from policy, to then end up in product design?

After college, I ended up in Albany working in the state legislature, focused on the higher education committee. I was still in grad school, working to get my Master’s of Public Administration. At that same time, I was trying to explore my creative interests. I was getting into photography and graphic design. That’s when I met my current business partner. He had an idea around using technology to get people engaged in civic issues – using technology for clarifying these issues for everyday people.

When he initially assembled the team, I came in as a policy person but I also had all of these creative skills. And so, I just started evolving into a designer. We started a company, essentially, on nights and weekends when we would just jam. We would think through what the app would look like, and what we wanted it to do. We were very amateur. We had one engineer on the team, and he was a great engineer. But, none of us had ever built something from scratch. As I said before, all my life, I’ve liked leading projects and solving problems. I just stepped up. What we were doing involved a great combination of my technical skills in policy, as well as my creative skills in design. But there was a lot I didn’t know. It was the first time I was really encountering UI design. So I taught myself what I needed to know, and I’ve been blessed with opportunities to learn on the job.

I decided to make a move into design and leave politics. I was able to get a job at a small design agency in New York City, and then I moved onto another job at a small startup. And then from there, I got a position at a slightly larger startup. I was able to leverage my experiences to get each subsequent role which ultimately rounded out my experience as a product designer.

One of those startups is Civic Eagle?

Nope, those were all full-time roles that paid my bills, and allowed me to learn really important skills in product, design and startup culture. Civic Eagle was something we worked on during nights and weekends; we bootstrapped the company for the first three years, and it wasn’t until we got into our first accelerator in 2018 that I was able to go full-time with Civic Eagle.

We have gone through some great accelerator programs, and have brought on some great investors. And, each step of the way, it’s been an opportunity for me to learn more. I’m very bookish. If I don’t know something, I’ll do the research and try to learn. I’ll read a book, or watch a new video, or talk to new mentors about how to apply my learnings to what we’re working on with the company at the moment. It provides me with a lot of range. For example, right now, I’m a de facto Chief Marketing Officer. I’ve never been in that role before, but that’s what is needed of me given where we’re at as a company.

How have you educated yourself? And how do you continue to educate yourself, and stay on top of things?

I learned a lot from the Internet, of course. Just using free resources online and YouTube to find what I need to learn. But, it goes back to doing the research. There were so many boot camps in NYC. There was General Assembly and Flatiron School and they hosted lots of free events. I tried to attend as many free or low cost workshops and events as I could in the city. That’s part of the reason why I moved to New York City from Albany. Albany didn’t have weekly fireside chats with product designers — stuff like that happens all the time in NYC. When I moved there, the product design industry was pretty new. There weren’t lots of textbooks or alumni of university programs that I could go and talk to about this kind of stuff. But what is nice about the product design space, or more broadly the software development and technology industry, is that there is this open source mindset for making information available. You have to be hungry and go find it, but it’s there.

As I was sharing, this past quarter, marketing has been a huge thing for me, and for my company. So, we built the product and have the essentials that we need, and we’re continuing to iterate on the features. Now we’re at a point where we can turn on marketing, and get eyeballs on the app, and on our website, and try to convert leads into customers. Now I’m trying to learn marketing, and it’s different because we’re selling software to a business – business to business SaaS sales. And so, the things that I know about marketing are mostly around consumer products, and things that I purchase myself. I might say, “Oh yeah, I liked the way that Sephora sold me that lipstick. Let me try to apply that strategy to what I’m selling.” That’s something that you could do if you were also selling a consumer product. But, as B2B SaaS it’s a bit different. The best way for me to learn and educate myself in the areas that I’m not strong in is to read and learn from other people’s experiences, and then, figuring out how it applies to what I’m working on. I’ve really appreciated websites like HubSpot, which does marketing automation and has tons of free content, blog posts, webinars, videos. A lot of the time I go to the blogs of experts, that’s where I get information from.

What about mentors? Do you have a group of people you turn to, who can help you address some of your knowledge gaps, or troubleshoot solutions?

It’s so important to have a network of people that you can tap into. People often refer to mentorship in a way that’s kind of cliche, like having a fairy godmother who guides your career path. I haven’t experienced mentorship like that, but I do have a network of incredible people who help me talk through specific types of problems.

When you reach out to someone with a specific ask, and you show that you’ve done your own initial research, and you’ve done your part to get the answer, I have found that people are very willing to help you. So, I definitely don’t think that you need to have a mentor per se. I would say that it’s important to have a great network of people you can reach out to who are skilled in very specific things. I’m not going to go to the same person for advice on digital marketing, that I do for HR help. I would also recommend keeping your expectations in check. Don’t expect them to give you a solution to your exact issue. But ask them for perspective, what did you do in a situation like this? How have you done X, Y, and Z? Can you tell me about a time when you had to deal with this X, Y, Z problem? That’s been my approach over the past few years. And, as the company has grown, we’ve been blessed to have access to an even larger network of incredible people. I also extend my help to others and like to give advice where I can.

What do you find most meaningful about the work that you do?

There are so many things I love about what I do. I honestly could not have planned the way my career path has turned out. I spent a lot of my life studying and working in policy. And what we do now at Civic Eagle, I’m still working in policy, but in a really cool, innovative way. And, I get to flex all the skills that I enjoy using and I get to do it on my own terms. My two co-founders — any in a way that responds to how we see the world. We, as a company, have all agreed that we’re going to challenge the status quo. We’re going to challenge traditional notions of work. We don’t want people to have to be confined by traditional labor rules around vacation, or promotion, or organizational structure. We want to try to challenge these notions of business and profitability and success as much as possible. One of the company metrics that we keep up with is that a percentage of our customers have to be mission-aligned with us. That means that those organizations have to support increases in civic engagement, increases in democratic participation, because we want our product to be in the hands of people who are doing good in communities.

Now, of course, we are constrained by the nature of a funding company and what it takes to operate and staff a tech company. We are a venture capital-backed company. So, we do have pressures from investors and just the economic market in general. But, ultimately, we do get to determine our own destiny. And I’m blessed that I have business partners that also take pride in the fact that we don’t have to do it the way that it’s traditionally done. We can prioritize happiness and wellness for our team.

That’s incredible. Wonderful. Thank you so much, Yemi.

Hi, Jessica! So let’s start with what you’re up to now. What do you do?

I work as a partner at Generation Titans, a social impact company I co-founded with my two partners about two years ago. We have two areas of work. The first is more like traditional consulting. We work with corporations, investors, and large campaigns, to help them engage with communities of color more responsibly and in a way that is authentic and not extractive. The other piece is building a pilot platform to provide resources for entrepreneurs of color in specific geographies or who work in a specific industry.

Can you go a little more into what you mean by extractive, within the context of your work?

I think a lot of times, right now, we’re at a place where brands recognize that activism and working with people of color is cool or the “in” thing. It’s extractive because often brands will use the image of someone or a community they represent, and those brands are rewarded with increased profit. But are brands listening to that community? Are they making investments in that community? So we try to help brands who say they have a purpose, to do it in a real way that’s authentic and that puts resources behind their words so it’s not just ads and commercials.

I love that. So how did you get to this point in your career?

I was passionate about education policy, and worked for two years as a college advisor in Greensboro, North Carolina. The juniors and seniors I worked with needed better opportunities to access and attend college, but you also start to realize how interconnected college access is with so many other issues in communities. Economic mobility isn’t isolated to just education. Going to college won’t solve everything because there’s still systemic racism, misogyny, and on and on. I used to think that if people just go to college, that was the answer to their problems. But I realized I needed to do work addressing barriers to entry, and at a large scale. It was hard to figure out what that meant for my career because it’s not as though you can just find that in a job posting. So I started doing social impact work through traditional consulting, but I wasn’t passionate about it. I went to the Obama Foundation and I really loved my experience there. Then I just wanted to start something on my own, and ended up working with colleagues from the Obama Foundation to start Generation Titans.

In a way, a lot of your work at Generation Titans focuses on building networks. Can you share a bit more about the unique nature of networking as a professional of color?

I think that as a Black woman, and as an introvert, it’s been a learning curve for me personally (laughs). I’m not the type of person that likes to go to all the happy hours, talking to everyone in the room. But, I know I can connect one-on-one and I do well when I can be real with people. So I usually try to make a deeper connection with one or two people. I’ve given that advice to other people, too -- if your style of networking isn’t true to who you are, it’s going to seem forced. I learned the hard way, trying to perform the way I thought networking is meant to be.

I go to a lot of conferences. I know some people take more of a “whatever happens, happens” approach. I will typically do research before attending an event or panel. I’ll try to identify people I want to connect with, and panels and sessions that I’m excited about. I also rely on the network of amazing Black women I have had the opportunity to go to school with, to work with, and I will try to keep them updated on what I’m doing. It’s also important to understand that who you reach out to for help doesn’t have to be someone at your job or in your industry. That has been a real process, too -- just asking for help, being honest about where I’m at, and sharing how I want to collaborate with other people.

Describe your day-to-day.

It ranges. Sometimes it’s building out a project plan. Sometimes it’s more conceptual, where I spend time thinking about what being our startup strategy looks like for us. Sometimes it’s dealing with our budget, and other day-to-day aspects of managing business operations. On the consulting side, it looks more like sales, and building relationships -- just trying to get in the door and talk to people. On the entrepreneurship side, we talk to entrepreneurs and learn what their specific needs are, and trying to come up with unique solutions where we aren’t redundant and can distinguish ourselves. We might work with a client or a partner, or have a brainstorm, or go through Quickbooks to analyze the budget. It varies day to day and so many things happen each day.

What are the pros and cons of what you do?

Well, it’s kind of a pro and a con but you’re the boss. You can say here’s what we’re trying to build, and you have to build buy-in with with people outside your team on the idea. But that’s also scary because if an idea doesn’t work, it’s on you. I’m a planner and want to know what is happening in three months, six months, nine months out. In a startup, you’re constantly changing and evolving as you learn more. That’s been hard. Not knowing what happens in 12 months. In a traditional nine-to-five, you have the comfort of knowing how you’ll grow, you have an idea of where your role is going to take you. But as a startup, it’s really rewarding when you have wins because you saw it through from start to finish. It was just an idea and you made it happen and now it’s real.

Is tech making space for people of color?

We talk about this constantly. And not just for ourselves because we’re trying to be a part of this space, but also because of the entrepreneurs we work with who are finding their footing in tech, in and outside of Silicon Valley, in venture capital. There’s a lot of bias. It’s well-documented. There is so much signaling. People will ask, what school did you go to? Because so many companies are new, there’s no way to tell whether a founder or a company is going to be great, so people use these markers like, who have you worked for? But those are not proven methods for figuring out who or what is worthy of investment or who will be a great founder.

Outside of the Bay Area, we are seeing the tech communities in places like Atlanta and Philly saying “We can build our own tables. We don’t have to try and fit in at yours.” I get excited about that shift, and building wealth for our community as a collective. Instead of someone looking at you to figure out how you fit into their checklist of what is desirable, I think there is a new community that is saying “Let’s figure out how we can raise capital together and we can all get to the next level.”

It’s been hard, though. Social capital and networks are so important. Who you know is such a big thing in this space, and access to those rooms. Even just access to information. I didn’t grow up knowing a lot about coding or tech as a space, or even angel investing. So you have to do a lot to figure out where the opportunities are. It’s also worth figuring out what’s free. You can take a class at the General Assembly or enroll in a coding bootcamp, but it’s thousands of dollars. There are lots of resources at the grassroots level focused on allowing people in and helping them navigate this space.

What is a moment or some words of inspiration that you consistently return to?

There is one moment I remember from when I first started working in consulting. I was really excited to have the job, and I had a little imposter syndrome. The first year, I would always want to prove my value for being there, so I would be the first to volunteer to take notes during meetings. I don’t know what I was trying to prove. But there was this woman whose project I was working on. I had worked under her for six months and she was a mentor. One day she said to me, “You’re present but you’re passive. If you want to be more than the note taker, you need to claim space in the room.” I think of that today when trying to find my utility in a room. And so I would advise young black women to use their voices. Our voice is productive and powerful, and we bring so much to the spaces we are in. That is our value -- not taking notes, not getting coffee, but being present and bring our perspectives to spaces

What makes you uniquely suited to do what you do?

I’m someone who likes to connect the dots, and it happens pretty naturally. I’ll talk to someone and think, “Oh, this person needs to meet this other person.” It’s useful at work. And I like solving problems -- how to organize my day, what the team needs to do, what I need to do -- to get things done. When things go left or something unexpected happens, it gives me so much energy and motivation because I’m like, “I never want to experience that again!” (laughs) And, also, I think just having a lot of work experiences. I’ve worked in consulting, at a nonprofit, and now at a startup, so I’m able to pull from that diverse skill set.

What are you excited about for the future?

Right now, I’m in the early stages of a startup. But in the next year or two, if we do the things we want to do, we will have centered entrepreneurs of color and demonstrated their value. That will be awesome for us. They’re running amazing businesses. I want to have my friends support them, and see my friends buying those products. I see how that vision could be real, even though it’s going to take some time. I will feel good about what we’ve done when other people see entrepreneurship as something they can do, and to realize that they don’t have to be in Silicon Valley. They don’t have to fit some specific profile. They can be themselves.

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