My name is Rachel, I'm a Senior Program Manager
in Google, New York. Google hired me out of a bar in the East Village
about 12 years ago. For about three years, a group of NY Ops and SRE,
drank at my bar. Like everyone at the bar, they asked the
bartender for advice. I gave them advice and helped them through
a lot of problems, and I also became
friends with them. I really admired them, they
were incredibly smart and charming and really good
drinkers, and tippers. Eventually, I wanted something
different for my life. I've been standing behind
a bar all night long, and there was an opportunity to apply for an admin
role in their team. So, I joined Google in 2008. They hired me first
as an Administrator for Site Reliability and Engineering Ops in New York City. After about two years, I transferred into
Program Management. Google's hiring is a little
more conventional now, but the skills that I
polished while being a bartender informed
my everyday work. A wise old bartender that I knew in the lower East side
once told me that, "A bar was a room full of tables and chairs and some beer, and a meeting room was the same, a room full of tables and chairs. People come into a bar
like they come into a meeting room wanting to
leave feeling something else." As a program manager, my job was to help people
through that experience, the aesthetic experience of
meeting with each other, making decisions, and coming
to conclusions together. Very similar to bartending and helping people
have a better night. My role as a program manager started by someone
taking a risk on me. My engineering partner
picked me out of the admin pool
because he knew that I could build a community
with these engineers. When you work in a bar, you have to talk to anyone
who comes into the bar. Anyone who walks through
that door is your customer. You have to understand
what they want, what they want to drink, whether they can
continue drinking, whether they might
be done drinking, all of these things. When you are working with a subject matter
expert, an engineer, a product designer, a UX person, the same things apply. You have to be able to talk
to any engineer on your team, any product manager
you need to work with, and you have to understand
their unique needs. Program Management
isn't just about the process and the
artifacts that you create, it's about how you
relate to people. Understanding what you've learned in other parts of your life, whether it was in a
bar or art school, these are the
experiences that you bring into the job that
make your work unique. Your skills, talking to people or de-escalating conflict or
understanding what people need. This is what makes you a
great program manager.