Her Story
About Alexandra
I've been in this field for around 7 years, and I've been with my current organization for 5 years. I was hired while I was still in college finishing my second degree, starting on our support team. From there, I migrated through different positions throughout the organization - I was in our hospitality vertical, spent some time in marketing and biz dev, then moved over to the consulting wing. Eventually, they created a position for me to oversee internal operations and tooling development as our company scaled. Now I hold a dual role that's a bit unique - I'm the tooling and operations team lead for special projects, but I also never lost the consulting piece. I sit as an overlay for the consultants, promoted up into it for CX projects, AI, and dev-heavy projects. On a typical day, I oversee the team that does all of the development and management of our internal applications and tooling. There's a lot of business process check-ins, revamping the way we're doing things, asking questions, pushing boundaries, and then communicating those business requirements technically down to my team so they can execute within the tooling to reflect those changes or improvements we want to make. On the consulting side, it's a lot of client meetings, getting to know people and organizations all the way up from the C-suite down to the base-level workers, so we can really understand the objectives of the problem we're trying to solve with the project. We also have a huge initiative within our organization to build into the local IT community, so I'm involved in lots of non-profit IT events that we sponsor and attend, which turn into networking events as well.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Alexandra
01What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
I think the biggest thing is, it's not about us fighting for a seat at the table anymore, or people taking us seriously - it's more just using our voice when we have the opportunity. A lot of times, you know, I meet women from the university I came from, or girls entering the workforce, and you get the imposter syndrome, and it's a bit intimidating to be in these rooms with people that are your parents' age, and to have an opinion when you don't feel like you have the experience to. But it's okay to voice that opinion, and that's going to get you a lot farther a lot quicker. Everyone gets imposter syndrome at some point or another, but you have to push through it and speak up.
02What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
I think in women tech, we have the ability to view both process and outcome, whereas a lot of times, I observe men typically viewing outcome and ignoring process. So, if you have the ability to kind of view both sides of the coin - both how you're going to get there and the destination you'd like to go - and then you also have the aptitude to use AI to assist you, to get the process established and the destination arrived at quicker, that's really what's differentiating women in tech, I think. The opportunity is in leveraging our unique perspective on both process and outcome, combined with AI tools, to create better solutions.
03What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
I'm not one for big milestones - I think people tend to measure themselves against them, and that makes things hard. I love the continual little wins, whether it's personally seeing your kids achieve things, like our daughter working her way up from the C team to the B team for volleyball over a season, which was incredible to watch, or our son developing as he grows. At work, it's about implementing processes, changes, tools, and projects that really radicalize the way people work. I know it sounds cheesy, but just seeing the relief from them or them get excited about things is what kind of keeps you going, versus just those big awards or recognitions or certifications. It's about making a real impact on people's daily lives and celebrating the small victories along the way.
Keep Exploring
More Influential Women · Ohio
Join Influential Women and start making an impact. Register now.