Her Story
About Kat
Kat Fisher serves as Vice President of Customer Experience in the SaaS industry, based in Provo, Utah. She brings more than 11 years of experience to her role, where she focuses on leadership and optimizing systems and processes to improve efficiency and support company growth and scale. Kat studied criminal justice but entered the software field by chance after a decade as a stay-at-home mom, quickly advancing into leadership positions through self-taught technical skills and a talent for identifying and solving problems. She attributes her success to resilience and values curiosity, compassion, empathy, and accountability in both her professional and personal life. Kat is particularly passionate about coaching others, especially women, to ask questions and build strong leadership skills, noting that AI presents challenges in the software sector but cannot replace judgment-oriented leadership and coaching roles.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Kat
01What do you attribute your success to?
I would say resilience. Just being willing to continue even when I'm feeling down, even when things are hard, even when I've gotten a no. I think more than anything, like, resilience. Like, everything else, I feel like I've been able to go learn a system, I can go learn a process, I can go learn a company. Resilience is kind of like one of those core competencies that I have to build myself.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
It's probably been to go into things with curiosity, even when I am almost positive I'm right. Early on in my career, I got feedback that I approached people aggressively. I developed the habit of saying 'hey, this is what I'm seeing, can you help me understand it? I'm not sure if I'm seeing everything correctly.' That one tweak made it feel like I was trying to collaborate.
03What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
Ask all of the questions. One of the things I've noticed in particular when coaching women is that sometimes they hesitate to ask questions. Women seem to have imposter syndrome at a higher level often than men do. Asking questions allows us to get better informed and educated, but it also builds relationships.
04What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
AI is presenting a lot of challenge in the software industry. Building up really strong leadership skills is something I've coached people on as we're starting to see AI take over more and more, because that's the one area that I've just seen no movement being made in the AI space. AI can't do the day-to-day leadership or coaching. It's really good at task-oriented things but not judgment-oriented things.
05What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
Curiosity is definitely a value. I want to continue to be curious and coach other people to be curious. Compassion and empathy is really important, done in the right way, avoiding ruinous empathy. Accountability is really important. I want to be accountable and want other people to be accountable.
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