Kelly Shalk, Director, Developer & Agent Relations on Influential Women

Influential Woman · Software SaaS

Kelly Shalk

Director, Developer & Agent Relations, Docusign

San Francisco, CA

Certifications · Degrees · Memberships

Cert Yoga Teacher Certification (in training) Member Planning Commissioner for City of San Rafael (former) Member Tech Women Mentor (former) Member Girls Who Code Mentor (former)

Her Story

About Kelly

I lead our developer and agent relations team at DocuSign, where my team is responsible for our developer go-to-market strategy. We're focused on inspiring and activating developers and agents to build on our platform as the world quickly evolves with AI and agents, and we're evolving with it. A big part of my scope is also leading community - both DocuSign's own community and the broader community strategy for the company. My journey into this field started with recruiting engineers, which I did for about five years starting at Groupon in 2011. Through that work, I fell in love with working with developers and learned how important authenticity is, as well as how solving their problems and building community is really at the center of how you both recruit and inspire this community. That recruiting experience exposed me to building out the engineering brand for Twitter at the time. What I find most rewarding about my work is empowering others - not only getting to empower my own team to drive and lead programs, but collectively we get to empower the community to both lead programs and build some pretty unbelievable solutions on DocuSign's platform. The unknown is pretty exciting because when you open up your APIs and platform, you may be surprised by what gets created. As Bill Gates said, a platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it exceeds the value of the company that creates it. Technology is here to empower people, and getting to work on the ecosystem is really getting to be at the forefront of empowerment.

Her Interview

Ten minutes with Kelly

01What do you attribute your success to?

I would say curiosity and grit. I think always remaining curious and leaning in to the unknown, just taking a yes-and approach. I'm also a big believer that I'm happy when I'm learning and I'm growing. My mentor, who was the head of HR at Twitter, told me to think of your career as a jungle gym, not a ladder, and I thought that was really helpful advice because it's really about trying new things, learning new things, stretching yourself in new ways. The other factor is grit - it's just putting your head down and working hard. Sometimes those tougher moments in your career can be where you learn the most, and I think grit is a quality that I've been told often I exude. When the going gets hard, I lean in.

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