Her Story
About Livia
Livia Monteiro serves as Chief of Staff at Blue River Technology, where the company applies AI, machine learning, and other technologies to agricultural equipment such as tractors and sprayers. She has been with the company for eight and a half years and moved into her current role two months ago after spending the better part of eight years in program management. Her responsibilities include clarifying how company strategy aligns with day-to-day execution for engineering teams, streamlining communication across teams, and managing cross-company collaboration with the parent company John Deere. She chose to pursue a business degree because it offered broad exposure, allowing her to explore different areas before focusing on program management. She holds PMP and Agile Scrum Master certifications, which help her bridge traditional project management with dynamic agile product development in the agricultural technology space. Livia attributes her success to resilience and maturity, emphasizing the importance of learning from encounters, building trust across teams, and persisting to create professional space. She advises young women entering the industry to avoid discouragement from difficult encounters and to seek true mentors, including male allies who can provide honest insights into team dynamics and leadership perspectives.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Livia
01What do you attribute your success to?
I attribute my success to resilience and maturity. It's really understanding that you can't please everybody, not every professional encounter is going to be successful, but you need to take the learnings from that and keep going. And find your space. There's space, it might not be exactly what you want or the size of the space that you want from the start, and it could take time to build that space, but it's there. You just gotta keep working to build it, and so I think it's been a lot of that, just that resilience and not giving up, and keep at it and understand that it's a different pace than I would like, but you keep going.
02What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
Don't get discouraged by some of the few bad encounters, because those are bound to happen, but find true mentors in the network that can help you understand how the teams function, how leaders think, and what motivates them. Having an overall positive experience with the broader ecosystem can be very helpful. Finding male mentors that are allies to women has been very helpful because they can tell you both sides and be brutally honest about how males think.
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