Her Story
About Robbin
I've been in the technology industry since 2007, and I always tell people in my Women in Tech forums that soft skills are transferable across industries. Before coming into tech, I was in sales, and even before that, I was in criminal justice. Both of those industries required very refined communication skills and the ability to engage and interact with people and excavate truths. When I stepped into tech, I started in project management, and I was able to transfer those refined communication and people skills into understanding perspectives and translating that into requirements, which gave me a solid foundation. I've worked through project management into program and portfolio management, and now my main expertise is business and digital transformation from a programmatic perspective. At my heart, I'm a project manager. Every single day, I'm looking at portfolio reports, checking progress against many different programs, all with the explicit goal of ensuring integration. Projects implement things, but portfolios and programs transform businesses. I'm looking for iteration in my programs that roll up to the portfolio realm to get us closer to the transformation goal. Day to day, I'm engaging with senior leaders and executive leaders, checking the temperature and pulse of all our organizational change management outputs, and ensuring things are tracking as they should and that we're seeing the outcomes in our metrics that we should be seeing.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Robbin
01What do you attribute your success to?
I would say my most notable professional achievement would be embracing failure and seeing failure as a trigger for growth. Early in my career in tech, failure could mean taking down a customer's environment or losing multi-million dollar customer deals. There's a lot of fear with that, especially with there being a lot of competition in the tech industry - you fail and you don't get something right, then you could be replaced. I think overcoming that mindset and the idea that failure was a bad thing is probably something that I would attribute to a lot of my actual achievements. If I excavate anything that I've done well, I go back and look at how I initially failed and embrace that, leaned into understanding how to ensure I didn't repeat that again, and use that as a lesson to be learned, always doing a lot of self-reflection on the things that I can do better. So I would say embracing failure would be my biggest achievement.
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