Her Story
About Ruby
My career in communications spans over 25 years, beginning with Nortel in 1999 or 2000, then moving to Avaya Gov in 2009 and Avaya in 2010, where I've been ever since. I spent a long time in unified communications before transitioning to the contact center space about 8 to 10 years ago, though there was always some overlap given I was in the same company. My AI strategy work truly began about a year and a half ago professionally, though I started exploring it personally as soon as ChatGPT launched. The past 6 to 8 months have been transformative in this area. Currently, I work in the cloud business where I hold responsibility for the SRE team, which handles outages and incidents, as well as DevOps. My career goals have evolved significantly. I used to focus on what's my next promotion, what's my next level, but now I think about what makes me happy and what my dreams are. It's really about making a difference in the technology world. I volunteer at colleges, do guest forums, and conduct mock interviews for students. My aspiration is to become known as a technology governance or transformation leader in the industry, and perhaps serve on a board of advisors somewhere.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Ruby
01What do you attribute your success to?
I have a drive, and I have a can-do attitude. I have a solution-oriented approach where even if I don't have the solution at that moment, I know we'll find an answer. I have this natural instinct of being able to synthesize information very quickly in my head, and I can go breadth-wise and depth-wise very deep in any area and be good at it. I'm very execution-oriented and I'm always optimistic that we'll find a way forward.
02What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
The industry has shifted. Just being good at your technology, it doesn't matter which field, is table stakes, but you need to have skills that are more about leading. I talk about it as structured thinking and decision making. Build the domain knowledge, no matter which industry you are in, and be adaptable. Build your connections, be adaptable, be accountable, and learn to make decisions. Take AI positively because it's here to stay. I am very bullish on it, and I would say go all in. I've always seen this with a lot of women where it's like, I'm not ready, let me learn a little bit more, and we're trying to build more confidence. But my learning over the years has been that confidence does not come first. Courage does. So take that step, and you will get the confidence, and you will build the confidence. Nobody was perfect when they started.
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