Hi, I’m Lydia.

I’m a maker and a strategist. I make friends with big fuzzy problems and hold their hand through discovery, synthesis, implementation, and delivery.

What do you do?

If you ask me this at a party, I will ask you a bunch of questions to figure out how I should answer.

I’ve never fit neatly in a box and I lean into that trait with my whole heart. I am equal parts engineer, designer, product manager, educator, tinkerer, musician, artist, therapist, and community builder. I love it all, and I don’t love having to choose.

I’ve been fortunate to hold many varied roles across industries that have allowed me to be an interdisciplinary enigma and get paid for it. I usually have a title that doesn’t match the description of what I do.

What do you do now?

I currently serve as the VP of Product Engineering at data.world.

VP of Engineering is usually the top people manager on the technical staff - the one that knows how to map the skills, processes, interests, and growth opportunities of the team to engineering and business problems.

VP of Product is usually a strategic role aimed at synthesizing the needs of the market into roadmaps and prioritized initiatives. My role is a hand-wavy blend of these.

I’ve spent the better part of a decade with the same core group of engineers - first as a front-end dev, then a tech lead, manager, director, and VP. I still work with most of the engineers that were on the team with me before we launched the product in 2016. I’ve had a front-row seat from pre-launch to product market fit to growth, and the honor of collaborating directly with incredible customers across the Enterprise space.

I write code, triage escalations, and talk to customers. Mostly, I make sure that the people that work on my team have what they need to grow, build good products, and be good humans.

What have you done?

I hold a Professional degree in Architecture (BArch) and a Masters degree in Software Engineering (MS) both from the University of Texas at Austin.

I’ve worked in big companies and teeny companies, pre-launch startups, architecture firms, non-profits, and enterprises.

I collaborated with a fellow EmberATX meetup organizer to write and deliver a workshop curriculum to teach women in the software industry to write applications using the EmberJS framework.

I cohosted a podcast about engineering soft skills for while.

One time, I spent a year learning conversational ASL so I could conduct meetings with my Deaf clients and engineering colleagues.

One of my favorite roles was leading Learning and Development for a large tech sales organization, where I got to introduce recent grads to their first professional roles. A lot of them still work there, more than a decade later.

I learned to love placemaking and community building working for Sinclair Black at Black + Vernooy - an architecture firm that shaped many of my most cherished parts of home in Austin.

What’s the theme?

Every problem, project, team, and product - are ultimately design exercises.

I apply design thinking and experimentation to interdisciplinary settings where someone needs to quickly and deeply understand the technical, people, design, and business constraints of an initiative.

The other core skill is multi-modal communication. Big fuzzy problems require someone to play translator between people that think in pictures, numbers, words, and metaphors. In most cases, you must be adept at describing and visualizing something that does not yet exist, so that many people can work in concert towards the same goal. This was my focus of study for 5 years in Architecture school, and remains my most used skill.

I gather research by talking to people, assessing data, and going to look at and touch things with my own eyes and hands. I take that research and organize it into simplified hypotheses and assumptions that can be validated through testing. I build prototypes and many bad first drafts of things so that we can stand back and look at them and figure out where the holes and the heroes are. I believe in quantity of ideation and quality of synthesis - I make a lot of bad things quickly so that we can make a few wonderful things…also quickly.

Then I figure out how the thing gets built and who will be best to build it. I look for strong alignment in the natural interests, goals, and traits of my team members because teams do better work when they have agency and motivation to explore the problem more deeply than what is assigned.

Sometimes I build it myself, sometimes I build alongside others, and sometimes I don’t do the building at all. I spend my time making sure I know what’s going on in this phase. Many design and technical decisions get made after the plan is established, through iteration and problem solving. I make sure we constantly follow the “why” and check our adjustments against the goals of the project and the evolving ecosystem around us.

The last step is education and enablement - Telling people, telling them again, telling them in another way, showing them with pictures, documenting with words, creating video tutorials, wrapping program around promoting interest, and probably still telling them again about the thing that was built, why it was built, why it is valuable, and how to use it.

I’ve done this with buildings, training programs, sales quota processes, SaaS tool implementations, Girl Scout curriculum, events, book publications, software design sprints, self improvement plans, mentoring programs, organization design, house renovations, and meeting agendas.

What do you do outside of work?

I teach a cohort of 15 second graders to love nature, leadership, engineering, making, and community. Lately, I’ve been making whimsical bird-shaped pitchers on the potter’s wheel and building play gardens with native Texas plants.

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