 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Grace Hopper's Celebration of Women in Computing, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference here in Orlando. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Jeff Frick. We're joined by Erin Yang. She is the VP of Technology Product Management for Workday. Thanks so much for joining us. Of course, thank you for having me. So tell us a little bit about what you do at Workday and what are the most exciting projects you're working on right now? All right, so I lead up our technology product management team at Workday. And so for those of you who might not have heard of Workday, we are a leading cloud provider for financial management, human capital management, analytical applications. Been around since 2005. I've been there for the last six years and I would say the technology is such an exciting part of the company and one of the things that really drew me there. So a lot of people don't know the original story around Workday, but when we started, we had this amazing mix of really experienced leaders who had been in the enterprise space before, who had built a lot of these products before, combined with cloud technologies just taking off. And no one had really done the HCM in the cloud before financials in the cloud. And so they were able to completely start over. We like to say with a clean sheet of paper, with new technologies, but having experience in the industry and built from there. So we have a single technology platform that powers all of our different applications and that's the part of the company that I sit on. So you're really in the core technology that's driving the application. Exactly. This is why your technology, not HCM or one of the others. Correct, so like the things that my team really looks after are security, integrations, our infrastructure, the common data model, and the common workflow that goes across the different applications. And the fact that we can have a single platform that connects all the applications makes it so much easier for our customers. And that's really been the philosophy of the company, which is customers first. We really focus on making our customers happy. And so one of our company goals is always hitting 95% customer satisfaction, which is really unheard of in the enterprise industry when most people are not super happy with those products. And we've been able to hit 97% in the last year that we did those surveys. It's an interesting part of the SaaS model because unlike a traditional kind of enterprise software sale, they make the sale, they collect the 15% but you're getting paid monthly, I assume, and maybe it's an annual contract. So you have to keep delivering value each and every single month, because you don't have this like long-term big giant enterprise license. Yeah, it's a subscription revenue model. So it's no more of a, you deliver a product and you don't think about it anymore. It's a continuous partnership with our customers. And I think that's why the relationship matters so much with our customers. They're stuck with us to a certain extent. And we want to make sure that they're happy, that they're getting the value that they wanted out of the product. And then we can also grow with them. And so one of the interesting parts of our technology is that we actually abstract the application and business logic from the technology itself through a metadata language that we've built out internally. And so we've been able to swap out our persistence technology, change the way that we store data, scale our transactions without our customers even knowing it. So that's kind of one of the beautiful parts of the way that our architecture was designed. So it's the architecture but then what else are you doing to hit that 97%? I mean, what are you doing that the key is empathizing with your customer? Right. We spend a lot of time with our customers. That's one of the big points. It's almost every single product, every single feature that we build has a design partner program where we literally are with our customers understanding what their pain points are and figuring out how can we solve those pain points in the product. And then the fact that we're pure SaaS so we just have one version that every customer has so if we're improving the product for one customer, we're improving it for all of our customers. And so we're able to just focus on that single version instead of splitting our attention across old versions and maintaining old systems. Yeah. So shifting gears a little bit to Grace Hopper specifically, you talked about before we turned on the cameras that work they made a big investment in Grace Hopper this year and you brought a huge contingent of people. We did. I think it's interesting. I think a lot of people know a lot of hiring that goes on but I don't know that everyone knows kind of as a development opportunity where companies bring large contingent. So I wonder if you can speak to one kind of what is the value that you guys made this investment in this show around people that already work for Workday. Yeah. So I mean, ultimately we're here because at Workday we really believe in diversity being good for our business, being good for our people. It helps us make better decisions, helps us build better products, we're more creative and it helps the bottom line. I think there's a lot of research out there now. And so at Grace Hopper we think this is the best way because it's such a big event to improve all aspects of the talent pipeline. So it's not just the hiring coming in from college which we are definitely doing but it's also bringing, we have over 130 employees who came here from Workday and all walks kind of in their career. So some newer, more junior people and some more experienced people. And we really think that the networking that they can do here, the sessions that they can come to to do professional development and learn, one of our sessions is how to get out of that middle management quagmire. So how do they continue moving up and forward in their careers? It's not just that entry point into that junior entry level position. What an investment outside of your own event. I would imagine that's probably the biggest presence you have at any tech event. I think it is. I haven't heard of us having more than 130 people at any other events. And it's a big investment especially because our big customer conference is next week. So we're all busy with that but this is an important enough event for us. Both for college recruiting, both for professional developments and for, like I said, building that network even within the women here who are at workday because we're a bigger company now and this is a good opportunity for us all to strengthen those relationships. And we have eight employees who are speaking in sessions and that's a great experience as well to get up on stage and to build your presence, learn how to speak and communicate and challenge yourself in that way. What would you say have been sort of the biggest challenges in your career? You're someone who grew up in the Bay Area, went to the same high school as Steve Jobs, Stanford graduate working in this industry for a while now. What would you say what you've learned along the way in terms of overcoming challenges? You know, I think I would say that I've had a very, I've had a lot of opportunities kind of growing up and I would say some of the biggest challenges though are the impressions that people might have of you that you need to overcome. Okay, interesting. You know, for me it's like first you start off as a female and so people think you might be leaning towards certain areas and so starting from when I was young I got a rush out of defying the expectation that people had of me and maybe that's how I have ended up to where I am today. But I liked to surprise people, but some people don't like that and so I can see that being a challenge for some women if they're saying I really like math and technology and science and if they get some odd looks or even just a lack of support they might start backing off and start thinking they may be better suited for something else. But for me I actually really liked the challenge. It made me more excited to overcome that and say, hey, I can be a woman, I want to surprise more people. I want to get into Stanford and do electrical engineering because that's not going to be the expected path that others have of me and I want to show that I can do it. And it's been really nice to see more and more female role models who have stories like that because then you start making it more of the norm so that if someone really is hesitant on whether they should or shouldn't be going down that path that they see other women who've been strong and achieved many things that they were able to do that. Before the cameras were rolling you were also talking about your experience at Workday and the mentorships and the sponsors that you've received, the sponsorships that you've received. Can you tell our viewers a little bit more about your experience? Yeah, I mean I think that's been a big part of my journey at Workday. So I started off as a product manager for our collaboration team. It was my first time doing product management only six years ago and I had my manager at that time he really believed in me and combined that with the fact that we were at a fast growing company we were only 900 people at that point. I told you we're over 7,000 now. Lots of opportunities were coming up and he was able to say hey there's this other opportunity around our extensibility area which was totally unrelated to collaboration but he's like you've done well with what I gave you over here, why don't you try this? And it was not something I would have personally volunteered for because I actually didn't think that I was capable of doing it but he's like no I believe in you, I think you can do it. I've already advocated for you that you should take on this role and so I stepped into it, did a good enough job for them to say okay we're going to keep investing in her and that manager continued to really put me forward for other opportunities and then when he switched roles he nominated me to be his successor for leading the whole team. And so he's been a really major part of my career progression here at Workday and I think having someone who can be there to advocate for opportunities for you and also teach you how to navigate an organization who are the key decision makers? Who do you need to influence? What are the relationships you need to build? All of that is such valuable knowledge to have that you may not know otherwise, right? A mentor might not even be able to do that for you but someone who's really sponsoring you can. Great. Well Erin thanks so much for joining us here on theCUBE. It's been great talking to you. Thank you so much. I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff Frick. We will have more from Grace Hopper just after this.