 Welcome to the CUBE's special program series, Women of the Cloud, brought to you by AWS. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Very pleased to welcome Megan Hayes to the program now. Megan is the COO of Blackstone's technology group. Megan, great to have you on the program. Thanks for joining me today. Thanks for having me. Tell me a little bit about your background, a little bit about your role as COO. Yeah, definitely. So I joined Blackstone about six months ago and I serve as our Chief Operating Officer of Blackstone Tech and Innovations. And really what that means is I look at all of our aspects of operational excellence. I run our agile practice. I look at our labor strategies, what we do with workforce, our finance function, and what we do with our communication strategy, training, and really just everything that centers around continuous improvement and how we really drive culture across technology. So it's a pretty dynamic role. It really looks to serve across how we enable our entire tech organization and it's just a lot of fun. That's good, fun is good. Sounds like it's a very comprehensive role as well. I was looking at you on LinkedIn. You've got background in physics and engineering. Talk to me a little bit about your path to getting to the COO level. Yeah, I mean, it has been a non-linear path for sure. I think a big part of it has been just jumping in opportunities that have had lots of different aspects of technology, product, data, anything that I've had a passion in as it has revolved around technology. And so I think being a good COO is about asking really good questions, being thoughtful and looking for opportunities where organizations can keep driving excellence, keep getting better. One of the things that I think is really important about being a good COO is just thinking inevitably about what's next and what's on the horizon in terms of the future of technology and how you can enable that within an organization. And one like ours, we're always kind of looking for what's next. So I think for me, it's been about taking those next opportunities about really continuing to drive that across finance. So I've had positions across various industries within the financial services sector and have really had a great opportunity to be here at Blackstone. So I'm very excited. Sounds like you have a really diverse background. And I always think those non-linear paths, mine wasn't linear either. And I talked to a very few people whose career paths are linear, but you get so much thought diversity because you bring in different perspectives. I can imagine that's a huge advantage to the COO role at Blackstone. I'd love to get your advice on how would you advise the audience watching this maybe looking to grow their careers in tech? What are some of the key recommendations that you would deliver to them? Yeah, I think about it in two ways. I mean, the first thing for me is about asking for feedback. One of the things that has really come to me throughout my career has been people that are willing to give those tough messages to really push you to grow. So one of the things that I have been challenged with is exploring what do I need to get better at? Where do I really need to lean into growing those skills? And part of that is it comes in messages from others where they're willing to reach out to you and give you that feedback proactively, but sometimes you have to seek it out and you have to really ask peers, mentors, people that you have seen grow in their own careers, people that you admire and you wonder how they got there themselves and just really seeking out feedback, asking what you can do to grow yourself and not being scared of hearing those tough messages and leaning into it. So I think that is the first part of it and really fostering and cultivating a sense of not being fearful of hearing those messages of feedback. So thing one for me is go after that. It's never a bad time in your career to really listen for feedback and to think about what you can do to keep getting better. And so I would encourage anybody to really think about ways that they can continue to grow and continue to cultivate new skills and new competencies and look at those opportunities to get better. And then the second thing is, don't be scared of taking on opportunities or roles where you don't have every last skill. I think predominantly along with women, we try to see ourselves as being perfect in every aspect of a job opportunity. We really wanna know that we're going to be great. And oftentimes where you see the most growth is when you don't have some of those skills where maybe you have 40 or 50% of what's on that job spec and the rest of it is, well, I'll learn as I go and that is where the growth is. So don't be scared of being really interested in a job opportunity where you have part of what's on that job rack and you don't have all the rest of it and lean into that and let that a little bit of that fear, a little bit of that anxiety drive you to keep getting better and cultivating those skills and that new opportunity. I've been fortunate to have senior leaders and other mentors in my career see things in me that I couldn't see and encouraged me to take opportunities that I didn't think I could be successful at and I've gone after those things and then seen the growth in hindsight. So I would really encourage people to look at those opportunities where it's a little bit scary and then go for it because that really cultivates a whole new set of skills. And when you look back on those challenges and those opportunities that you jump at, you're like, wow, I would do that again and you keep doing that and you find yourself going. Now I know so many more things than when I started. So the combination of feedback and taking risks I think really helps elevate someone's career over the course of decades. So those are two things that I think can be just incredibly powerful throughout a person's career. Absolutely, I couldn't agree with your advice more. I think it's open, open your ears, open your mind, open your heart, but also to your point, I was doing some research a few months ago for a women in tech segment and I saw that women will apply and you talked about this for a job say on LinkedIn, if they meet, they won't apply unless they meet 100% of the job requirements whereas men will apply if they meet only 40 and your point is you don't have to meet all the job requirements. Very few people do, take the risk and to your point there's so many new skills and new growth areas that you can unlock for yourself by just taking the risk. Maybe it's a little bit scary, but I always think a goal isn't worth having if it doesn't give you some butterflies in your stomach. Exactly, exactly. And I think so many of those butterflies, it's the adrenaline, it's the motivator and it is the thing that will push you to take the training course, to read the book, to reach out to a friend, to seek out help and that is how we continue to get better. Education at its finest, it's upskilling at its finest and I don't think that being perfect at something is necessarily the best thing. It is the imperfect nature of learning and education that actually makes us better at what we do and more introspective about where the failures are that we can continue to grow. So I think that we should be a bit fearless when it comes to our own growth in our careers. Yes, I love that, becoming more fearless. There's so many positive things that can come from it as a result. Talk to me now about some of the successes you've had where you've really helped solve problems for customers or even for Blackstone related to the cloud. Yeah, I mean, one of the biggest things for us has been the journey of migration. So when you go from going off of your data centers and migrating to the cloud, that is a tremendous effort for any company especially one as we look to do it here at Blackstone. So we've migrated over 240 applications to the cloud. We've shut down our four data centers. That's a tremendous effort that the team went through and a huge success story, I think across all of the teams that had to come together to do that. The biggest benefit truly was the cultural one though, the ways that the teams collaborated, the ways that they came together, how they had to work across the different leaders, across the different teams and figure out how to get things done. And so that culture of collaboration that was really instilled across the day-to-day teams that were so used to working together. And then all of a sudden, so many teams across different executives had to come together and figure out how to get the work done. That has been instilled now, I think in the ways that we work to date and then the upskilling and the leverage and opportunities where they could focus on things that created business opportunities for our consumers and our businesses across the company and working on those higher leverage opportunities has been phenomenal. And so those carry forward lessons that we've been able to take with us and are here today. And so as we've been planning for the years ahead, what's the tech strategy and how do we look at things? Those cultural benefits have been massive successes, I think for our team and something that have really been instilled now in the culture of our tech workforce. It sounds like you've really impacted, positively impacted the ethos of the company. And I think projects like what you talked about, migrating 240 apps, being able to shut down four data centers, I don't think you can do that without cultural change at the same time and that cultural transformation is really the fuel that has to be there for digital transformation to be successful. I kind of see them like this, like that they're linked. And it sounds like you guys have done a great job at Blackstone about really, really driving that cultural change for the better, for the permanent but also for the better across all lines of business. Yeah, and I think it opens up for people what they can do. They start to see the momentum build, they start to collaborate together, they start to share their expertise with one another. And I think they see those, those linkages getting created and they realize, okay, I've been doing the state today, before the migration took place and now that there's this forcing function and the teams come, they come together in a big room, they're trying to figure out large scale plans, they're trying to understand how to get things done, how to leverage the latest and greatest technologies, how to make things more modern and reach those huge milestones. All of a sudden, it enables this creativity and this uplift that they haven't seen from prior ways of working. And I think that just creates a huge amount of ways of thinking about how we're gonna work going forward and the creativity just starts to flow for the future. And it creates a lot of leverage and uplift going forward. And so that culture that just starts to get instilled and ingrained also then becomes a huge recruiting lever for us and then also a retention lever for us because people start to work in a more modern stack and a more modern way of being. It's momentum, right? I mean, absolutely it's momentum that's really driving that flywheel. I wanna switch topics a little bit and get your perspectives on diversity. We talk about it so often in technology, in every industry, but there are still some challenges there. I'd love to get your perspectives on some of the things that you've seen and what are some of the improvements that you think can be made where diversity is concerned? Yeah, I mean, diversity is still a huge challenge and so many facets of the pipeline as I think about it and as I've experienced it in the recruiting aspects, the retention aspects and even the elevation of great talent. So in technology specifically, it's still a challenge to really ensure that we can get into minority and lower income communities to ensure that there's great access to training and to folks that really want to participate in this kind of a field. It's expensive, it has a high barrier to entry and to really get out there and teach people these great and innovative technologies is difficult. And from my perspective, the essence of technology is diversity because it's about how you look at the future, it's about how you innovate, it's about how you see things with a different perspective and so it's vital that we have people from all different walks of life, from all different experiences, having these skills and can see the world through the lens that they experience the world from. And so it's not just the beginning of the pipeline of ensuring that people have access, but also when they have a passion for it and when we recruit them and when we give them opportunities to have a career and flourish that we can also make sure that it's a place that they can flourish, be promoted and then be retained but also elevate and feel a sense of community that is inclusive and that represents them and that they have the encouragement to continue to have amazing, amazing careers where their perspectives are valued and their experiences are valued. And so I think the entire pipeline is something where there's still so much work to do. I think from my own experience, it can be challenging, it can be challenging to be unique with your own, with your own perspective and with your own experience, kind of walking through a tech world, whether it's as a woman or whether it's as a person of color or whether it's as a person with a different sexual orientation and any person that has any intersectionality. And so there's all these different ways that we look at the world and our experiences and technology, again, is this essence of diversity and development. So I think that we still have a lot of challenges in how we build the pipeline and retain the pipeline. And for me, I always try to think of like, how do you use your own experiences to cultivate that in others, to mentor and to build programming that allows your organization to bring in the best and brightest and to really give back because that is really the best way to do that. It really is. I like how you talk about in the diversity pipeline and we think of filling the front end, but to your point, it's really got to be across the life cycle of that from a retention perspective, attraction talent, but retaining them, making sure people feel that they're included, that they have, that their voice matters, that their thought diversity impact matters. Last question for you as we wrap up here, just what are some of the things that are next on the horizon that you see in terms of cloud? How do you see your role evolving? Yeah, I mean, I think really the biggest thing from a cloud perspective really is the talent and the diversity. I think that the more that we cultivate skills upskiller our engineering population and continue to look for ways to modernize our applications that inherently will attract new talent, new ways of thinking, new skills that are coming out of all sorts of organizations, all sorts of colleges, all sorts of institutions that will attract the right kind of talent that we want here at Blackstone. It's really exciting to think about what we can do for our companies that we invest in, for our businesses here at Blackstone, for our engineers and the value that we can bring across the communities that we work within. And so I think that we really just want to continue to attract that talent and drive that value really across the organization. Awesome. Megan, it's been such a pleasure having you on the program, talking about your role as COO of Blackstone's Technology Group. The great successes that you've had where cloud has concerned your thoughts and recommendations on diversity and what you see as next. We really appreciate your time and your insights. Thank you for having me. It's been great. Our pleasure for Megan Hayes. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this CUBE special program series, Women at the Cloud, brought to you by AWS. Thanks for watching.