Women in STEM – You Don’t Have to Be a Rocket Scientist

It all started in sixth grade – my love of math. By high school, it got to the point that I looked forward to math tests. I loved math because I always knew how I scored by checking my work – it came easy and was fun. At the same time, I played classical piano and my teacher was strongly urging me to attend music school. As the first child of immigrant parents, I felt I only had two options – medicine or engineering.

I ended up becoming a pre-med majoring in chemical engineering at Stanford – much to my parents’ delight. However, things changed in the summer after my sophomore year during my internship at the Hewlett-Packard Analytical Instruments Division. I fell in love with manufacturing engineering and swiftly changed my major junior year to mechanical engineering, eventually receiving my masters in Manufacturing Systems Engineering.

My first job was at Instron Corporation, a materials testing equipment manufacturer in Canton, Massachusetts. My love of technology soldiered on and I was the first to program and introduce the Instron robotics line which is still selling today. I also learned that engineering could be a solitary profession and I craved interaction with people. Two years later, I attended Harvard Business School with a focus on operations.

First job after business school was in operations with Hewlett-Packard, where I managed a production line for cardiac imaging transducers. I applied my technical skills to streamline processes, learning the intricacies of wiring and identifying bottlenecks. This allowed me to double the line’s productivity while also improving employee morale. Understanding how to leverage technology for business outcomes became a mantra for me.

Over the next decade, as I was raising my family (my husband and I went on to have 4 sons), I made lateral moves to IT, Marketing, Procurement and Supply Chain at HP. I left and worked at two Linux server start ups and then returned to HP shifting to go-to-market and sales. Sales, you say? What does that have to do with technology?

During the Mark Hurd era, sales was becoming more of a science than art. Concepts like total addressable market (TAM), share of wallet (SOW), and propensity to buy introduced the need for complex technical algorithms to determine quotas, assign territories, forecast outcomes, and track quota attainment. I was drawn to this new function and applied my technical skills to mature sales into a data-driven function. I later had the opportunity to bring this approach to similar roles at Intuit, Informatica, and VMware.

I initially received an offer at VMware to run the Americas Sales Strategy and Operations team. However, with the Dell acquisition of EMC that role did not materialize. During this time, I fostered a meaningful relationship with VMware’s Chief People Officer, Betsy Sutter, who was determined to bring me on board. Leveraging my technical background, I interviewed for the role of central engineering (R&D Operations and Central services). My ability to use technology to achieve business outcomes was attractive to the CTO and I got the job.

Over the next several years, we transformed this central engineering function to significantly enhance the product experience across areas like performance engineering, security engineering, globalization, localization, R&D enablement, and release management, while also driving efficiencies and scale. Today, I serve as the Senior Vice President of SaaS Engineering at Nutanix, a leading hybrid and multicloud enterprise software company. I lead a talented team of product managers, developers, and data scientists. Our mission is to drive world-class customer, partner and employee experiences through data-driven innovation. SaaS Engineering is at the intersection of people, process and technology and we employ systems thinking focused on impactful end-to-end experiences for our internal and external stakeholders. We are constantly integrating our technical skills with business outcomes that truly matter.

Recently, I was honored to be nominated by Jade Global, an IT consulting company, for the Stevie Award in the category of Woman of the Year - Technology. I was fortunate to be one of the finalists and will be heading to NYC in early November to see if I receive a gold, silver or bronze prize. Regardless of the outcome, the recognition itself is a win for me. From that young girl who discovered math to a working wife and mother who has navigated both engineering and go-to-market functions at the highest levels, technology has always been the theme of my career. While the number of women in STEM isn’t rising as expected–perhaps because these careers seem too daunting– I am living proof that you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to have a successful career in STEM.

About:

Kathy Chou is Senior Vice President of SaaS Engineering at Nutanix. Her team is responsible for building secure and scalable SaaS applications and systems across the entire customer life cycle.

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