Being a manager in a software company is hard. Your CEO wants more things shipped every month. Your direct reports say they don't know what the company strategy is, and two of them are in an ongoing feud. Your cross-functional colleagues aren’t terribly functional. Your customers are complaining on Twitter. How do other managers figure out what to do?

On October 15, four senior leaders from local software companies answer your questions about manageering--live. Join us and ask this seasoned group how they'd handle the hardest problems you face:

Juan Pablo Buriticá, VP of Engineering at Splice
Dheerja Kaur, Chief Product Officer at theSkimm
Tanisha Barnett, Director of Engineering at Mailchimp
Tracie Lee, Product Design Director at The New York Times
Moderator: Ras Kasa Williams, Staff Engineer at Mailchimp

Drinks and snacks at 6p; panel at 6:30p.

This event is hosted by Mailchimp Brooklyn as part of our Mailchimp Chats series.

We're holding the event at the Invisible Dog Art Center's main gallery, which has accessibility info here. If you need captioning, a sign-language interpreter and/or other accommodations, we'll set that up. Email merridith@mailchimp.com to let us know what will let you participate comfortably and fully.

About the Speakers

Juan Pablo Buriticá

Juan Pablo Buriticá is the VP of Engineering and IT intern at splice.com where he leads a distributed engineering team throughout North and South America, with the mission of building the creative hub for the modern musician.

Juan Pablo has built high-performing software engineering organizations by emphasizing Open Source software values, technical excellence, trust, and empathy. He has also organized more than 10 software engineering conferences in the US & Latin-America, founded multiple JavaScript meetups, and led the growth of Colombia’s JavaScript community, now one of the largest Spanish-speaking JS communities in the world.

His favorite food group is empanadas.

Dheerja Kaur

Dheerja Kaur is Chief Product Officer at theSkimm, a company that focuses on delivering news and information into the routines of female millennials. They have an audience of millions who engage with them daily via their various digital products. Prior to joining theSkimm, Dheerja was an engineering and product leader at ESPN, working across all of their digital products and spearheading major products like Grantland, some of their flagship apps, and a relaunch of ESPN.com.

Tanisha Barnett

Tanisha Barnett is a Director of Engineering at Mailchimp, an always-on marketing platform for small businesses. She has over 19 years of management experience in the IT industry. Tanisha started her career as an engineer and quickly realized that her passion was in growing people and organizations while continuing to stay in the IT industry. She is committed to diversity and inclusion and the impact it has on organizations. Tanisha holds a Bachelor's Degree in Management Information Systems from The University of Georgia. Go Dawgs!

Tracie Lee

Tracie is a Product Design Director at The New York Times. Throughout her career, she has pursued opportunities where technology facilitates connection through storytelling. She initially was fascinated by the power of self-publishing through blogs and the communities that sprung up around them, so she worked with small publishers like Gothamist, Paper Mag, Brownstoner and Talking Points Memo at Six Apart. She led a team that helped these publishers design for compelling narratives with the aim of growing their audiences. She led design at Serious Eats, where she worked with editors to create an authoritative brand and engaging experiences to build trust with their readers. She now collaborates with product teams that are focused on strengthening the relationship between The Times and its audience.

Through these experiences, she believes that design management plays a vital role in both building those innovative products and creating diverse and inclusive workplaces. To that end, she is leading work on tools and processes that support career development and define a shared language for the practice of Product Design at The Times.

Ras Kasa Williams

Ras Kasa Williams is a Staff Engineer and Tech Lead at Mailchimp where he builds infrastructure and tooling to support Data Scientists and analysts at the company.

Kasa has spent time in his career focused on everything from building out scalable data processing workflows, to coaching and mentoring around professional development, to building supporting communities for Black technologists through organizations like /dev/color.

He's a BIG fan of travel and seafood!

Mailchimp Chats: How Do Managers Really Think?