The best way to beat imposter syndrome? Know your sh*t, and share it

Alice Egan is SaaS Savvy

🔥Enough to be Dangerous

Alice Egan is SaaS Savvy

A newsletter I subscribe to asked for personal essays on the topics of relationships, health, and money, and careers through a feminist lens.

I never heard back, so I’m featuring myself pitch essay here!

For those of you who are curious for a 700-word run down of my story from Barbie-loving girly girl to SaaS Presales Solutions Consultant to solopreneur, this has got you covered :)

Shoutout to all my former Zendesk colleagues for answering all my questions both embarrassing and totally valid <3

The best way to beat imposter syndrome? Know your sh*t, and share it.

How I learned to talk tech, not code it, by keeping none of it to myself

As a kid, I never “tinkered.” I loved Barbies and American Girl dolls, and playing “house” or “school.” Coding? Nah, computers were for Carmen San Diego or flirting with boys on AIM. My math anxiety was bonafide and no one batted an eyelash when I dropped out of high school physics. I was a wordsmith, a people person!

After majoring in French and linguistics, I spent my first few years out of college living abroad and learning languages. What does that mean? was an important question I posed many a time to native interlocutors, and felt no embarrassment.

I was there to learn, n’est-ce pas?

But years later when I landed a job as a technical salesperson (Solutions Consultant) at a leading Silicon Valley Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company, I sheepishly found myself at a loss of words.

I could talk seamless simplicity through software all day, but I had no vocabulary with which to dive into the nitty gritty of our cloud-based CRM, our robust API and SDKs, our AWS-powered platform, JSON payloads, and whatever IPaaS was.

Looking to beef up my technical prowess, I tried learning to code. Aside from the fact I found it relentlessly boring and math-adjacent, coding didn’t give me new words. It was clear a person could code without needing to articulate what was going on or how it worked.

Which for me, a customer-facing technical salesperson, was not going to cut it.

I needed to learn concepts over code, but that would require revealing just how little I knew to those who knew the most.

…

At first, I was loath to admit to any of the fast-talking, more tenured guys on my team that I didn’t know where the cloud was or why my API calls threw errors.

But I quickly realized that voicing my gaps and feeding my curiosity was the best way to go deep fast. Google wasn’t great at answering But what does that mean? - a desk buddy could provide much needed context or partnership.

People proved supportive over judgey, and I noticed the little ego boost people got while talking about things they knew. What’s more, I had the sense my colleagues benefited from my “dumb” questions - forced to explain a concept they perhaps only knew in their heads, they reinforced their expertise out loud.

I got answers, they got practice.

It was also clear that I wasn’t the only person in the dark - plenty of other people didn't know things either, but were more hesitant to expose their blindspots.

Hmm.

I started writing down everything I could, synthesizing my notes into digestible giveaways. I served up all kinds of references, 101s, and video tutorials to new joiners or teammates who also found themselves with a lack of words.

After a while, I had a reputation as a person with answers myself. In our Women of Presales group, I created a space where we could discuss technical questions out in the air. Through creating in-depth trainings on our tech, I sought input from people across the business and forged new cross-team connections.

Beyond making a name for myself, I did better in my job. SaaS and APIs went from intimidating jargon to concepts I could speak about with confidence and authority. I won more deals, got promoted, and jumped at the opportunity to take on the UK fintech market. Financial services may have stoked that latent math anxiety, but if I could teach myself to talk tech, I figured I could speak fluent finance too.

…

When a new role emerged to enable technical sales teams on our products and technologies, my work made me top of mind for the job. In that role I went on to launch an internal course to get Go-To-Market employees up to speed on SaaS and cloud so they could sell smarter. Engineers even Slacked me that it helped them better explain their code and communicate with non-engineers.

These days, I’m founder of SaaS Savvy, where I’m building a course teaching customer-facing professionals to talk tech, not code it. I am a firm believer that anyone can learn enough to be dangerous about anything, and that concepts compound with the right foundations.

Pushing past the nagging fear of asking a “dumb” question was the best way to learn quick; sharing knowledge with others was the best way to reinforce it, build community, and drive the knowledge home.

Treat your curiosity as a skill to have and to hone, and remember that the best way to know your sh*t is to share it with others.

Stay Savvy

Curated links and commentary at the intersection of tech, business, and culture.

Relevant Roundup

Things that are relevant to the current business and/or cultural zeitgeist

What Comes Next for the Mostly Empty Downtown in America from The NY Times

Sometimes I get a whinge of nostalgia for the pre-COVID San Francisco tech boom times I was briefly a part of, but also chose to leave behind. I haven’t been back since, but am curious to see where the city evolves to next.

It’s News to Me

Profound, perhaps never thought-about things RE internet, cloud, and business

We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google. Here’s what it says. from MIT Technology Review

Gebru was specifically let go after the publication of “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” I was curious to know just what was written in this paper that would have tipped the scales to push her out, and MIT Tech Review summarizes many of its points in this article. I was most surprised by the environmental and financial costs of AI - for example, just training Google’s BERT alone is equivalent CO2-wise to a round-trip flight between NYC and San Francisco.

Tech Beyond the Valley

Things happening in tech in literally anywhere else

Inside the Face-Off Between Russia and a Small Internet Access Firm from The New York Times

Earlier this year I was exploring Gmail alternatives (lol, I know, cute, As if!), and the Switzerland-based Proton was one of them that was specifically touted for its privacy and security features. Beyond an email client, they offer free software that masks a person’s identity and location online, and this has made them a foe to Russia. Scary.

Unplug from tech

Not tech-related, but fodder for more stimulating small talk or captivating an audience.

Why Is This Generation Struggling So Much? with Scott Galloway on Modern Wisdom

I discovered Scott Galloway on Eva Longoria’s Connections podcast (which I linked to last). Described by The NY Times as the “Howard Stern of the Business World” and perhaps a healthier alternative for young men put off by current Joe Rogan, Galloway critiques (and loves) Big Tech, teaches marketing at NYU, and wants to create more economically viable men in society. I’m all for it.

A Note from Alice

Shortlisted & Technical Underbelly on pause this week.

I will either move to monthly publications of this newsletter or slightly change the structure to make it more sustainable. Updates to come either way.

I love writing these but I have a lot going on building the SaaS Savvy course!

That being said — are you on the Waitlist?

➡️ ➡️ Sign up on www.saassavvy.io