Jen: Welcome to the Asos Tech podcast, where we are continuing to share what it's like to work inside a global online fashion company. Perfect. You may have bought some clothes from us, but have you ever wondered what happens behind the scenes? Hello, my name is Jen Davis and my pronouns are she, her and I'm an engineering manager at Asos. I would first of all go over to Char. Would you mind introducing yourself? Tell us what you do, what your role is.
Char: Hello. I'm Shah Chang. D her, and I'm a platform leader asos So I have been with Asos for coming up to ten years, so I've seen a lot of change in the time.
Jen: Thank you for that, Shah. And over to a very lovely Laura. Would you like to introduce yourself, please?
Laura: Hi, I'm Laura Tombs. She her. I'm a web engineer in the web platform, so I've been at Asos for 18 months, but I did used to work here before, so I'm what we call a boomerang. Why the places? And I was like, no, I miss Asos. So I came straight by.
Jen: Thank you both for that. So I'd like to start off with a bit of an icebreaker and Shaw, I'm going to ask you first, what did you want to be when you were growing up?
Char: That is an interesting one. When I was about five or six, we had this exercise at school and they asked, what do you want to be when you grow up and why? And I basically said I wanted to be a lime tamer. And I actually said because I thought it was easy. And it is printed in the school year book. Oh, wow.
Jen: I've never heard of anybody wanted to be a lion tamer, especially because it was easy.
Char: I think my parents probably worried about me at that point in time.
Jen: And how does being a platform lead now differ from being a lion tamer, do you think? Are the similarities?
Char: Certainly not easy, but at the same time, I'm not saying it's difficult, it's challenging, but in a good way. What I absolutely love about it is that it combines delivery. Right. Because I used to be a project manager, but with a lot of work and development around people. So people for me is the key thing, really, and that really drives me day in, day out, and I really enjoy my job because of that as well.
Jen: Cool, thank you. And Laura, can I ask you the same question? What were your dreams as a young girl of your future life?
Laura: So, I think it was quite a typical one. I wanted to be a vet, which I think a lot of kids go through.
Jen: Yeah.
Laura: Actually, up until I had my son, I used to faint at the sight of blood. Anna Ruga wasn't pretty good at science, so I don't quite know how I was going to make that happen. Apparent positive thinking. Yeah. So, unfortunately, that didn't quite work out.
Jen: Yeah, I definitely shared that. I definitely wanted to be a vet as long as I didn't have to do any of the gory stuff. I certainly wasn't going to be into putting any animals to sleep. I basically just wanted to play with fluffy kittens and puppies. That was my dream of being a vet. Yeah. And then the moon landings happened because I am that old. And I thought, yeah, I'd like to be a space man, because obviously space women weren't a thing at that point. So a space man was something I aspired to. So how did you transition from wanting to be a vet into being a web engineer?
Laura: To be honest, there's a lot of different careers in between that.
Jen: Tell me, how did you get this? How did you end up where you are?
Laura: So I do have a bit of a weird, what we call like a wonky career. So I've got a psychology degree. It was at that point where everyone just went to University of that generation. I was lucky because I loved my degree. I actually loved going to lectures, and I really, really enjoyed it. I sort of focused on neuroscience towards the end of it, and unfortunately graduated slap bang in the middle of a recession. That wasn't great. And I ended up actually going into retail management for a couple of years. So I used to look after sort of 40, 50 student, which had its own challenges and its own rewards. And then I decided I wanted to go more like a traditional office role. So I went into recruitment and I did agency for a little while. And then when I moved down to London, I went to work at the Top Shop, topman head office on Oxford Street. I was an internal recruiter for them, and he also did HR and learning and development as well. And it was great. I loved my job, I loved my team. I was in there's a lot of different skills you learn doing that. You learn about everything in the business because you have to go to interviews, know what you're talking about, you have to know about PPC, buying design, garment template. You have to know about all of these roles and how the product cycle works. So I was really lucky. Like, I loved that. But as I carried on, I found myself a bit reluctant to take on promotions. And I was thinking, I don't think this is maybe challenging me in the right way. And I kept sitting on these interviews with the people that worked in tech and the digital world, and I remember this vividly. There was a guy who came in and I think he was interviewing for a graphic designer role, but he was really into technology as well, and he grew up in India. He said, I grew up really poor in India. I loved fashion. He's a dream that one day I'd go to London Fashion Week or like New York Fashion Week, and I didn't think I'd ever be able to do that. And I got into technology and I started doing a little bit of code and he showed us this QR code with a 3D app that he built that he could watch the shows so you could hold it on the table and hold the QR code on your phone, watch the shows happen.
Char: Oh wow.
Laura: Just blew my mind. And I remember turning I was interviewing with the top man, digital director, I was interviewing him with him and I turned to him and I was like, how do people do that for a living? He was like, you need to go learn how to code. So I actually quit my job at Topshop and went to a twelve week boot camp, a place called General Assembly, which again loved. Really good, really intense, but brilliant, like some of the best time of my whole life. And then after that I joined Asos for the first time as an engineer. So yeah, it's been really career, but it's been brilliant and I've actually been really lucky. I've loved all of my jobs for very different reason, but I can obviously say that where I am now is the most fun, the most rewarding, and the most challenging.
Char: Amazing. I feel you're very brave because I think quite often people get into roles and then you just stay in that role and on that career path. And the fact that you've chopped and changed but also enjoyed everything that you've done is incredible. Absolutely incredible. I got into tech completely by chance to some extent. It wasn't something, I guess maybe in my generation that I knew that many people actually doing computer science. I don't think it was a big thing at the time. And they essentially studied a business degree. And that in part is because my parents are Chinese. And if you grew up in a Chinese family at the time it was we want you to either study law, medicine, or business, or maybe accounting as well. So I remember one summer, I basically joined an advertising company just as a summer job and I absolutely loved it. So I said to my parents, I want to do advertising, though I know you're not going to make money out that you have to study business. Then I was like, okay, how about I do a marketing degree instead? They're like no business. So that is why I did a business degree. Not because I really wanted to, but.
Laura: I thought at least I'd be able.
Char: To do some marketing and learn a bit about advertising, et cetera. And I did really well on my marketing modules and I came out of university saying, that is what I want to do, I want to go into marketing. But it was really difficult getting a job after uni trying to get onto grad schemes, et cetera. And I eventually found a temp job at Barclays Bank, and there was a job working with a web communications director in their marketing department. And they were looking to replatform the corporate banking website. So that means bringing on a new content management system, redesigning how it looks, the user journey. And I thought, brilliant. So I interviewed for the role, and partly because I had done the advertising job previously, I understood some of the process and what it takes to basically deliver content. And I ended up working with the director for about a year and a half. I worked with media agencies in creating the look and feel. I worked with IBM and basically looking at the CMS, I think I worked with probably about 60 stakeholders trying to understand what their requirements were. I learned to pull together a project plan for delivering everything. And that was all great. It was interesting because I previously worked with Barclays, putting letters into envelopes as a part time job, as I was a poor student. And when I left there, I had to hand over the work that I was doing to some of the managers. And they were like and they were the same managers I used to put letters into envelopes for. So they were like, oh, wow, we didn't know that you could do all these other things right, because this was in Coventry, I moved down to London and I was like, I'm going to get a marketing job. So I went to recruit age, and they said, what were you doing over the last year and a half? And I talked to them that, have you ever considered a career in project management? And I was like, what is project management? And they said, Everything that you've been doing, liaising with the stakeholders, getting requirements together, looking at the project plans, all those kind of things, managing dependencies. And that is how I started my career in it. Because I basically worked for a web agency in London as a project manager. And I have gone through various project management roles. And it's all a bit by chance. I've landed it into what I'm doing now. And actually that's paved the way into platform lead as well, because as I mentioned earlier, as a platform lead, I manage or lead four delivery teams for engineering teams, and we support the business delivery across, asos my area is specific to stock and fulfillment. So anything related to stock fulfillment is basically what we do.
Jen: Brilliant. Thank you both so much. Although both of you said that you had nontypical roots into tech, I actually think for women, this sort of sideways approach into tech is more common. The amount of women that I've spoken to that have said, yeah, I went and studied computer science and then I went into tech is close to zero. There's very few women out there that took that route, in my experience, anyway. There might be lots of other women shouting at the screens right now.
Char: And I think it depends actually, which country you're in. So I work with a lot of offshore teams as well. And I know when I've spoken to friends of ours or people I've worked with in India, they say actually the ratio of which is much lower in this country. The ratio of women to men who go into computer science is there might be slightly more men, but it's a lot more equal compared to looking at this country, which is interesting.
Jen: No, you're absolutely right.
Laura: Part of my role at the moment is so I'm a women in the tech community lead like Jen is as well. And the bit that I look after is education. So as part of that, we go out to schools, we speak to young women about careers and technology, because when you look at the data, that's where we're losing people, that's when we're losing women, is at those crucial stages where they're picking their options, they're picking their A levels. I think. I'm not going to get this completely wrong. There was a statistic that the rates of young girls, young women considering a moving to computer science or even a career in technology is something like a fifth of what is happening to boys and young men. So it's almost like from 1314, a career in technology in this country isn't really considered if you're a woman, and hopefully the tide is changing. I do feel like that in the schools we've been to recently, but I wonder if that's maybe part of it as well, maybe that non traditional route is because it's not really talked about in school so much. It wasn't certainly when I was at school. So hopefully that's changing now.
Jen: Hopefully it does seem to be. Certainly when I was looking into it, it almost felt like computer science was an offshoot of math and it just all felt very uber technical, if you like. It was something that I didn't feel I could ever achieve. Because I also think that a lot of the perception of tech is just deep diving into code and algorithms and all of that stuff. But Char, your testament, it's massively wide, isn't it? The amount of tech careers you can have is just huge. Correct.
Char: And when we talk about women in tech, it's not just the engineers, is it? We have a whole lot of supporting roles. So you can still work in tech and be a project manager or a platform lead or we have business analysts that work with us as well. So I think people always you tend to think of tech, people think, I know if I've spoken to people before, they're like, oh, you work in tech or you work in it, that means you can code. And I'm like, no, I don't code. I did double my hand at Python during lockdown just because I used to be and this goes back to what you said, Jen, about people thinking about computer science and math. I used to be very good at maths and I always thought if times were different now and if I was younger now, would I taken a different career path? I wonder how good I would have been at programming, for example, because I love problem solving, all that kind of stuff and I actually did, yeah, I taught myself a bit of Python and wrote a little Miniat. It wasn't exciting, but for me it was, because it actually worked, whereby you just plug in, like, your salary and it tells you how much you pay for your base tax rate versus your whatever tax rate. And if you were earning over so much money, what would it mean in terms of and it will break down all the taxes. It wasn't particularly useful but I actually got it to work and I was quite surprised.
Jen: Yeah, I'd be really interested to know laura, I'll come to you first, if you don't mind. I'd be really interested to know how different is your actual role to the perception of the role that you had before you got into tech?
Laura: That's such a good question. It's completely different in every way. I was in recruitment before so it was handy that I knew the broad outline of the role and I also knew that the career was going to be like a really lucrative, really flexible career so all of those things to be fair, have completely lived up to expectation. I think there's this strange misconception, and maybe I had this a bit as well, that you aren't people orientated if you're a web engineer you don't have to be good with people or you don't have to have particularly good communication skills it's not really the focus but actually it's hugely important. You are constantly communicating with other people and if you're not doing your job as well as you could and you're not enjoying it as much as you could so I think that was a really big misconception for me. I thought that I would be sat on my own in a room coding and at the time because I was doing sort of twelve interviews a day recruitment, I was ready for that. It is way more people focused and it's also a lot more creative than people think as well this real sciency side of it. And again, the whole maths thing was a real common thing. I also believed that before I was a web engineer I thought I'm not good at math, wasn't particularly good at science and I don't feel like a very techy person but actually I think it's about creativity and problem solving. You have to come up with solutions and you have to craft something if you want to be creative but you're not good at design, you're not good at actual art, but you want to build stuff you can create really cool things with code. So I do what's called CS art in my spare time occasionally when I get any, and I've done patches of building, like 3D things in code using WebGL, and you can be so creative with it. So, yeah, it's really different, but in the best possible way, it's even better than I thought it was going to be.
Jen: Cool. And Char, you mentioned that about problem solving. Did you see that being a massive part of the role when you weren't in tech? How are your differences manifesting themselves?
Char: I guess it's a bit different because I slid into this career path. It wasn't something that I considered doing, but from everything that Laura said, I agree with in the past four, I think people used to say, how can you innovate? And actually, I feel it's in everything that we do asos intech as well. And it doesn't matter what role you're in, so from what Laura says, you're given a problem or a requirement, but it's down to you to go figure out how you want to solve it. Right. And I feel that has innovation in it as well. But it's not just problem solving on engineering solutions, it's part of my role. We are very much focused on delivery, but also on improvement. And that just doesn't focus on how we design stuff, but also how we deliver it. So we're always having to think on our feet in terms of, can we be doing things differently? Is there a more efficient, effective process to be doing things because we love efficiency and effectiveness, because it also drives and supports people's happiness in the role. So I think in terms of problem solving or being creative, I think it's part of all our roles. Right. I think if we're all passionate about what we do, we want to be experimenting, we want to be doing things differently, we want to be challenging ourselves. It's just part of our day to day.
Jen: Yeah, I completely agree. And I think the ways of working as well with pair programming, you're never stuck in that room by yourself, really, are you? It's building those relationships with stakeholders and with your colleagues and knowing how to ask for help and knowing that everybody's there trying to get the, as you say, the focus on delivery. And it's not just the delivery of the individual, it's the delivery as a team, which I think is lovely.
Char: We always say this as well. I think the people skills and the behaviors we always say are very important at Asos, but I think it's important anything you do. I was having this conversation yesterday saying actually how we conduct ourselves at work should be like, how we conduct ourselves outside of work, right. And how we build those relationships with our family and friends, et cetera. Right. Because you could be brilliant at your job in terms of your technical skills, but if you aren't able to work with others or be able to communicate with others, et cetera, it makes your job really difficult. And quite often we don't work on our own. We work as part of a team. Right. Should be a direct team or indirect team. But we always say in order to be effective, you do need to have.
Laura: Those people skills 100% if you're worried about communicating with someone or asking for feedback. And feedback is essential when you're a web engineer. If you don't get that and you're worried about that, then it really creates like a bad loop, breaks that feedback loop completely.
Jen: Yeah, I completely agree. And that age old comment that you can always teach people technical skills, but the people side of it, the people skills, the soft skills, they're much harder to teach, aren't they?
Char: Yeah, definitely.
Jen: So here's a more challenging question for you both. What do you think we could do to attract more women in? I'm sure we all agree there are nowhere near enough women in this field. And why wouldn't you want to work in tech? It's just brilliant, isn't it? But what can we actually do? Unfortunately, I'm going to land this one in your lap first. Any thoughts?
Char: I think it's providing more visibility of what we actually do that people understand. As Laura was saying, it's not just all we were discussing earlier, it's not just the engineering roles that people think of, but there are many other ways that you can be working within Tech as well. And I think it's probably because there's a lack of visibility of it and people don't understand the breadth of roles that they could go into. I think if you don't know they're there, then you're not going to consider it as part of one of the career options that you've got. I haven't been involved in this, but I know that as part of the education piece, going into schools, start having those conversations early so that people understand what we do at Asos, for example, what roles we did, even all the conversations that we've had today, how did we get into it? I didn't study to get into the role, and I know that there are a lot of people who didn't set out to work in it, but I think it's interesting for them to hear, actually, there are different paths to get in there. And actually there's probably a lot more support now because there are women like us in Tech and I think we should be looking at ourselves as role models for these young girls.
Jen: Laura, any thoughts on attracting more women in tech?
Laura: I think, again, that education piece is really poor and that visibility. So on our most recent education outreach event, we had a group of girls come in from a school of ages between 13 and 15 and the feedback that we got was they couldn't believe how many different roles there were in Tech. Me, that feels slight difference in potentially the curriculum, which I know is a huge topic to take on. And also it's really hard because the teachers aren't given the resources speaking to the actual teachers, they aren't giving the technical resources to actually make these decisions and form this interesting, engaging work for school, I guess it would be now. It so I think that piece is really important. It's showing that there aren't just engineer roles and also, like Shawn said, it's that, okay, how does that actually look in a day? What does that actually look like? And I also do think there's a bit of a piece around the career change aside, and I increasingly see more people going through boot camps, which is amazing. I still occasionally teach at General Assembly where I learned how to code, and I run workshops on sort of intro to CSS and HTML and I literally, rather than just give the spiel, which some do, I like to actually do a code along because I think don't know if you're going to like it unless you actually do a bit of code. So I think those things are really important and actually the benefit of getting maybe women in quite a transformative state in their careers where they're maybe having thoughts about what they want to do next. Getting women then that could potentially then come into technical roles is so valuable for them, but it's even more valuable for us because they are bringing a whole wealth of experience and a completely different perspective. And you also think, and I've seen this a little bit more on social media, is the rise of the female engineer influencer, which is awesome. So there are a couple of female engineers that I follow on Instagram. I've got really great tutorials from them. Like, whenever I felt a little bit disillusioned, I can't do that ticket or not. The Apostasyll on their platforms, and I look at some of the talks they've done and the sort of encouraging, open way that they talk, I think, yeah, I'm so lucky to do this. This is amazing. So I think there's a lot we can do. I do think that we're all doing the right things now. I think having this podcast, having the women in Tech, having the Asos blog, all of these things are the right things to do. And I think it's just going to take a little bit of time to get there.
Jen: Completely agree. And I think the older women coming into Tech is a massive market, too. Women returning to their careers, maybe after having children or just getting fed up in the role that they've got. Tech is a fantastic place where you can come and just grow and develop. And because of that breadth of roles that there are available, you can try one thing and go, actually, I think I'm going to veer off in this direction now and see where that takes me. And I think, yeah, that's a great thing for women to explore. Yeah.
Char: And we have that at Asos as well. Anyway, so we do have people who come into engineering, for example, and they love it, but then they see there are other opportunities. For example, they might oh, there's a role in a business analyst, which basically their role is to work with product, to basically understand what the requirements are and deliver them into team. And people make jumps into different roles. So you might start off as an engineer, but you can move into a business analyst role. But I was thinking about also, I went into a Women in Tech conference recently and what was quite nice to see was and maybe they should be doing more of this there was a group of young girls from a school. So it was by chance because I think one of their parents was speaking at Women in Tech, so they were able to get some tickets. But it meant that they could go around the stores, they could speak to different companies. And we did stop to speak to them, talk to them about what do we do at Asos, how they could get into engineering there. I was quite excited by seeing them there. Right there. There was a bit of a buzz around it, but I think there probably needs to be more of it because there are great opportunities. These Women in Tech conferences, they should almost be encouraging more schools or enabling them to come visit and basically speak to future companies out there and get girls thinking about the careers that they could have.
Jen: For sure. I'm reminded now, actually, in my previous organization, we also invited a girl school in to show them all of the women that were working in tech there. And we did everything. So I remember one woman who was the head of end user computing, stripped her laptop down, gave it to them and say, Rebuild this, which they absolutely loved doing. And then there was another woman who was a data modeler, talking them through data models. I must admit they weren't quite as thrilled by that role, but it still showed there's this other thing you can do. Yeah. And it was the same. One of them said, yeah, I'm coming to work here straight away from school. This is where I want to be. And it just lit that spark. That's what we need to completely agree.
Laura: Yeah. The feedback we had after that event, the last event we did not only did we have and I've saved it in my emails because it just meant so much to me, was these girls saying, I want to go work as a product designer for Asos. I want to go work as a product manager for Asos. That is what I'm going to do now. And actually selecting computer science as one of their GCSE options come into that event. It's lovely to see that generation.
Char: I.
Laura: Think we're in good hands.
Jen: Yes, for sure. Laura, I've got a question for you. Can you tell us about some standout accomplishment that you've achieved in your career so far?
Laura: Yes, so I feel like there's been a lot of amazing things that have happened and I've been really lucky to be part of. Obviously the women in tech education stuff. It's the thing I'm probably most proud of. But as someone who rape you, deli suffers from impostor syndrome, as I think a lot of us do. I actually was involved in a project when I first started back Asos. It really sticks out to me. We're looking at creating a component library in web. So it's going to sit across the whole web platform. It's going to be packages of regularly used components of the website, so things like buttons, typography, and we want you to be involved in it immediately. My head, I said, I can't do that, no way. That seems a lot of pressure. I was, oh, no, I can't do that. But I was like, sure, yeah, that would be great, thank you. And then I was and this has been talked about for a very long time, this component library, and there'd been some amazing progress towards it that hadn't started yet. So myself and a couple of the engineers, initially just one and then another one in my team, our job was to build this component library, like from conception through to actually making the components and then pushing them to our repos and replacing old code with this new beautiful reusable packages. So we literally came through that. I built the first component that was used across the website, so it's the spinning Asos logo. Lot of help. I managed to flow that as ampose component. And even now, when I look back at the finishing of that project, it's still now ongoing through a guild, having people talk about it really openly, we get that from the component library. That little flame that I was involved in that from the beginning, I've not had that in that way before. Like a real technical achievement. So, yeah, when I'm having a bit of a tough day, that's the thing that makes me remember, okay, I can't do this.
Char: Cool.
Jen: I will never look at that spinning logo again without going there. That's Laura's logo. Char, has anything sprung to mind for you?
Char: I've delivered many projects over time, but I was trying to think, what's the big standout thing for me? And it's probably less about project delivery, but more so about a role that I've stepped into. So, as I mentioned, when I moved down to London, I basically got to the web agency. This goes to show how many years ago it was just around the.com bust time, but essentially as a project manager in the agency, I wasn't really working on web delivery, but more so on the media side. So we're talking about ad banners, et cetera. The story goes, I left there and I went to India to work NGO, and my mom was probably worried, going, what are you doing? You need to get back into a job straight off. You can't, at the age of 27, take six months off. But I did, because I'd always wanted to do it and never had an opportunity to take gap year. And coming up to those six months, I was in mountains in India and at a morning rave and I bumped into an engineer. He basically had done something similar to me. He left his company for six months, and I only met him for 24 hours. So we exchanged email addresses and when I came back to London, literally a week later, he emailed me and said his company had taken him back and their project manager is leaving. Would I like to apply for the job? So literally, I got the job the next week. Now, it was a job, a role, project management role in a mobile agency. Did I know anything about mobile? No. Worked on any web stuff? No. Did I understand what APIs net? No. And it was a steep learning curve. And at that point there was very much the impostor syndrome. I did fairly interview for the role and got given there right. But at the same time I was thinking, do they actually know how much experience I have? They used to joke about it in meetings. They talk about Java beans and they'll look over their table at me and go, not the same as coffee beans, by the way. Just to let you know that I felt I did incredibly well there. And that probably gave me my passion for working on tech projects, because I do love the if you've got a problem that you need to solve, how are you going to do it? And there's a secret geek in me, he likes having the technical conversations with team time. Obviously, I don't understand the code stuff, but I know enough. And it was a very steep learning curve. But it was an incredible year. I learned so much. It gave me that taste of what I wanted to do, which was to continue working in tech. I worked with a lot of great customers at the time, so we worked with all the big network operators doing stuff for them, and that the work that we did, I think, was just too ahead of its time. We basically wrote conversational apps, you know, those phones, really old school phones, you can only write so many characters in your text messages. And also we were delivering people probably haven't heard of It applications. But the company, I feel, in speaking to my past colleagues and friends, we think it was way too early for its time, because nowadays you've got all these chat bots now, and in essence, we were doing all this stuff way before, all this stuff that we have now has come about, really. So we're like it's just a shame that actually, we're probably a bit too ahead of our game. The market wasn't really ready for it and nor were the phones. But in essence, it gave me a taste for tech. A real taste, instead of I'm not saying it wasn't a proper job previously, project managing, ad banners, working on that side of the fence, it was fun. But where the real meat is and the complexity, for me, that's where I like it is basically within the web space.
Jen: Lovely. Congratulations to you both for overcoming Impostor syndrome. It can be quite a leap, can't it?
Laura: Yeah, definitely.
Jen: So thank you very much. That's been just a great chat. I absolutely love talking to you.
Char: Thank you very much.
Laura: Jen, thank you very much for having Anne.