Welcome to the Asos Tech podcast, where we are continuing to share what it is 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 screen? Hello, my name is Jen Davis and my pronouns are she, her and I'm an engineer engineering manager for Asos. In this episode, we're doing something a bit special to celebrate Women's History Month in March, which obviously includes International Women's Day. So all our content this month is being presented by some fabulous women. I'm here with the very lovely Carmen and Lucy. Would you like to introduce yourself to us and give us your name, your role and where you live?
Yeah.
So I'm Lucy. I'm an engineering manager at Asos. Pronouns as, she, ha. I'm from Coventry, but based in the London office.
I didn't know you were from Coventry. It's interesting. So just down the road from me, really. And Carmen, would you like to introduce yourself?
Hello, I'm Carmen. I'm an associate. QA. My pronouns are she, her. I'm based in Coldstone, which is the very south of London. Just before you hit the M 25.
Nice to have those geographic locations, I think. So I'm going to kick us off with an ice breaker. And that is what did you want to be when you were growing up? What did you imagine your future was going to be like as a little girl? Carmen, can I ask you first?
Yeah, you can definitely ask me. I unfortunately don't have a straightforward answer to that.
Interesting.
I probably more like for cultural reasons. I just wanted to be anything that wasn't what my parents wanted me to be. That makes sense. Anything that wasn't forced for me. So I wanted it to be fun. Think just that wasn't your typical study as hard as possible job. But you always wanted to be a mom? That was one thing, which I am. I have two little girls, so that was one thing. But, yeah, job wise, no idea. Just went for it.
Okay, that's interesting. That is very interesting. Lucy, were you similar or did you have a firm idea?
Yeah, so I was probably the same. I was trying to ask my sister this. I didn't really have anything specific. When I was younger, my mum always told me I could be whatever I wanted to be. I just needed to try my best. So I had no kind of specific career and I really thanked my mom for that because it gave me the opportunity to do what I wanted and change my career multiple times because I didn't have, one, that set thing. And two, my value was based on just try and you'll get to where you want to be.
So I've got to ask then, from that point, how have you ended up as an engineering manager? Lucy, take us on that journey.
So I've done a number of hops over the years. So started in Warehousing, then moved into Tax where I dealt with Customs and Excise Tax. I did a bit of like, system set up as part of that and a bit more of the technical side of things. Helped with setting up some robotic process automation and then went to a party and met an ex colleague who worked in tech and got chatting, had a few to drink and thought, oh, that nothing will ever come of that. And then ended up as a job in service delivery and tech. And that was where it started for tech. So I'm not a coder by nature, I don't have a technical background, but just bringing in some of those kind of alternate skills and then wanted to do something more around people. So that's how I got into the engineering manager role and looking after a team.
And do you think because you met a former colleague, so you knew of their kind of capabilities, you understood them, that sort of demystified tech a little bit for you and made it more attractive or more achievable? Possibly, yeah.
I think I've seen quite a few friends and colleagues that have gone from non technical roles into the tech field, so that was good for me and I didn't have some of that stigma, some of it was still there, but I didn't have quite that. You have to be a developer and done a three year degree in order to get into tech. It took some of that away from me and Carmen.
What about yourself? Talk us through your journey into tech.
I technically did study in tech course for university, but my main goal was actually to go into production and do making fun TV shows and all that kind of stuff. I studied at Birmingham as well. Birmingham City University.
Yay, big up, brom.
It was a really lovely course. It had five set modules where obviously the core for us was to do TV studio work. But on the side there was things like design. We used good old dreamweaver to do websites and things like that. We had electronics was one of them. We made like sound mixes and all sorts of things. A little bit of the tech side there. But from that course I went straight into the wonderful world of production. I spent ten years working in production company making commercials. That was a lot of fun and I think that definitely fulfilled my whatever I do, I've got to have fun. But then, like I said, I've got two little girls, so that's kind of my career change came in and I really wasn't sure what I wanted to do. So I did a little bit of retail, I did a bit of that kind of trying to find things that was really flexible to do and some tech just stuck in my mind. From selling your crafting sessions. I'm a creative person and someone once said to me, you couldn't be more creative than working with Tag. You could literally make whatever you want. So I just thought, why not give it a try? Found a role for a QA that didn't need any previous experiences and then moved on from there. And now I went asor. So it seemed to be a good choice at the time and it definitely fulfills everything that I wanted it to be.
I think Qat can be a good routine, can't it? For non technical people especially, I'm thinking Uat kind of user acceptance testing is a good routine to Tech for a lot of people and the crafting. Just to explain, I run a little half an hour once a fortnight crafting session where myself, Carmen and a few of the crafty women get together. And it's interesting that I've found that there is a correlation between women that are into tech and women that are into their crafting. Because as far as I'm concerned, knitting and Crochet is the first 3D printing. You're taking this thin line of stuff and creating a 3D model anywhere. That's a conversation for another day.
Possibly.
One thing I'm interested in is how different is your actual tech role now to your perception of what Tech was before you got into the industry. Lucy, if you don't mind, to come to you first on that one.
Yeah, so I saw a role in Tech was going to be head down coding, not really talking to people. That typical American little boxes and offices, that kind of stuff. That was my perception and very much a misperception of what Tech was going to be like. I thought there was going to be a lot of people that didn't really want to communicate with each other, that weren't necessarily wanting to communicate with each other. That was what I was thinking it was going to be. And that was some of the reason why it was probably something I never really looked at when I was younger. Whereas now I realize we're such a diverse group of people, we've got so many different cultures and understandings and diversity between us that that's really interesting in itself. And everyone's coming from a different place and a different journey. And that career is no longer a ladder. It's this massive kind of spider's web that you can go across and there's no real target. It's just moving around that web. And that's one thing I really do like about Tech is that you can start to discover something else and go off on a different route and you can either come back to where you started if it's not working for you or do something different and it's no longer. That how you'd work in a warehouse and going up and supervisor and manager and then you look after the whole warehouse. That's not in tech. And that's nice.
I love that analogy of the web.
Absolutely.
You can go off in all directions, can't you? But there are always transferable skills, no matter which bit of the web you're in and obviously not the interweb, but yeah, which bit of your career you're in. You've got skills that you can utilize from where you were previously. That's really interesting. Thanks for that comment. How much of your role now is what you imagined it to be?
I probably had a very similar thought to that is how tech was going to be. I definitely thought that you had to be super, super smart and super into coding and know everything. Yeah, it really isn't. It's all about asking questions, especially as a QA. You have to think outside of the box and think of things in a different way to parade your typical way of thinking as well as obviously standard user pass and all that kind of thing. But the more outside you can think of, the more other questions you can come up with. Really helps. But yeah, it is very different and even on our team it's incredibly social and like Lisa said, it's incredibly diverse as well. I don't think I've ever worked somewhere that has such diversity and it is great. And everybody can bring themselves into the workplace as well, which is great. You just got so many types of people and everyone really embraces it. So I think it's fantastic. It's a great industry to be in.
It is. I don't understand why everybody doesn't want to work in tech because it's just brilliant, isn't it? It's just so interesting. And tech now is as mainstream as I've ever known it anyway. So hopefully we will attract more diversity into tech, certainly. When I started off in my career, which was a phenomenally long time ago, the only kind of vision I had was that I'd have to be a man, I'd have to have a substantial beard, I'd have to wear socks and sandals and yeah, and I would just talk in maths, basically. That's what I thought my career would be and it's been nothing like that. I don't think I've ever worn socks and sandals, but I'm prepared to be corrected now I'm starting on the beard, but that's another story.
I think Asos will embrace the socks and sandals anyway.
I'm sure it'll be in vogue any day now.
I never thought about what you might wear because it probably very much used to be a suit tie kind of job.
Yeah, that was definitely my perception. Like suit tie and then a bit of that kind of dark grunginess of the people working in the back that might be dealing with servers like the real hands on kind of techies. That would be like all black because that's what you backstage on theaters and stuff, all black.
So they are glamorizing. It a lot more in films and things now where it's very cool to have all these different kinds of technology.
Absolutely. I think we're so I'm talking a long time ago. So the suit, the suit persona of the It professional kind of came in the, say, mid to late 80s, whereas prior to that it was just shades of beige, really. Shades with the odd flash of orange. 70s. So how do you think we can attract more women into technology? There's definitely a problem here, isn't there? There aren't enough women in technology. We can see it. What do we do about it? Carmen, any thoughts?
This is always going to be an interesting topic. The main thing to do is just to shout about it and be proud. Like the goals that Asos have set to have at least 40% be women that working in tech I think is an amazing goal to be trying to achieve. And the more people who hear about it, the better. Get people talking about it, have anything that just spreads the word for it teachings would be great. I know that there's loads of places which do sessions especially for women to learn to get into the industry. I think all those things are a great way for people to know how to get in. I don't even know how would you find out about it? Because if you're not looking for it, where would you go?
I think for me there's a lot to be said for stuff like this of women actually talking about their experiences and hearing it. Because women notoriously like to communicate. We like to talk, we like to chat. So actually having those conversations and being really open about it and having an opportunity to have those conversations. So whether it be maybe just going into schools and talking to schools and schools, talk to the children, talk to parents and then parents have that conversation with you, things like that can be a really good way to do it. And like I said before, that knowledge of potential transferable skills, you don't have to have the C sharp degree or whatever it might be to get into tech. There are so many roles that we've spoke about that are the less technical roles, but still really are building what we need. Because if you have only one type of person creating a product, it's only going to be suitable for that one type of person. Whereas if you have multiple people building a product, you get that diversity and therefore that shows in a product and that's what you need. You need people that aren't all the same, asking different questions. You get to a point of a really good thing. Women understanding that the skills that they use in time management with kids and running around and doing all those things are really useful in tech. Organization, facilitation, all those kind of things are really useful in tech.
Completely agree. You have to juggle so many different priorities when you're a working mom that all of that is directly transferable into tech fields.
Project Delivery.
I've used Project Delivery to help my parents in law move. Why elderly couldn't move themselves. I set up a cambamboard on my living room mirror and the rest of family didn't know it but they were being assigned tasks every day so absolutely those skills are transferable.
Completely agree.
Lucy, what do you think the industry itself can do to be more supportive of those women when they get into tech?
Think shouting about the flexibility that's within tech is really important. Not just for being a mum, it's all the other things that often women have to consider taking care of the house, elderly, relatives, these things happen. And tech can be such an environment where you've got core meetings that you need to go to and you can plan the rest of your time around that if your workplace is accommodating for me, I get to do the school run and there are things that I wouldn't miss for the world. And now I get to have the job I want and the things I want in my personal life as well. So making sure that's like front and center is really important.
Carmen, any more thoughts on that?
100% agree with having that work life balance. I think for this it's also being that flexible, it's not so stressful in your home life as well. It definitely makes everything easier by showing women that they are going to be supported in this role. I think the engineering managers here are absolutely amazing at their jobs showing support this week I feel like it's definitely been a challenging week because I am doing a holiday stuff that I have done before, I've definitely done tests before but I'm working with a whole new system that I have never worked with before. It's been challenging but I've still got the support network, I've got a mentor to go to, I have all of my team that I can just ask questions. I've got people in my platform, all of this support which is so necessary and it's just great to have around to help grow. Like I don't think people really appreciate how much like growth and development goes into the first part of it. I know a lot of people who are more senior. They're happy in their ways and they forget that they need to knowledge share but having mighty especially they're fantastic with just being there on hand, constantly supporting and having your hearing managers say don't worry about all of it, it's okay. It's okay to take a little bit more time and it's all about the process. I'd say you don't really get that in every single job and also you can turn to the internet and find a lot of answers as well and.
It comes from diversity in itself, doesn't it? Calm and the fact that you've got plenty of female engineering managers, they understand. A lot of us have been through this, a lot of us have raised children, going through it, having elderly parents as you said, gives us that depth of understanding that delivery isn't all about having the nose to the screen every single day or every hour of the day. It's about giving people the space to grow and the flexibility as well in policies, flexible hours, shifting your day, compressed hours, all of those things. They're just all essential tools, I think, for women these days. Can you think of a particularly memorable achievement you've had or a real highlight in your career? I'd love to hear about those. Lucy, I come to you first, if you can think of one.
I think my career has been an engineering manager. One of the best things I've done is bringing a team from the start and helping shape them to them, starting to deploy an application, but really asking some of those nontechnical questions that just sometimes get forgotten about and developers are so far into the detail and it's actually, have you thought about this thing up here? It's like, okay, actually, that question just changed the whole thing and you see what you're adding. Having some of that non technical kind of perspective and being able to have regular catch ups with each and every person in that team was probably one of the best things. And what brought me to Asos was being able to spend that time with each person. So in that team, we really built a lot of trust people, shared personal things, work things and really support each other. So that was a really good thing. And some of the other work that I did around being a mental health champion, so supporting our colleagues, setting up things like wellbeing, walks, wellbeing conversations with our senior leadership teams, coffee, kind of catch up sessions between people just in that remote working really made a small difference, but a big difference at the same time. So there are probably two things that stand out for me and having the autonomy to do both of those.
Because you're heavily involved with the Northern Ireland hub, aren't you? So that kind of remote communication is essential, isn't it, in that role? Yeah.
Trying to bring together multiple locations now is something that I'm really going to try to work on. I'm going to try and work on more because there are simple things that I think we can do across people working from home, london, Birmingham, Northern Ireland and any of our other offices to have the same experience all around.
Yeah. It's quite a challenge, isn't it, in a remote world? And Carmen, can you think of any notable achievements in your career to date that you'd like to share with us?
I don't know. My career feels very short. Would it be really cheesy to say that one of my biggest students is probably getting a job at Asos? Things that I've known about since it started? Me and my friends have been ordering from Asos forever and they still do. And just even like, telling our colleagues where I've moved on to, and they go, wow, asos knowing Asos has a tech place for them. Because to me, I'm like, Asos has the tech place. And they're like, yeah, it's like, almost as good as going somewhere as big as Google, Facebook, and that kind of thing. And I was just like, oh, okay. To me, it's still this online store coming here and actually being a part of Asos Tech now, you can really see it. There's so much behind all of it, and I don't think I'll ever be able to fully piece together how everyone fits into it, but somehow it all works and it's just great. So, yeah, that 100% is my biggest achievement so far in this career. And I'm so grateful for everybody who, like, throughout my interview process, it was probably the best interviews I'd ever had.
It was so relaxed.
And I do look back because I do have days where I'm like, why am I here? What am I doing? And I look back and I'm like, if there are other qualities that I've been able to bring along similar to Lisa, I used to plan a lot of socials, and we're now bringing that with our team. And I just love bringing people together and things like that. And it's been great to be able to go to women in tech conferences. That's been something great. That was really motivating to see so many women talk about what they do and being able to relate to so much of it. So all of those things all put together just from moving over to Asos has been great.
That's so lovely to hear.
It took me ages to apply, and I remember when I got the job, I was like, are you sure? You sure you got the right person here?
Yeah, the tech here is amazing. And even though I'm nontechnical these days, I just like being close to it and go, yeah, doing deliveries every day. Yeah. Except for five.
Yeah.
Eight KS. Yeah. Keep it, Eddie. Sure. Yeah.
I know all the words. Don't ask me to explain them.
That's been a lovely thank you both so much for your time. It has been so lovely to hear your thoughts and your stories about getting into tech and life here at Asos Tech. Thank you so much.
Thank you.