My name is Evan Child, I'm a senior manager at Qualtrics. I graduated from BYU with a bachelor's and a master's degree in computer science, After graduating, I went down and worked for Exxon Mobil down in Houston, Texas. I was there for a little more than six and a half years and had a variety of different types of technical software engineering positions, working primarily in the Exxon Mobil Research lab. I loved my time there, it was a really great place wasn't planning to leave, did take advantage of tuition reimbursement there and did MBA at the University of Texas at Austin, where I focussed on both finances as well as on technology management and I enjoyed that. It was a great experience, found out that I really enjoyed finance, thought about changing my career into finance at that point and then ultimately decided that I wanted to say in Tech and so shortly after that, though I did leave Exxon and I went to work for Goldman Sachs in Salt Lake City. Goldman is an outstanding really fantastic company. I had a lot of great experiences there, some of the things that I did there, I worked in the GSAM business, Goldman Sachs Asset Management, working primarily in the fund of funds businesses and then switch to the equities division where I focused on developing solutions for real-time trading and tracking and loved it, it was a great, a lot of fun. After some time there at Goldman, Qualtrics reached out to me and sold me on the opportunity to be a client-facing, customer-facing and so it was that in large part and the fact that Qualtrics was a rocket ship and was taking off and going quickly that I decided to leave Goldman and come down here to Qualtrics. It's been a great experience. A couple of incidents or experiences, I guess that you might use as anecdotes to discuss how I got where I am. First of all, when I applied to my master's program in computer science at BYU, I was originally not accepted into the program, and this was a great experience for me to go through because I had to decide if I really wanted to do that and I ultimately decided that I did. So, after retaking the GRE, I reapply and was admitted. That was a win in my mind and the same thing happened, actually, in the MBA program I applied, I got waitlisted. They advised that I should retake the GMAT, I did well on it but I retook it, studied for it a little bit more and did a lot better on it and ultimately made it. I think the two things that I take from that are that being willing to work hard and not giving up allows you to achieve things that you really want. So those couple of aspects anecdotes from my own career about trying to be gritty in terms of my desire to get things done.

At Qualtrics, we give engineering managers really two different roles. First is the engineering manager so I have several teams that I manage. I do the people management side of things, I'm involved in hiring and firing, if you will, I do performance reviews, I help decide on compensation. I'm also heavily involved in the engineering and architecture and design aspects of it. So I'll sit down with my team, will go through how the system's supposed to work which brings me to the other aspect of what I do at Qualtrics, which is a product manager role. We typically ask most engineering managers to be focused on, what's the product supposed to do? What are the requirements? What is the market expecting that we do? which is a little outside the norm, normally you don't have engineering managers do that, but for a variety of reasons, that's an opportunity we give our engineering managers here. That's something I really enjoy is thinking about the way that customers are going to use, what we're trying to build for them, gathering that feedback from them. It's sort of ingrained in what Qualtrics does as a company to gather feedback. So that's a big part of what I do. Weekly hours I spent in the office, I have to do a lot of one on ones with my team members. I sit down and we have career conversations. We try not to do status, although inevitably that comes upon on the project status but I think where I'm making my biggest contributions is really helping to develop the leaders on my team. So I have three different managers that all report to me, and there are working to grow their careers and manage the people that they're responsible for. All of that is very fulfilling to me to see that career growth, to see the products get developed, to see the aspects. I do travel on occasion, I have a team. One of my teams is up in Seattle. I'm up in Seattle on a regular basis. I also was in San Jose and Bellevue earlier this year, giving presentations at conferences regarding the products that we've been developing and I do work from home, it happens. I'm not sure how much you want to know and what's interesting about that but as the opportunity permits, I'm able to dial in from home and make things work out.

So let me talk about three. I will talk about people that report to me, people that are my peers and people that I report to or work with that are more senior than I'm. So job titles that I typically work with on my team are software development engineers and associate development manager, associate software engineering manager. So the software development engineers I work with directly I don't do as many code reviews, I have in the past. I'm not doing a lot of coding right now, but I do sit in on design reviews on a regular basis, maybe get feedback on how people write those designs. So are they thinking about how to architect something? Are they thinking about how do I engage with this other team over here? I help to provide not only architecture feedback but also a Steven, Mr. software development engineer, Here's how you need to engage with this team over here. Make sure that you're aligned as far as a technical perspective, make sure you are aligned on schedule, make sure that you have a clear line of sight as far as what is actually going to be done so those are the types of aspects of the feedback to my engineers I work with. As far as the associate managers that I manage, a big part of my job is making sure that they're doing their job. So as they are engaging directly with their reports, doing when I one on ones, having career conversations, making sure that everybody's getting the appropriate technical feedback, making sure that everyone is aligned and working towards the same goals, that were organized, that we keep track of the tickets that we're currently working on all those things are aspects is to make sure that our organization functions from an operational perspective. Obviously, we have on-call rotations as well where engineers might get woken up at two in the morning or whatever the case may be to fix an issue and making sure that we're organized that were consistent, we're meeting our service agreements for how we respond when one of our systems goes down, that's a big part of what I do with each of my teams. As far as my peers, I work with other senior engineering managers and engineering managers and that's why I would consider them my peers. But what I do with them it's largely about both influence, we really think that you ought to go build on our platform, for example, and I was going to make the case for why they should consider using the different components and tools and systems that we've architected to solve the problems that they're doing. It's a big part of what I do on my day to day job one. But then the second one is also unblocking people. So I mentioned that some of my associate managers and software development engineers need to go work with other teams to accomplish that, they really have to think through, how do I influence them? That's where I can come to help and unblock their interactions with other teams by having conversations both sometimes with my peers, sometimes with the people who were their peers necessary. Typically trying to interact with the folks that are at the same or similar level as what I am. And then my superiors, I report to a director, I used to report the CTO we hired a director, so I report to the director of engineering here at Qualtrics and a big part of what I do with him is keeping him informed around the progress, making sure that I raise any potential escalation topics and by that I mean, something's going wrong, something's off track, either within my own team or within another team that we're interfacing with in order to deploy our stuff, we need to have them finish what they're doing otherwise we're blocked. So it's not just, Hey, we're at the status. Hey, we might be at this stage in a couple of three weeks if we don't do something about it, and so I can leverage him to go influence that other organization again at his same level. So about determining what's the right level at which I need to engage, what's the right level which I need to influence other organizations to get them to do what we need to do in order to be able to accomplish our objectives and ideally if I could do it in such a way that it also enables them to accomplish their objectives, then that's when we get into the win-win territory.