Career Journey 5: Bringing Diversity to Tech Leadership | Bhavini Soneji

**Bhavini Soneji** (0:00)
And Dan, it starts also with starting with some change. So you don't have to wait for the full sponsorship and support from leadership to start this from the ground level. I was part of Microsoft, and a lot of those at initial times, the women just started coming together as a community, as a network, as a support forum to support each other, and then starting to bring about and influencing change. So my thing is that, yes, start with the top, bring about that change, but don't wait.
You can do it in multiple directions and in parallel.

**Conor Bronsdon** (0:38)
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**Dan Lines** (1:42)
Hey everyone, welcome back to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host Dan Lines, Linear B co-founder and COO. And today we're continuing our series on the career journey of an engineering leader with Bhavini Soneji, former VP of Product Engineering at Cruise.
Bhavini, great to have you back on for a second episode.

**Bhavini Soneji** (2:05)
Thank you so much, Dan, for having me.
And as I said before and spelled right, I love what Linear B is doing, both for driving more evidence-based and data-based transformations, which is so, so necessary as we make the whole software production and assembly line, as well as what this group is doing for the community outreach and helping leaders like me to learn from each other. So thank you for doing that.

**Dan Lines** (2:36)
Absolutely, and thank you right back at you with the kind words about Linear B and all the community stuff. And I want to say to everyone, if you haven't listened to Bhavini's first episode on building customer-obsessed teams, product-led companies, go and check that out. I think it's a really good episode. We had a ton of fun recording it. And so yeah, of course it's amazing having you on here for another episode. This time the topic is a little different. We're going to step back from a little bit on the nitty gritty details about how to build a product and the focus of that.
And I would say this topic is a little closer to the heart. You wrote a blog titled Diversity Strategy Built to Scale.
And in it you discuss how to drive diversity, inclusion, improve the number of women represented in tech, all of these really, really important things and some amazing, I guess, stories there. I'm really looking forward to hear your insights about all of these topics. And I think we can kind of just maybe start out simple here for a second. Our first topic is driving diversity in tech. And in your own words, when you just think about it for yourself without being like academic maybe, like why is that important or why does it matter to you?

**Bhavini Soneji** (4:08)
Yeah, I think for the couple of things, why it matters to me, because one is I have been on the receiving side of it. And when I see the next generation, I want to bring that change. And I would say the last but not the least is I have seen it firsthand of how it impacts driving better outcomes for the company, for the team. So I'm a firm believer of it. And I'll tell you one story around that, allyship. Like people talk about what is and why is allyship important.
And that is where when the majority starts supporting advancement of minority initiatives and advances, that's how a transformation comes about. And that's why to drive this, you need both the parties to come together. And that's where I want to bring that awareness on how this would help the leaders and the company. And one of the stories kind of touching back to why it's important to me, one of the stories that came to my mind was during the George Floyd Black Lives Matter movement, I have twins who were, I think, probably young at that age, and we had taken them for one of the support rallies.