Diversity in the technical workforce is a valuable asset for all companies, because it encourages different types of thinking and taps into the full potential of your team. Come learn from one AWS organization how a fast-moving, fast-growing team has put in place a "diversity circle" for personal and professional development. This program provides a peer mentoring group that builds skills and establishes informal networking support. The host and active participants of this two-year program will share tips and best practices for running a diversity peer mentoring group that spans engineering, product management, and operations.

1. Women in Technology: Supporting Diversity
in a Technical Workplace
Neha Sherpa, Software Development Engineer, AWS
Amy Therrien, Senior Software Development Manager, AWS
July 13, 2016

2. Diversity circle sponsorship

3. The flywheel for growth

4. AWS —unleashing untapped potential

5. Amazon S3 Women’s Circle
Membership selection (17 members)
• Common
• All women (inherent)
• All part of the Amazon S3 organization (acquired)
• Diverse
• Diverse levels of experience (acquired)
• Diverse roles: managers, product managers, software
engineers, systems engineers (acquired)
• Diverse cultural backgrounds (inherent)

6. Two circle starts
AWS S3 Women’s Circle
• Common
• All women (inherent)
• All part of the Amazon S3
organization (acquired)
• Diverse
• Diverse levels of experience
(acquired)
• Diverse roles: managers, product
managers, software engineers,
systems engineers (acquired)
• Diverse cultural backgrounds
(inherent)
AWS Platform Circle
• Individual mentor-mentee relationships
• Aggregation of established relationships
• Common organization

7. Sponsoring
• Identify
• Time/budget
• Coaching
• Facilitating

8. Facilitating trust
Safe environment for learning
Strong relationships keep circles
together
Make it fun!
• Blackberry picking
• Happy hour
• Lunches

9. Facilitating a structure
• Monthly meetings on topics covering experiences and
knowledge
• Amazon S3 topics are defined by the circle: negotiation,
leveling the playing field, communication, confidence, work
life balance, etc.
• Establish role models
• Individual mentoring for the first role models
• Leverage existing career development techniques and
resources
• Guest speakers, published resources
• Provide feedback, encouragement

10. Knowledge sharing
Inspiration
Practice
Retrospective
Four flavors of learning activities

11. Sample meeting
Knowledge sharing
• 10 minutes: Grab lunch &
greet/mingle
• 30 minutes: Video on “Leveling
the Playing Field”
• 40 minutes: Interactive
worksheets, open discussion
• 10 minutes: Planning next
session
Experience sharing
• 10 minutes: Grab lunch &
greet/mingle
• 5 minutes: Introduction of guest
expert on “Confidence”
• 60 minutes: Pre-prepared Q&A
with guest product manager
• 10 minutes: Planning next
session

12. Logistics
Do’s
• Stay connected to participants’
managers
• Advocate for your circle
participants outside of the
circle
• Make time for retrospectives
Don’ts
• Get into expanding circle churn
• Feel like you need to limit this
to women
• See this as a replacement for
all other mentoring

13. Our experiences and learnings

14. Practice skills example
Background:
design reviews
What we did:
technical presentation practice

15. Examples of learnings
• Experience sharing
= Inspiring stories
• Knowledge sharing
= Learning and
growing

16. Leveraging resources
My favorite:
“Communicating with
Confidence”

17. A story

19. Strategies
Communication changes
impact perceptions
Remove lessing language:
- Just
- Sorry

20. Measuring success
Career path
Growing influence

21. Start your own circle

22. © 2016, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Thank you!