- Extracurricular activities:
- Snowboarding, camping, whitewater rafting, outdoor alternative rock concerts.
- Favorite concert venue:
- Three-day event called Austin City Limit
- Favorite places:
- Actually, I am a city person. I love San Francisco—that’s my favorite city in the US. I grew up in Hong Kong, so it’s way up there, too.
Responsibilities:
Manage interactions with our clients, including coordinating engineering and system set-up. A lot of what I am doing is learning, and with the system being constantly updated and improved, I’m looking forward to that continuing.
Job prior to Medallia:
Management consultant.
Similarities between management consulting and Medallia:
Lots to learn, really high-caliber colleagues, and access to senior people in client organizations.
Differences between management consulting and Medallia:
- Autonomy: I definitely have a lot more autonomy here. In management consulting, I was more in a team structure.
- Specialization of role: At Medallia, I am focusing on one industry, retail, so I’m getting less exposure to other industries than I did in management consulting. But Medallia provides services to many industries, so there is an opportunity to broaden my exposure if I want.
- Tangibility of job: The job at Medallia is more tangible because I work with a software application, an actual product. With management consulting, I got a bigger-level picture.
- Relationships with customers: More cordial at Medallia. Our customers are open to hearing from us because we’re perceived as doing something really positive for them. In management consulting, we were seen as giving our clients more work and telling them to do something different. It was less cordial.
- Amount of travel: Less at Medallia, though I have to say I miss the airline miles of consulting!
Positions considered:
Strategy roles (at a large retailer, in renewable-energy industry).
Reasons for choosing start-up:
More exciting, more opportunities to try new things and be involved in the direction of the company.
Things you like about Medallia
- High-growth environment: Being with a growing company is also exciting—you’re thrown into different situations, so you have to be prepared to be flexible.
- Technology: It’s awesome to go back to technology—my educational background is in engineering, and it’s great to be able to leverage both my technical and business sides.
- Impact of your work: The work is really fulfilling: you’re not a number, you get exposure to all the different parts of the business, you talk to everyone—they’re within reach—and you get to work with sexy clients like Nike and Sephora.
- Colleagues: Really friendly, open, easy to talk to. When I started, there were three if us who were new. I really like the starting class mentality, the learning together. Only one of us has to ask the stupid questions.
