Ari Rizzitano knows exactly who her hero is: Limor “Ladyada” Fried, founder and CEO of Adafruit Industries. Rizzitano, a senior software engineer at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, has looked up to Fried since she was an undergraduate engineering student.
“At the time, there weren’t many well-known role models for women in electrical engineering, so Limor stood out: young, nerdy, pink-haired, and entrepreneurial,” Rizzitano said. She and her friends used Adafruit’s open-source engineering tutorials to build their own electronics, and the experience changed the trajectory of the college student’s career.
“I discovered that I really enjoyed programming and tinkering with microcontrollers, and I ended up switching majors from English to computer science,” she said.
In a field with less than optimal representation of women leaders, aspiring young tech workers are hungry for role models and inspiration. Built In talked to five women tech leaders in Boston to learn more about the women who inspired their vocation.
From mothers to mentors, these leaders shared powerful stories of being encouraged, inspired and empowered to forge their own path as women in tech. Like Rizzitano, women in powerful tech roles made imagining their own trajectories that much easier. These stories, in honor of International Women’s Day, are reminders of the impact of representation.
Warner Bros. Discovery is a global media company that provides content across multiple distribution platforms, including digital distribution arrangements, throughout the world.
Looking back on your career so far, is there a woman who has consistently inspired you?
There are two women who have inspired me and shaped me into who I am today. One of those is my mother. She's someone who grew up with very little, only had a high school degree, and went on to become director of claims at a successful workers’ compensation firm.
My mother taught me to be my own advocate in order to accomplish whatever I want in life. She taught me healthy boundaries, to speak up for myself, to be confident, and so much more. All of these teachings are what enabled me to feel empowered no matter what I set out to achieve.
My mother taught me to be my own advocate in order to accomplish whatever I want in life.”
The second is my former manager, Charlene Liang at CIDC, an online gaming software company. She helped me navigate being a woman in the tech industry. She also taught me how to advocate for myself, and provided me with the resources to grow my knowledge in the Business Intelligence environment for which I was working.
Being a young woman in the tech and gaming space in the early 2000s was a unique experience, since both were such male-dominated industries. Having Charlene as my mentor and an example of someone who was successful in that space was so refreshing.
How have you incorporated the lessons and achievements from her life and career into your own?
Being confident has helped me tremendously in my career. Both my mother and Charlene were great examples of this. Women have had a long history of being told to be quiet or stay small, as if what we put out into the world didn't matter as much, but women have so much to contribute.
If a woman is confident in her abilities and in the work she is contributing, then others will also feel confident in her abilities and her work. Learning to quiet the voice that says “is this really good enough?” and fully believe in your own talents and skills is a superpower.
Another lesson learned is that it’s okay to not always have the answers. Knowing when to seek help isn’t a weakness. It shows initiative, and that you care about the success of your objective. Learn how to ask great questions. Find resources or people that you feel comfortable going to with questions or for support.
I’m also always reaching out to stay connected. I have monthly meetings with other women in my department. These women have become the people I feel comfortable with reaching out to for support because we've built and maintained great relationships over many years.
Acquia specializes in providing cloud-based digital experience management solutions.
Looking back on your career so far, is there a woman who has consistently inspired you?
I’ve been fortunate to have many women to look up to throughout my career. My constant is my mother, who is someone I aspire to be like both personally and professionally.
Immigrating to a new country without understanding the language and culture required perseverance, determination and tenacity while allowing herself the grace and forgiveness to learn from mistakes and to overcome challenges. This has played a major role in my development entering the workforce as a young professional and is still a part of my fabric as a leader today.
How have you incorporated the lessons and achievements from her life and career into your own?
As a first generation Chinese American, I had a front row seat to many important lessons around overcoming adversity, and the importance of community and advocacy that have carried on into my professional life.
As a first generation Chinese American, I had a front row seat to many important lessons around overcoming adversity, and the importance of community and advocacy that have carried on into my professional life.”
The lessons of being comfortable with the uncomfortable have led me to many opportunities to disrupt the status quo in Talent Acquisition. My mother taught me to always advocate for myself and my ideas even when it was uncomfortable, to tackle the big (sometimes scary) audacious goals and to always do the right thing.
Many years ago, I was working at a technology company and saw an opportunity to create a space for employees to build community within the organization. I seized the moment to stand up the company's Employee Resource Group infrastructure and created the overarching ERG Counsel. This will help leaders like myself navigate forming ERGs and championing diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging. It is from my mother that I learned to take chances that will ultimately allow me to achieve the impossible.
I also believe it is my responsibility as a business leader to pay it forward and develop great leaders of the future. An area that I am passionate about is serving our communities.
For example, here at Acquia, we host many in-person and virtual events, offering opportunities for underserved or underemployed groups in our communities to upskill and position them for success in the future. I get excited to see more women and women of color with a seat at the table, because I believe that representation matters.
Federal Reserve Bank of Boston promotes sound growth and financial stability in New England and the nation.
Looking back on your career so far, is there a woman who has consistently inspired you?
I’ve always looked up to Limor “Ladyada” Fried, founder and CEO of Adafruit Industries. Adafruit is a hardware company that manufactures electronics components, tools and kits for building everything from robots to synthesizers to wearables. The company also fosters a vibrant learning community by publishing tutorials, guides and project ideas that help people learn about circuitry. The tutorials and spec sheets are free and publicly available, so you can build (or modify) an Adafruit project without necessarily buying the kit.
I first learned about Limor and Adafruit from a friend in college. At the time, there weren’t many well-known role models for women in electrical engineering, so Limor stood out: young, nerdy, pink-haired, and entrepreneurial. Not only could she build circuits, she ran her own company. This upended my stereotypes about engineering and business, ultimately changing the course of my career.
At the time, there weren’t many well-known role models for women in electrical engineering, so Limor stood out: young, nerdy, pink-haired, and entrepreneurial.”
Beyond bucking stereotypes, Limor is a hugely positive, inclusive figure within the “do-it-yourself” community. Engineers tend to focus heavily on technical perfection, for good reason. But this can intimidate newcomers, leading to monoculture and brittle products. Since Adafruit’s inception, Limor has invested in culture alongside innovation, welcoming beginners and fostering open-source collaboration. She’s shown how mindful culture work can benefit not just a single company, but the tech industry at large.
How have you incorporated the lessons and achievements from her life and career into your own?
As a broke, nerdy college student, I immediately latched onto Limor as a role model. Adafruit’s kits were too pricey for my ramen-and-textbooks budget. But since she published the instructions online, my friends and I were able to bootstrap our own “kits” using components we scavenged from discarded electronic devices.
Although I had no technical background, Adafruit’s highly accessible tutorials enabled me to experiment, hack, and build my skills. I discovered that I really enjoyed programming and tinkering with microcontrollers, and I ended up switching majors from English to computer science.
Limor has shared how Adafruit’s open-source community actively helps to maintain the company’s projects by finding bugs and opening pull requests to help the core team move faster. I’ve had the privilege of working on a few open-source projects, and it’s extremely rewarding to watch a global developer community solve problems together. But the guiding principles behind open source — transparency, collaboration, and innovation — are valuable for any software team. I try to embody this mindset in my work as much as possible. Sharing is contagious.
Over the years, Limor grew Adafruit from a small dorm room operation to a mature company with 100 employees and a 50,000-square-foot factory. Rather than scaling too quickly or ceding control to investors, she stayed true to her original vision while running a successful business.
Purpose-driven organizations are my favorite places to work because you get to grow and learn while working toward a meaningful goal. I’ve grown tremendously during my time at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, and I’ll always take pride in the work my team did to launch the FedNow® Service (the Fed’s instant payments service).
Ultimately, what I admire most about Limor is her ability to strike elegant balances: principles and profit, innovation and culture, machines and people. I particularly appreciate this quote of hers from an interview with Github:
“Being a developer exposes you to this fragile duality of dealing with computers and humans. It’s about that goal of perfection and then at the same time, also managing human expectations, desires, needs, and wants, with no boundaries.”
Endpoint designs, engineers, and tests interactive response technology platforms that enables data access through phones.
Looking back on your career so far, is there a woman who has consistently inspired you?
Looking back, it has never been one consistent person that inspired me, but many that I have encountered over time. The first woman who inspired me to pursue my career in the tech and healthcare industry was one of my professors at MIT, Martha Gray.
The first woman who inspired me to pursue my career in the tech and healthcare industry was one of my professors at MIT, Martha Gray.”
She is a biomedical engineer who encouraged students, researchers and peers to seek creative solutions for unmet needs in healthcare. She provided resources inside and outside of class, sparked partnerships and collaborations across the industry, and was very knowledgeable about the healthcare industry and its challenges.
She broke boundaries between learning and doing and helped students and fellows all become contributors to the enhancement of the healthcare industry for the patients and stakeholders. Her approach to problems was not tech forward, but human-centered, relying on tech to create solutions. She made sure that our solutions were not just catch words, hype, or another iteration of the most trendy technology, but feasible solutions to real problems.
How have you incorporated the lessons and achievements from her life and career into your own?
When I encounter a complex problem to solve, sometimes I play her voice in my head. I repeat the question of “what is the problem/need?” in my head until the problem’s root cause becomes clear to me. Then, I map out everything related to the identified issue and try very hard not to decide on solutions until I am clear about all of the stakeholders' perspectives.
I also go through scenarios in my head of how stakeholders' day to day lives would be changed based on the ideas I bring to life. Then I go through the devil's advocate voices to poke holes until I feel confident that I can present the ideas to a larger group for deeper discussions. Martha instilled this in me early on in my career life, and it has helped me humble myself and become a problem solver who listens.
Stavvy is a financial technology company that designs platforms to manage security risk, eliminate fragmentation, and increase speed, efficiency, and transparency in lending and banking.
Looking back on your career so far, is there a woman who has consistently inspired you?
My manager, Kayleigh DeMello, has been a source of constant inspiration. In an environment where the business is constantly adapting to client needs, she has been able to maintain project focus and team positivity. She is able to take account of a given situation, analyze the variables, and make tough decisions promptly and efficiently in times of ambiguity.
My manager, Kayleigh DeMello, has been a source of constant inspiration.”
Kayleigh understands how to leverage resources available to her, and when necessary, pursue with tenacity information from other departments and higher leadership. This allows her reports to maintain a sense of purpose and direction, weather uncertainties and changes by keeping an end goal in sight, and trust in her leadership. Kayleigh's goal-based focus, ability to clearly communicate, and ability to persevere in pursuit of answers has contributed to her being a well-respected and effective leader in the company.
How have you incorporated the lessons and achievements from her life and career into your own?
As a promoted manager myself, I emulate much of how Kayleigh leads a team. She has shown me how to commit to achieving goals despite obstacles and ambiguity and how to maintain focus of product vision and engineers. Kayleigh has also taught me to communicate candidly and empathetically with others.
Transparent and empathetic communication cultivates mutual understanding among colleagues, clarifies product objectives, increases efficiency in producing deliverables and fosters better relationships. Consequently, definition of team direction is solidified, confidence of direct reports in leadership is bolstered and interpersonal relationships are nurtured and strengthened.
Kayleigh encourages me to communicate what I believe in and have faith in my own voice, which has helped me to have more confidence in myself and my leadership capabilities. She has been and will be an instrumental mentor throughout my career.
