Rachana Kumar  is currently the Senior Director Of Engineering at Etsy, the e-commerce platform made for unique buyers, sellers and creatives. But Etsy isn’t like a normal e-commerce site with traditional vendors and inventory, the tech behind the platform is just as unique as the people using it. Rachana explains it all on this episode of IT Visionaries. Plus, she dives into the importance of creating a diverse workforce and doing mission-driven work. 

Key Takeaways:

• How Etsy handles the billion-plus data points generated daily
• Using machine learning to improve customer experience
• What it means to be mission-driven
• Creating for mobile versus creating for desktop

IT Visionaries is brought to you by the Salesforce Customer 360 Platform - the #1 cloud platform for digital transformation of every experience. Build connected experiences, empower every employee, and deliver continuous innovation - with the customer at the center of everything you do. Learn more at salesforce.com/platform

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Brightspot is the leading content management platform built for modern teams. Your content lifecycle - from ideation to archival - moves faster, handling any volume, variety, or velocity with ease. 

Unlike legacy platforms that demand heavy dev work and struggle with scale, Brightspot is user-friendly, endlessly customizable, and enterprise-ready. Think dynamic, modern experiences, shipped in minutes—not months. 

Trusted by some of the world’s leading tech organizations, Brightspot reduces total cost of ownership, boosts productivity, and gives you the governance, security, and performance your teams need. 

Visit brightspot.com/ITVisionaries to learn more.

---

This episode was produced by the team at Mission.org and brought to you by Brightspot.

Computing at the edge is only really starting to come into fashion now. But Tyler McMullen has known the merits of working at the edge for a long time. As the CTO of Fastly, he’s been advocating for the edge and helping companies such as The New York Times and others realize that through Fastly and edge computing, you can create a whole new and better experience for your users. He explains all of that and so much more — including his unexpected love of raccoons — on this episode of IT Visionaries. 

• Explaining the benefit of working at the edge
• How being open source is mutually beneficial to the developer community and Fastly
• What is the current state of the edge and who will be the main users in the future?

IT Visionaries is brought to you by the Salesforce Customer 360 Platform - the #1 cloud platform for digital transformation of every experience. Build connected experiences, empower every employee, and deliver continuous innovation - with the customer at the center of everything you do. Learn more at salesforce.com/platform

-- 

Brightspot is the leading content management platform built for modern teams. Your content lifecycle - from ideation to archival - moves faster, handling any volume, variety, or velocity with ease. 

Unlike legacy platforms that demand heavy dev work and struggle with scale, Brightspot is user-friendly, endlessly customizable, and enterprise-ready. Think dynamic, modern experiences, shipped in minutes—not months. 

Trusted by some of the world’s leading tech organizations, Brightspot reduces total cost of ownership, boosts productivity, and gives you the governance, security, and performance your teams need. 

Visit brightspot.com/ITVisionaries to learn more.

---

This episode was produced by the team at Mission.org and brought to you by Brightspot.

John Kucera the VP of Product Management at Salesforce and Taksina Eammano, VP, AI & Automation, Service Cloud at Salesforce, work together on a mission to bring automation into the hands of customers. On this episode of IT Visionaries, they explain what they focus on when thinking about automation, and they discuss the role automation and RPA will play in the future of work and life.

Key Takeaways:

• Automation can create better customer experiences
• When looking at RPA, you have to understand your process before you automate
• Automation can and will be used to solve really big problems

IT Visionaries is brought to you by the Salesforce Customer 360 Platform - the #1 cloud platform for digital transformation of every experience. Build connected experiences, empower every employee, and deliver continuous innovation - with the customer at the center of everything you do. Learn more at salesforce.com/platform

-- 

Brightspot is the leading content management platform built for modern teams. Your content lifecycle - from ideation to archival - moves faster, handling any volume, variety, or velocity with ease. 

Unlike legacy platforms that demand heavy dev work and struggle with scale, Brightspot is user-friendly, endlessly customizable, and enterprise-ready. Think dynamic, modern experiences, shipped in minutes—not months. 

Trusted by some of the world’s leading tech organizations, Brightspot reduces total cost of ownership, boosts productivity, and gives you the governance, security, and performance your teams need. 

Visit brightspot.com/ITVisionaries to learn more.

---

This episode was produced by the team at Mission.org and brought to you by Brightspot.

The best way to learn about a subject is to study it in depth. Jeanne Ross knows that better than most. As the Principal Research Scientist at MIT’s Center for Information Systems Research, she spends her time really digging into how to get the most out of information technology. One of the subjects she’s looked at closely is the topic of digital transformation — in fact, she recently published a book on the subject titled Designed for Digital. On this episode of IT Visionaries, she tells us about the building blocks of digital transformation and takes us through use cases from Apple to Lego to illustrate how the shift to digital plays out.  

Key Takeaways:

• Jeanne’s work at MIT and how research is done
• The building blocks of digital transformation
• Digital transformation use cases
• How to create a good employee experience when implementing digital change

IT Visionaries is brought to you by the Salesforce Customer 360 Platform - the #1 cloud platform for digital transformation of every experience. Build connected experiences, empower every employee, and deliver continuous innovation - with the customer at the center of everything you do. Learn more at salesforce.com/platform

-- 

Brightspot is the leading content management platform built for modern teams. Your content lifecycle - from ideation to archival - moves faster, handling any volume, variety, or velocity with ease. 

Unlike legacy platforms that demand heavy dev work and struggle with scale, Brightspot is user-friendly, endlessly customizable, and enterprise-ready. Think dynamic, modern experiences, shipped in minutes—not months. 

Trusted by some of the world’s leading tech organizations, Brightspot reduces total cost of ownership, boosts productivity, and gives you the governance, security, and performance your teams need. 

Visit brightspot.com/ITVisionaries to learn more.

---

This episode was produced by the team at Mission.org and brought to you by Brightspot.

Wade Wegner has been focused on building developer tools and platforms for most of his career. Today, he is the SVP of Product for Platform at Salesforce and responsible products that are used by countless customers around the world. What Wade and his team focus on most is helping customers get more done faster so that they can put more of their energy into moving their business forward. On this episode of IT Visionaries, Wade explains how that’s possible with the Salesforce Customer 360 platform, and he shares what we can be excited about coming out of the Salesforce product team soon.

Key Takeaways:

• The world of app development is focused on creating app factories
• Putting together different developers will lead to better results in app dev
• Constant delivery of product should be one of your main focuses

IT Visionaries is brought to you by the Salesforce Customer 360 Platform - the #1 cloud platform for digital transformation of every experience. Build connected experiences, empower every employee, and deliver continuous innovation - with the customer at the center of everything you do. Learn more at salesforce.com/platform

-- 

Brightspot is the leading content management platform built for modern teams. Your content lifecycle - from ideation to archival - moves faster, handling any volume, variety, or velocity with ease. 

Unlike legacy platforms that demand heavy dev work and struggle with scale, Brightspot is user-friendly, endlessly customizable, and enterprise-ready. Think dynamic, modern experiences, shipped in minutes—not months. 

Trusted by some of the world’s leading tech organizations, Brightspot reduces total cost of ownership, boosts productivity, and gives you the governance, security, and performance your teams need. 

Visit brightspot.com/ITVisionaries to learn more.

---

This episode was produced by the team at Mission.org and brought to you by Brightspot.

From joining when there were 7,000 employees to, in just four years, scaling the IT behind Uber’s current 43,000 employees, Shobhana Ahluwalia, the head of IT at Uber, was faced with the ultimate challenge. Some IT leaders dream of helping to scale their company’s IT at the rate Uber did, others may fear it. Shobhana confronted this challenge head on and now is responsible for Uber’s IT across 650 offices in 70 different countries around the globe. On this episode of IT Visionaries, Shobhana shares her insights on scaling IT at Uber, the journey automation optimization has taken over the past decades, and how leaders should think about failure.

Key Takeaways:

• IT’s rate of change is directly correlated with the increase of data
• Scaling Uber to 43,000 employees
• Advice on how Uber views failure

IT Visionaries is brought to you by the Salesforce Customer 360 Platform - the #1 cloud platform for digital transformation of every experience. Build connected experiences, empower every employee, and deliver continuous innovation - with the customer at the center of everything you do. Learn more at salesforce.com/platform

-- 

Brightspot is the leading content management platform built for modern teams. Your content lifecycle - from ideation to archival - moves faster, handling any volume, variety, or velocity with ease. 

Unlike legacy platforms that demand heavy dev work and struggle with scale, Brightspot is user-friendly, endlessly customizable, and enterprise-ready. Think dynamic, modern experiences, shipped in minutes—not months. 

Trusted by some of the world’s leading tech organizations, Brightspot reduces total cost of ownership, boosts productivity, and gives you the governance, security, and performance your teams need. 

Visit brightspot.com/ITVisionaries to learn more.

---

This episode was produced by the team at Mission.org and brought to you by Brightspot.

The usage of mobile phones has been sky-rocketing since 2007 and continues to play a major role in our personal and work lives. In the future, will our usage continue to grow? The answer to that question is still unknown. But we do know how and why mobile is so important in the present day. On this episode of IT Visionaries, we chatted with Victor Oliveros, the Senior Director of Product Management at Salesforce, who focuses on leading a product team that works specifically on the Salesforce mobile app. Victor touches on many things including, how to launch a B2B app, the implementations that go into mobile voice technology, and the importance of the CIO in tech companies. 

Key Takeaways:

• Mobile apps require the least amount of clicks to complete tasks
• Voice is challenging to implement, but the future of voice is bright
• CIOs have one of the most difficult jobs in tech

IT Visionaries is brought to you by the Salesforce Customer 360 Platform - the #1 cloud platform for digital transformation of every experience. Build connected experiences, empower every employee, and deliver continuous innovation - with the customer at the center of everything you do. Learn more at salesforce.com/platform

-- 

Brightspot is the leading content management platform built for modern teams. Your content lifecycle - from ideation to archival - moves faster, handling any volume, variety, or velocity with ease. 

Unlike legacy platforms that demand heavy dev work and struggle with scale, Brightspot is user-friendly, endlessly customizable, and enterprise-ready. Think dynamic, modern experiences, shipped in minutes—not months. 

Trusted by some of the world’s leading tech organizations, Brightspot reduces total cost of ownership, boosts productivity, and gives you the governance, security, and performance your teams need. 

Visit brightspot.com/ITVisionaries to learn more.

---

This episode was produced by the team at Mission.org and brought to you by Brightspot.

Phil Tee would tell you he is a math and physics nerd. But his LinkedIn tells a different story, one about a multi-time founder who currently serves as the co-founder, chairman and CEO of Moogsoft. On this episode of IT Visionaries, Phil explains how he went from studying theoretical physics to finding a place in the tech industry and then taking off from there. He dives into the big operational problems Moogsoft is trying to solve with A.I, and he shares all the lessons he has learned through founding multiple companies.

Key Takeaways:

• How Moogsoft is solving operational problems with A.I.
• Lessons learned as a multi-time founder
• The benefits of building a company in Silicon Valley

IT Visionaries is brought to you by the Salesforce Customer 360 Platform - the #1 cloud platform for digital transformation of every experience. Build connected experiences, empower every employee, and deliver continuous innovation - with the customer at the center of everything you do. Learn more at salesforce.com/platform

-- 

Brightspot is the leading content management platform built for modern teams. Your content lifecycle - from ideation to archival - moves faster, handling any volume, variety, or velocity with ease. 

Unlike legacy platforms that demand heavy dev work and struggle with scale, Brightspot is user-friendly, endlessly customizable, and enterprise-ready. Think dynamic, modern experiences, shipped in minutes—not months. 

Trusted by some of the world’s leading tech organizations, Brightspot reduces total cost of ownership, boosts productivity, and gives you the governance, security, and performance your teams need. 

Visit brightspot.com/ITVisionaries to learn more.

---

This episode was produced by the team at Mission.org and brought to you by Brightspot.

The way that technology has expanded throughout the last decade has been impressive. And that expansion is set to continue. As we move into the future, we can expect that technology will be used in more ways than ever before, including for things like image-recognition. Zineb Laraki, the Deep Learning Senior Product Manager at Salesforce, is helping to build out that technology and more, which she says could change the way people work. She explains on this episode of IT Visionaries.

Key Takeaways:

• The tech behind image-recognition
• Why understanding the scope of a project is important
• The ethics of image capture and the future of image-recognition technology

IT Visionaries is brought to you by the Salesforce Customer 360 Platform - the #1 cloud platform for digital transformation of every experience. Build connected experiences, empower every employee, and deliver continuous innovation - with the customer at the center of everything you do. Learn more at salesforce.com/platform

-- 

Brightspot is the leading content management platform built for modern teams. Your content lifecycle - from ideation to archival - moves faster, handling any volume, variety, or velocity with ease. 

Unlike legacy platforms that demand heavy dev work and struggle with scale, Brightspot is user-friendly, endlessly customizable, and enterprise-ready. Think dynamic, modern experiences, shipped in minutes—not months. 

Trusted by some of the world’s leading tech organizations, Brightspot reduces total cost of ownership, boosts productivity, and gives you the governance, security, and performance your teams need. 

Visit brightspot.com/ITVisionaries to learn more.

---

This episode was produced by the team at Mission.org and brought to you by Brightspot.

Throughout the last twenty-plus years, Jim Ryan has seen his company, Flexera, change and grow in exciting ways. And he’s been able to grow with the company along the way. Today, Jim is the CEO of Flexera, and he joins IT Visionaries to discuss his journey. Plus he dives into how members of the C-suite can find ways to be more efficient, cost-effective, and build out long-lasting companies.

Key Takeaways:

• How CIOs have evolved
• Working with the C-suite and identifying ways they can improve business
• What it means to partner with members of the C-suite

IT Visionaries is brought to you by the Salesforce Customer 360 Platform - the #1 cloud platform for digital transformation of every experience. Build connected experiences, empower every employee, and deliver continuous innovation - with the customer at the center of everything you do. Learn more at salesforce.com/platform

-- 

Brightspot is the leading content management platform built for modern teams. Your content lifecycle - from ideation to archival - moves faster, handling any volume, variety, or velocity with ease. 

Unlike legacy platforms that demand heavy dev work and struggle with scale, Brightspot is user-friendly, endlessly customizable, and enterprise-ready. Think dynamic, modern experiences, shipped in minutes—not months. 

Trusted by some of the world’s leading tech organizations, Brightspot reduces total cost of ownership, boosts productivity, and gives you the governance, security, and performance your teams need. 

Visit brightspot.com/ITVisionaries to learn more.

---

This episode was produced by the team at Mission.org and brought to you by Brightspot.