Dataiku

Elisa Salamanca is Head Of User Experience at Dataiku, where she leads a team in charge of improving the overall journey of Dataiku users. Originally transitioned from the public sector, Elisa loves Dataiku’s autonomous culture.From public to privateI'm 32 years old and I have an engineering background. Somewhat atypically, I worked as a public civil servant for seven years before entering into the tech world. I started as a very young manager in the eastern region of France working on environmental policy.I had always wanted to work in the medical field, and progressively, as an engineer I thought that I could have the biggest impact by helping leveraging data for medical research. That’s why I joined a public university hospital and led the digital innovation and data team. That was my first step into the tech world, even if it was for the public sector. Later, it made the transition easier because I had already been working closely with developers, data engineers and data scientists.Daitaku was growing very quickly when I joined the company, so my job description didn’t really fit any standard definition. As head of user experience, I’m in charge of UX design, User Research, Product Analytics, part of Product Management, and some Ops topics. The idea is to figure out how to address the user experience holistically.&nbsp;Autonomy and scopeOur R&amp;D team is quite mixed, but there are some discrepancies between sub-teams. In the product team, we already achieved the 50-50 male to female ratio, but it’s still work in progress within our software engineers teams. I’m one of the only women in R&amp;D who has a management position today, but I’ve never felt out of place. It was the same in my previous job so I’m quite used to it.&nbsp;I also felt trusted right from the start. Daitaku has given me a lot of responsibility and autonomy. When I arrived, I was leading the UX Design team with three people, and now I have a team of roughly ten with a scope that has been enriched. They’ve trusted me to try out this new idea around user experience and grow a team.I've also been following management training and a coaching program that Daitaku provides to all managers. They really support you as an individual contributor, but also as a manager to grow in your role. I was offered the coaching program only six months after I arrived, which shows how much they trust us and invest in us as managers.A spider in the webIn my weekly role, I’d say I spend 20 percent of my time working as an individual contributor on specific features. For that, I’m in contact with the UX designers, engineering managers, and developers. The rest of my week is going to be focused on doing managerial and organizational activities such as one-on-ones with my team or meetings with other stakeholders. Our product management team is split into two main subteams: one around user issues and one focused on market strategy. I'm mostly in charge of the first, so product management from the user side, even though the two teams interact very frequently.We have a strong relationship with the engineering team, where developers are subdivided into squads. As product managers, we really are in close contact with the VPs of engineering, the engineering managers and the developers relating to the part of the product that we're working on.&nbsp;Respect for work-life balanceSomething I feel on a daily basis at Daitaku is that we’re really valued as employees and team members. Our culture is really focused on the well-being of the people that we recruit, and ensuring a healthy work-life balance. This is what I appreciate the most.&nbsp;I’ve been lucky to have had people throughout my career who have trusted me to switch sectors — from academia, to public affairs and management positions, and most recently to tech. For me, this has been linked to learning new things all the time. The biggest lesson I’ve had as a manager is that it’s very hard, and you’ll never be perfect. So by accepting errors and questioning myself all the time, I try to stay open minded and adapt my way of doing things.

“Our culture is built on work-life balance”

Elisa Salamanca