How do you gather fifty senior women in engineering and marketing in a job market where people say those candidates don’t exist? You start with great content, from top executives, that these women can’t get elsewhere.
On May 16th at Allied Arts in Menlo Park, Logitech partnered with PowerToFly for a first of its kind, exclusive afternoon, to engage women in engineering and product marketing in Silicon Valley. It was an opportunity for Logitech to select a small group of influential women who their engineers and CEO, Bracken Darrell, wanted to meet.
As one female engineer told us afterwards: "I was curious about Logitech because I used to work for another computer peripherals company and was pleasantly surprised and impressed. In addition to the great Logitech people, I met other terrific women."
The afternoon began around 4pm with a kick off by Logitech CEO, Bracken Darrell, who instead of talking at the audience, went to a white-board and mapped out what success looks like for him and the Logitech team. He was transparent about where they needed to be and how far they’ve grown since their stock price was depressed a few years ago.
With insight on Logitech’s challenges, we saw a detailed presentation from the Head of Global Brand Equity, Paige Lutter, on how the company had recently transformed its brand. What then followed were two fascinating looks into how Logitech’s video collaboration products are being engineered, and what it took to make the Wonderboom, a portable speaker that has now survived at least ten bath tub drownings by my toddler. We then capped off the talks with a chat, during which Bracken took questions on why hiring for gender diversity is essential for Logitech if they’re going to fulfill the goals he presented at the start of the agenda. Women in the audience had the opportunity to ask questions around how Bracken views parental leave, his desire for everyone to get to their kids’ soccer games and why Logitech needs more people working from home.
If you scroll down through the photos of the event you’ll see why another participant, who leads a cloud computing forum for women, wrote in to say “thank you so much for the event, which I got a lot out of it. Please let me know if I can reciprocate in any way I can.”
