Show Notes

In this episode, host Manuel Martinez sits down with Maureen Peterson, a Customer Solutions Manager at AWS, to explore her fascinating journey from advertising in Brazil to tech project management in the US.

Maureen’s story is a testament to the power of continuous learning, adaptability, and perseverance. She shares her experiences transitioning from marketing to technology, working in various industries including casinos, and ultimately landing a role at one of the world’s leading tech companies.

Key takeaways from this episode:

• 
  
• How to successfully pivot from marketing to tech project management
  
• Strategies for navigating major career changes across industries and countries
  
• Tips for overcoming imposter syndrome in the tech world
  
• Insights on preparing for and acing interviews at top tech companies
  
• The importance of continuous skill development and stepping out of your comfort zone
  

Whether you’re in tech, marketing, or considering a career pivot, Maureen’s journey offers valuable insights and practical advice for anyone looking to advance their career.

Listen in as Maureen shares her experiences implementing digital analytics, managing large-scale projects, and adapting to new challenges as a non-native English speaker in the tech industry. Her story is not just about career progression, but also about personal growth and the courage to pursue new opportunities.

Don’t miss this inspiring conversation that proves with determination and the right mindset, you can successfully navigate significant career transitions and thrive in the ever-evolving tech landscape.

Subscribe to Career Downloads for more episodes featuring industry professionals sharing their career wisdom and practical advice for professional growth.

Episode Length: 1:39:08

Release Date: October 1, 2024

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Transcription

Manuel: Welcome everybody. So my name is Manuel Martinez and this is Career Downloads, where basically each episode I hit the refresh button and bring on a different guest to learn more about their background and their experiences and really help pull out any techniques that they’ve used to manage their career that could be helpful to anybody watching or listening. So for this episode I have with me Maureen Peterson and she is a project manager. So she has a lot of experience in that realm and I think it’s very interesting because she has some certifications, some knowledge in areas that have really been of interest to me. So hopefully you enjoy the conversation and with that welcome Maureen.

Maureen: Thank you for having me today.

Manuel: Of course. Thank you. I appreciate you taking the time to come in and talk to me and tell a little bit more about your career. So I want to know now, so I know I’m going to skip ahead a little bit, but just in your current role, what is your current role now and what are you doing there?

Maureen: So right now I work for AWS, I’m a Customer Solutions Manager. So we are business and technical program managers. We are in charge of helping very large customers to navigate their migration from data center to the cloud using cloud technologies. And then there are some customers ahead of the cloud and the others. They are using database systems, they are using analytics systems, they might be using storage systems. So what we do in my team, we help our customers to make sure that they are getting the best out of their cloud journey by anywhere from helping them to start a project from scratch, writing project plans or working with their software developers and the customer to understand what are they doing and how can we help. So one of the things I do right now is to connect specialists inside AWS to help our customers and bring them trainings and bring them to the events that we have to make sure that they are learning and taking the best to resolve their business outcomes.

Manuel: What I’ve been doing with every guest is if you can just kind of start off, just give me a little bit of background and you know, again, as much as you want, just kind of where you grew up and what eventually got you interested in technology and kind of how you got started.

Maureen: So I’m Brazilian. I was born and raised in Sao Paulo, which is a very large city in Brazil. And then I’m now living in Las Vegas, I immigrated here first as a student. I came to study when I was like, in 2008, I came to get my third degree. And that’s how I got here. There’s a long story about that. Now. So I started at my career in advertising and marketing. I decided that I wanted to be in advertising and marketing when I was about five years old, when I watch a commercial. And I told my mother or my father, I said, I want to be the person that create those stories and put it in there. I remember it was a cartoon to sell some blankets and it really touched me. But I said, it’s not because I want to buy that blanket, I just wanted to be the person that create the little stories and touch other people. And I was so young, but I still remember that. So when I was 17 years old, I always like study a lot. I went to get a test. It’s kind of like SAT in Brazil for you to pass the school. And I studied in a school that is considered like the best advertising and marketing school in probably Latin America. It’s called Escola Superior de Propaganda e Marketing. So in the first year, I just studied and then I think second year, I started an internship in advertising. So the first role that I had, I got actually like learned how to network because it was one of my colleagues at school in college that told me, oh, there’s this position open where I’m working in this advertising agency, super small, but I think you’d be a good colleague. So he told me to apply and then I went there, did an interview and I got hired. And it was like part-time internship, but I learned a lot about doing editing with Photoshop. So we used to do those advertising that you send on the mail, you know, like for offers.

Manuel: Yes

Maureen: And I used to be the person like cutting the background of the product. Right now you just use Gen AI and you get that done in one second, but you used to take a lot of time to do that. And I was really into doing that. I did advertising for furniture, for anything. It was a really fun career because you get to understand about businesses that are very different from each other.

Manuel: And is it the, was it the storytelling that you enjoyed? Was it the creating something that kind of similar to you when you were younger that, you know, it really caught your attention? Was it the, what was it exactly that really kind of got you interested in marketing?

Maureen: I think when I started, so I had the idea when I was five years old. But when I was 12 years old, I think in school they had career fairs. And then I went to research about all of those different careers. And that’s when I learned there was actually something, a word for that, which is then it was when I learned about advertising. I didn’t know about marketing at that time. But then I started learning about marketing at college. And then we studied things that most people say, I go to college and I don’t even remember what I did so many years after. But one of the things that are really nice about the college event, they go right through the primitives, you know, like the building blocks of how you do things. And there I learned there was different ways for you to get communication through one person to the other. So you learned in school about you need to learn who you need to talk to. So you need to learn their type of communication. You need to learn what kind of conditions and why are you doing that kind of communication. You’re trying to basically solve a problem. And that was something that really interested me at that time.

Manuel: So they did prepare you quite a bit then with a lot of those skills, it sounds like, right? Understanding and really preparing you for getting your first kind of job or role. So when you graduated and that colleague got you that internship, did you feel prepared with what you had learned so far in college to that point?

Maureen: I did, but on top, I think also like when you get into a real job, you see that there’s way more than you, because you don’t have time to learn about everything. And then I think also I learned when I started learning more about marketing, I got more interested in marketing than in actually so in the beginning I wanted to be an art director and do like work with Photoshop and Illustrator. So I got trained for that. Then I get really interested in the part of doing marketing research and learning about people and learning about their needs and how you get to fulfill those needs. And sometimes in advertising or marketing, you’re trying to sell things that people don’t really need [Laughter] and that’s kind of like a, it’s like a very fun game. It’s like people like to play video games, I like to understand people and what makes them happy, what makes them sad, what are their needs, that’s something that is really interesting to me. So I think a year or two after I got that first internship, I got into, there’s this company in Brazil, I think it was like very beginnings of people opening for you to look for apartments or houses online. So it was one of the first portals in Brazil where you could get that part of like work and try to look for rental online. And that’s when I learned all this thing, Internet, it was a long time ago, that it was really fun to work with that because in that moment I realized that you can reach so many people in a scale that you could never imagine. So that started beginning to interesting to me in online marketing and advertising. So then I went to another job more related to the online advertising and marketing in a very large portal that also is kind of like here, you’d be similar to MSN or AOL or something like that at that time. It was a portal that had a reach all over Brazil and also Latin America. So I remember that there was one day when I realized that I could put one ad and reach someone in a different country. And it felt like it was so cool. I thought, oh my gosh, I’m doing a work here sitting in my desk and my computer. And even it was pretty interesting that I think, oh, there’s someone speaking another language that is getting impacted and they might buy something or they might learn something about something new and I did that. So that’s when I started kind of realizing there’s something there in technology as well. And then I started learning a lot about how to put advertising online. And in the beginning, like in that time, you didn’t have Google Ads or anything like that. So we used to use this system from RealMedia that you can actually go in there and you start doing programmatic advertising. And that’s like a long, long time ago. And I remember my role in there, I was an Online Marketing Coordinator. I was supposed to be talking to the customers of like the big clients, large retailers, that came, they will give us a marketing budget and then I would have to plan. So how am I going to use this marketing budget? We had this internet portal, there’s several different pages, right? There’s the news, there’s the finance pages, there’s like some areas for women, for kids. And then I was in charge of like actually creating a plan to maximize the return on investment on that advertising. So I wanted to learn how to do things really fast and that’s how I started like learning about the system itself because we used to use like Excel spreadsheets and then you have to like manually do things [Laughter] and then you have to sell to like get those Excel spreadsheets and send to the person like the IT guys, let’s say. And sometimes it would take a while or have a problem sometimes because they used to still use like banners and pop-ups and there was specific formats and sometimes someone will program the wrong size and you will mess up with all the content in the page. And then I was always like going to that guy that was actually in charge of, the Admin of the system and one day he told me like, you know, Maureen, you know, like you’re learning so much about this. Have you ever thought about doing like working with technology? I said, are you kidding me? Like, no, because I don’t have a technical background. I just came from advertising and marketing and then he told me like, I think you would do really well in there and he was like, and then that time I didn’t take anything out of it because I thought, oh, as a woman in, I don’t, they don’t really tell in Brazil that women can go into technology, you know. It’s mostly like, I hope that things change right now, but at my time, if you wanted to go to a technical school, like go to engineering or something like really, really IT computer science, they would say, oh, you’re not even like feminine or anything. And I said, I always thought this is not right. It’s just like a new thing for you to learn. It shouldn’t matter if you’re a guy or a girl.

Manuel: So then it was, it sounds like it probably wasn’t very common then for somebody like that to say, hey, you should go into technology so that admin person that asked you, that was probably, probably the reason you brushed it off was it sounds like it’s not very common at the time in Brazil. So did it catch you by surprise then?

Maureen: It catch me by surprise, but also it was like, an aha moment, you can see like the little light bulb in my head saying, oh, that’s a possibility. I said, I’m not changing my careers right now because I really like the other side of marketing advertising, but I think it created something in my heart that was just sitting in there for a while. So I think like after that, I have always been working a lot and studying and one of the things I’ve always wanted to come to the US because I came from a very dysfunctional family where things were not good. So I basically used studying and reading and learning of things as a way of distracting myself on what was happening at home. And I basically, I taught myself how to speak English. That’s why I have this very thick accent because I didn’t go to proper like, ESL classes I used to just get music when it was still CD players. Oh my gosh, I’m making myself really, really old in here.

Manuel: It’s okay. I remember cassette tapes and, you know, my dad grew up with eight tracks, right? So record players, so don’t worry.

Maureen: So I used to translate music back and forth and try to learn that and I have always wanted to come to the US to study. So I was still working, so I did my bachelor’s in advertising and marketing, then I went and got an MBA really young still, like a year or two after because I wanted to learn about the business side, how to network and some people said, oh, you were way too young to an MBA, but I always wanted, I have this thing in my head that if I studied really hard and make myself different like from other people by differentiating myself by getting lots of degrees and certs, I would thought that I would be able to get myself out of the bad situation at home. So I saved a ton of money and when I finally, I was like 28 years old, I was able to save enough money and I researched a lot. So I thought, how is the best way for me to get to the US legally and still trying to get into my career? So what I did is I signed up for a community college in the Bay Area because one of the one guy there used to work for me, one of my customers that, it’s like you used to be like a very rich guy, always traveling, he said, if you want to learn anything about online marketing, online advertising, now that there’s Google, there’s all those new things popping up, you should go to the Bay Area and that’s how I got in there. So I signed up for an associates degree in community college. When I got there, they said, oh, but you already have a master’s and a bachelor’s, why are you coming in here? I said, I just want to have this opportunity to come here in the Bay Area, learn about this market and improve my English. So there was like many reasons why I said, I’m going to kind of like you if you think about step backwards, but I always knew that if like, it’s a step backwards because it will help me move forwards. And that’s how I got the money I had to do this, it was the cheapest way for me, it was going to community college.

Manuel: And the associates were still within digital marketing, so it was still in that area?

Maureen: Yeah, so I wanted to do digital marketing and the closest things that they had in there was internet technologies. So in that, they had some online courses, they had some marketing courses, I had to take some math courses, even I had to take biology back to fulfill the credits. But they had like a little bit more into the technical side, so that’s more like when I started seeing IT, so that’s when I first took like network class for internet network and I learned about the seven layers of, and then I did some HTML, like CSS, that’s how I started learning a little bit about coding. I figured out in there, I said, yeah, coding, I don’t think it’s for me, it’s hard, but I really enjoyed learning about that side as well. So after I finished that course, I had about a year to stay in here with a visa for like OPT for you to do internship in here. So I was able to work with someone that I knew through community college, so that’s their networking as well, that she, that person was opening like a badminton academy as a side business from what she was doing and she said, come be my marketing manager here, help me out with that. So I did that, why I still was on the visa and when my visa was like about to expire, I said I’m going to go back home because I’m not going to be here illegally and I think it’s time to go back. It happened then and I met who is now my husband a month before I have to go home.

Manuel: Oh wow. And you met him there at school? Or while you were working.

Maureen: No, it was like, so I had this friend and she told me like, Maureen, all you do is you study way too much and I always have been the geek person, like always studying. She said sign up for online dating and I said, I’m not going to do that. It’s too pathetic, but here I am. [Laughter] So.

Manuel: Oh, and it’s probably at that time it was newer, right? So online dating wasn’t what it is now.

Maureen: Oh, no, it wasn’t. So it was really awkward as well because I thought I’m not doing that. I think like today everybody is swiping right, swiping left, but it was not that. But my friend told me you need to, not everything is about work and about your career and about your studies. You need to enjoy life as well and go meet people. And then I did.

Manuel: And around this time now, so I think you said when you left Brazil it was around 28. So and how long was your visa for? It was just the one year?

Maureen: So I was here in a student visa for two years from 2008 to 2010. And then I graduated about like in April or something. Then from April until the end of the year I was in this OPT visa to do my internship. So it was a little bit less than three years that I was here in the student visa plus the OPT. And then right in the end I was reached out by a friend in Brazil that they used to work with me in the previous companies. Like he told me like, oh, just come, we are just getting this new online marketing company that ends up big retailer. They aggregating like three major brands. Like there was a furniture store, there was electronic stores and grocery stores. And they said, we’re going to do all the operations for their online marketing. And I said, well, that’s a cool thing and I need to go back home. So I went there and I started working in there as an Online Marketing Coordinator as well. And in that time, technologies started growing, growing, growing. And then I learned about IBM Coremetrics and that’s where, how I started moving into IT.

Manuel: So right around that time, so you said, you know, like, so it’s probably like 2010-ish. So here we had that big crash, you know, the economy crashed around 2008. So this is probably around the same time you’re leaving and heading back to Brazil. Was there any impact there? So you know, you went back, obviously there was a good role for you. But was there any impact to kind of the economy there that like similar to here?

Maureen: I think it was everywhere. And it was hard for me. One of the reasons I couldn’t stay is because the more the dollar, when I got in here, the dollar was like one, like two, one dollar is like two reais and then it exploded. I couldn’t be in there. I think things were bad in there. But I don’t know, Brazil has always been a place where there’s inflation and all like politics and things like that. So we see things different, like recession. It’s kind of something normal that everybody learned how to deal with since you were very young. So you always know the value of money and savings and because you know that it might be next day, things are not going to be fine. So I don’t think people feel felt as much as here was you always.

Manuel: It wasn’t so drastic of a change like it was here.

Maureen: Yeah, I think it wasn’t because people kind of like used to living in a tough situation, I guess.

Manuel: And then so that marketing role, once you got in there and you’re at the director, was it everything that they explained that it would be?

Maureen: It was. So I also learned working with a bunch of customers that were giving marketing budget to that online portal together, advertising in there. And then so we used to be in the fifth floor in the building and the IT guys were in the third floor of the building. And I used to go back and forth, back and forth because there was like a lot of things that we need to push online. And there’s I need them to deploy something for me and I get a lot of friends in there. And then I don’t know how it was, but one day I was down in the third floor and they say, oh, there’s this system called IBM Coremetrics, which is Web Analytics. I said, okay, so what is this? And that’s when I discovered that, okay, so now there’s people not only putting Google Ads and there’s people also trying to measure what you’re doing and learning about your customers by putting metrics like putting tags and cookies and stuff like that. And that I really got intrigued to that because then I thought, yeah, if you can measure things, you can probably take better decisions, do data-driven decisions. So I went in there and I read a book like this big and it was printed yeah. Like right now all the documentation is online, but at that time I find out a way of actually printing out a giant technical documentation. And it was the first time I think I’ve ever read technical documentation. And it was fascinating to me.

Manuel: And you ended up reading the whole book? Were you skimming through it or just kind of what was?

Maureen: Oh, I read the whole thing. I don’t know if you. I became a little famous between my friends with my Sharpie. I used to have like a yellow Sharpie and I would highlight everything and then take notes. And I still like I have t-shirts with yellow marks everywhere. [Laughter] I went in my bedroom because I used to fall asleep with the books on me, but then I learned so much about that system. And then I started to kind of like say, okay, let me do a little experiment. I asked my manager at the time, I said, like, do you mind if I start sending emails every day in the morning with the numbers I’m seeing? We put some tags in the website and I said, let me translate those numbers that I’m seeing here. So I would go in the morning and see what people are actually researching in the search box. And I will figure out, oh, there’s people instead of saying the fridge, they would say refrigerator or some other people would actually put the brand. And some people looking for things that, oh, we don’t have this product, we don’t have the other product. And then we go to the buyers in there and said, oh, this product maybe let’s do change the advertising, let’s change the artwork, or can you call your, the place where you’re buying the products to sell and see if you can get this instead of that. And it worked. And it was really nice. And then I was able to, at that time I also started researching other options. That’s when I learned about Google Analytics. And then I also learned about Adobe Analytics as well. And I think it was the first time I actually did an IT project because we had to, I talked to the people in the company and I said, I think there’s this other product from Adobe in here that might be more robust to track all the products that we have in here. And then I was able to, like I said, well, okay, let’s write actually a business plan, a project plan. How do we get there? How much money do we need to buy this? Who is going to manage that? Who is going to be the admin? Is it going to be IT? Is it going to be marketing? And I think that kind of was the first time that I had to do an actual IT project. And then, again, it was like me and a few colleagues in there. I got two trainees and we, like, my director, our director gave us a very, very, very tight deadline. Said, okay, so I was able to negotiate with the vendor that we can do a proof of concept. And we’re not going to pay for the service while the proof of concept is in there. So they said, like, they gave us three months, but I think, like, we can’t spend that much time doing that. So do as fast as you can. And again, I read [Laughter] another, I think, I swear to you, probably 5,000 pages of user guide and technical guide on how to implement that. I was able to get…

Manuel: And this user guide that you were implementing, this was for implementing the Adobe Analytics?

Maureen: Yes.

Manuel: Okay.

Maureen: And then I was able to get some budget as well to get developers to actually put the code in there because, as I told you before, I am not good in coding. [Laughter] And you need to put some scripts in a page. So what I did is, like, I said, I’m going to plan the marketing side of it, the business side of it. What is the business problems that we’re trying to accomplish in here? And what we did is, like, we mapped the whole project from how the first time we tried to get an advertising and you enter a website first time. Are you clicking on something or are you searching for the actual product? And then we tracked the sales funnel from the first time you enter in the website through all the pages, shopping cart until you check out and get confirmation. And we started following the person for loyalty as well. So that was a very nice project that we did. And we were able to implement that thing in less than 30 days.

Manuel: Oh, wow.

Maureen: So it was, like, super cool.

Manuel: And that project did it happen so fast because of all the work that you had put in? Or was it, I guess, if they gave you three months and it took you less than 30 days, what do you think it was that really attributed to the success of that project?

Maureen: I think it was a combination of me working with my team at that place, me doing a very, very strict plan. So first thing I asked myself, what are the problems I’m trying to solve? And let’s think about the minimum thing that I can deliver to say this is successful and then do incrementals later. Because one of the things I learned in my career, if you try to boil the ocean, you don’t get anywhere. You normally, it’s much easier if you get a very large problem and you break them and structure them in phases or in steps. And I think also it was a matter of getting buying from the executives. That was really important because those things cost money. And when it comes from someone making an executive decision, so I had to explain why do I think this is going to benefit the company. And I worked with my teammates and we created a plan together that was convincing enough that they say, okay, we are going to bet on this proof of concept and give you the time and the resources for you to do that. And then I think, got everybody in the team believing in that, that it will be a nice thing. So when people actually believe in what they’re doing, they know that we’re going to point A to point Z and there’s all the steps in between. We divided everybody and then everybody did the work and that’s how we got to do that so fast.

Manuel: And that project management, obviously you had no real training or was there part of that in your college? And this is just something that with your team and with your experience, you just kind of on your own figured out that, hey, this is what we need to do. And like you said, boiling the ocean because without any formal training, a lot of times that’s what people tend to do. Like I’m guilty of that as well, right? Like projects at home or projects at work is you see this, you’re like, I’m going to get this all done instead of kind of breaking it up into pieces. So what made you, what gave you that insight to say, hey, I need to break this up into pieces because that’s not, in my experience, that’s not common.

Maureen: I think it was something part of learning in college that how they gave us the basics on how you write a business plan and you write a plan and how you execute a plan. So part of our, for you to graduate in that school, you need to work with like most colleges you go in there and write a thesis or something by yourself. But then in there, they told us, you don’t work alone in the real market. Like when you go to the real world, you have to deal with people and you have to have a business plan. So they explained to us how you do business plan. First you get with the problem statement, then you go in there and you have to get funding. You have to think about the product, you have to think about the pricing, you have to think about the placement. So they gave us a toolbox to say, here is how you do and applies to most everything I realize in my career that if you follow those things and combining with, I think, my background and all that I have to deal with when I was young and not dealing like with a bunch of stuff at home, I think I kind of learned to be resourceful and I always, I realized that you applying this business plan, planning. So I always say you plan, you organize and then you execute and you measure and that’s how you get things done in a way that you can repeat and grow, grow and grow incrementally, I think. But I did not know about project management or Scrum or any of those things at that time.

Manuel: And then, so now you’ve got this project, you got it implemented. What was the, I guess, the outcome for the business? Did they eventually take all the metrics that you did, implement that and then kind of what did that do for you, for your career?

Maureen: Yeah, so that was a very nice case and it got published even after I left in there. I think at that time when we started that project, they were tracking about 60,000 products in the website and because we did that structure and we started saying, oh, now let’s use digital analytics and let’s use data science and do economics and start statistics to learn that thing. In the end, I think they were tracking over a million products in a very short time span.

Manuel: Wow, that’s a big increase from 60,000 to over a million. And you leading that project, did that bring you recognition within that company? Did it allow you to get promoted? What did that successful outcome help you?

Maureen: I think maybe I would be promoted. I know people that might watch this and let me know later. But in that time, as I told you, I met my, with my husband now a month before I came and I was doing long distance relationship. And it happened that we got to a point that we say, okay, either we get married or we’re going to break up because I came here back and forth so many times, I can’t explain to you.

Manuel: He did? Or you did?

Maureen: No, I did. He couldn’t go in there because he was in the Air Force, has security clearances and it was really hard for him to get approvals to go in there. So I was the one coming. And then right after I finished that project, I worked a little bit longer there but then we decided, okay, let’s apply for, maybe he proposed and say, let’s get married. And then I moved here. So I didn’t have time to grow that much in that company because I moved to a different country.

Manuel: Got it. Okay. And then so obviously you got married and at that point you ended up coming over here. So then what was that transition like going from that role? What did you come and do here? Where did you move to?

Maureen: So I don’t know why but I put my profile on LinkedIn and I started applying for a bunch of positions. First in marketing, I thought. And for some reason a recruiter found out my resume and that time I think Adobe Analytics was really growing by the keywords. So it’s really important how you put things on your resume. You’re telling not only what you do, what you learned, but try to describe results and how whatever you did affected or improved in that company. I think I put something in my resume that called the attention from a recruiter from a very large big tech consulting company that sent me an email saying, why don’t you come and interview for this position to be an IT project manager to implement digital analytics in Microsoft. I said..uhhhh. And then they said, yeah, so it looks like you have a good profile. You did a project, you know, the system and we need someone with your profile. And here it doesn’t matter if you’re not coming from that background, they believed in me and it was super cool. It was hard for me because I had to move from here to Seattle and I was commuting back and forth again. I just came from a long distance relationship where I got married and here I go again because when they offered that position, I had to had a very hard thinking, oh, it’s just like first, second year of my marriage. But someone believes that I have what it takes to work in this industry for Microsoft. It was mind blowing for me. I came from a very, very kind of poor neighborhood in Brazil. I would never dream about something like that. And I said, this is a kind of once in a lifetime experience that I can’t let it go. And then I went in there and I tried.

Manuel: And that’s awesome and especially obviously, you know, you’re just getting married, but it sounds like your husband was also very supportive and, you know, was okay with you going through and kind of still progressing your career, right? Like he wasn’t like, oh, well, you’re here, we’re married.

Maureen: Oh, that was, it took us some back and forth conversations. I think it was a matter, in that time, I had to make a decision and I told him, if you really love me, you’re going to let me do this and I will continue coming here the same way I was doing because as I told you when I was a kid going through all of that, I always thought that my career is, in me studying, it’s what fulfills me and what is going to take me out of the bad places I’m having. And I said, I’m not going to just sit down in the house and be your wife. There’s some people that like that, I have nothing against it, but that’s not the choice I wanted to make for myself.

Manuel: Right, okay. And that, you know, it sounds like you ended up getting the position and moving over there and what was the experience there now moving to a full-time project management role? Was there any challenges? Was it different compared to what you did before?

Maureen: So that was the first time I worked in a place where I felt like it was minority because it was a Brazilian in the middle of like, so I got a team of developers and software architects and business analysts sitting both in Redmond, Washington to like go during the business hours for Microsoft. At the same time, we used to have another team that I was managing as well in India doing offshore, onshore model. And I think I was probably the only woman in that team. And it was kind of a different experience that I have to start saying, oh, now things are different. I’m out of my comfort zone because I don’t have a Computer Science degree. I’m not in IT and I’m not a man. [Giggles] But still, I think the work that we were doing was like really nice and important and it was worth to me to go through all of that, I think. It was hard, but it was very interesting.

Manuel: And being uncomfortable and in that, do you think that that also helped you kind of grow in that role? Because I know a lot of times, it’s nice to be comfortable. It’s nice to know and really feel like, okay, I know what I’m doing, but do you feel that being uncomfortable being in that situation, did it help or did it hinder you continuing to grow your knowledge? Because from what I’ve heard, every place you go through, there’s that thirst for knowledge. You’re always wanting to learn, you’re always reading, you’re always wanting to understand and do more. So when you got there, did that uncomfortableness forced you personally to want to try even harder or did it have the opposite effect?

Maureen: It forced me to try even harder. And I think when you, in the beginning, you were asking about how did I learn about project management and Scrum. It was part of like me doing, so the company, the consulting company I was working for, they did invest in us growing, so they give us a bunch of free courses that you can take. And one of those courses I realized is that there’s a methodology for you to go in there and handle all those IT projects, and that’s the first time I heard about Scrum and Agile methodologies. And that’s how I started learning, because I wanted to kind of figure out how is there easier way for me to deal with this market and learning how to deal with two different time zones. And sometimes it was even more than one time zones, because we used to have teams in Microsoft, in Redmond, and they had teams in England, in China, in India. And then I said, like, what is the easiest way or there’s any way for me to manage this, so I don’t have to every day be in a meeting at 7 a.m. or 10 p.m. at night. And with Scrum and Agile kind of learned ways of you to get that large project management and break it down even smaller to do incremental. So one of the things that you learn with Agile is that you ask, like, what are you, developer? What are you doing today? What did you do yesterday? And is there anything blocking you? And how can I or anybody, what kind of help do you need to unblock you so you can deliver this little part that is going to be part of a big whole, like, thing together. And that’s how I think, so that hardship of having to deal with so many people, different backgrounds, and speaking in a language that was now mine, it helped me to be even more curious about how can I apply things to make things easier.

Manuel: And that training that you went through, was it just kind of foundational? So I’ve looked and kind of researched a little bit about Scrum. So the training, was it actual Scrum and Agile training to get, like, the certification or is it more… So I come more from an infrastructure background, right? So understanding that a lot of these certifications that I was going through and that I would study for, doesn’t necessarily translate into really doing the work, right? So if I go and get, let’s say for example, when I got my Microsoft Server 2003 certification, it shows that you understand probably core concepts and understand how to do some of the basics and do it the Microsoft way. There’s multiple ways to do anything on a laptop, right? Like, I can tell you, hey, do this thing and you’ll probably get to it a different way than I would. You’ll choose different menus, some people like to use the command line, there’s a number of different methods. But with Agile and with Scrum, going through that certification, is it actually teaching you how to implement and do project management? Or is it just kind of like, well, we’re going to teach you core foundational, but then you actually have to go out and really figure it out on your own?

Maureen: I think all certifications that I took so far, it’s always taking from the principle I learned right back then in college, that you take the primitives, the building blocks. So you learn basic concept and then you go research and try in real life yourself. I don’t know if you look at Instagram or TikTok and people, there’s so many memes about developers hating people that do. Like, Agile, oh, it’s more meetings, meetings about meetings. So I try not to stick too much to what I learned in the certification, but I definitely think it’s a good foundation start for you to see, okay, so how do I learn about, there are so many things to learn, giant problem. Where do I start? Someone already did this, created a methodology. I’m going to go there and learn about it and say, well, what applies to me? And what not? You don’t really need to stick to it, but it definitely helps.

Manuel: Got it. And then going through, now you’ve got, I’m assuming at that time you did the training, did you also go and get the certifications at the same time?

Maureen: No, I didn’t. So there when I was still working at that consulting company, it was just basic, just starting to learn about the terms. I did not get my certs until I moved back here several years after. And I decided to get my cert when I was working from one of the casinos, when I was like doing more that when I was actually working in IT. And we started doing a very, very, very large Salesforce implementations with multiple systems. So there was like one implementation that we did that was like by 10, more than 10 different systems getting integrated. Then I said, okay, let me go actually learn more about that. And because I studied so much, they said, you know, I’m going to try for the cert. I already studied good all the way through the course. Then I signed up for that two day course, but also learning a lot. Then I said, I’m going to try and see what it is. The first cert, if you take the course, you don’t even, it’s not that you need to take a test for the first Scrum. And then I got also like, okay, let me try the other ones. So I did the Scrum Master, I did Product Owner, which it teach you a little bit about product management. And then that’s how I started like going through cert ways. And then also because of that large project with Salesforce, and there was one of the integrations. That’s how I first learned about AWS. And I said, oh my gosh, AWS, you go look at like this largest, it’s the largest cloud provider out there. There’s so many services, how do I get to know anything? And then that’s when I realized that there was the one cert that you can get Cloud Foundational to even start getting a grasp of what that is.

Manuel: Got it. So then when you’re working up in Redmond, and you’re going through, say you were there for a few years, what did you go from there? Because I remember looking at it, but I’m trying to remember.

Maureen: I came back.

Manuel: You came back?

Maureen: Because that’s about two, I think two and a half years back and forth relationship with the top. Then me and my husband said, okay, enough, let’s go back to Vegas. And I think at that time I already had enough experience. I had something to say, oh, I worked in an American like US market in a very large company. Now I have more chances to say something in my resume and start working with recruiters. So that’s when I learned about recruiters as well. The first time there, I got recruited. And then in here also, I realized, oh, if you put the right keywords in your resume, people are searching for it. But if you work with a recruiter, make things much easier, because they know where, who is hiring and what they need. And then you can talk to the recruiter. And if it is not this opportunity, they will find something that fits you. So I met a very, very nice recruiter that got me a position here at Station Casinos in Vegas. And that’s how I came to the casino and hospitality for the first time. Also, they said, oh my gosh, I never worked in this industry in my life. So what did I do?

Manuel: Another book.

Maureen: Yeah. I learned it was actually two or three. It was thousands and thousands of pages of how to implement IT casino systems in the machine. So I learned everything about the slot machines and the systems, the accounting, finance for the casino. It was pretty interesting as well.

Manuel: I’m going to go back just a little bit. So when you are working with a recruiter, so I’ve had similar situations where I have worked with a couple of different recruiters, talk a little bit about your experience there working with them and how I had a recruiter on as well, just what was the process for you to go through and provide, did you provide them what type of roles you were looking for? Did they ask you, if you remember kind of what was that experience of working with a recruiter? So you said, hey, I know that there’s somebody that’s going to go and find me these jobs, but how were there certain jobs you told them I want to do something within just project management at this point or how did that go?

Maureen: I think at that time I was getting into project management and I realized I could combine both things. I said, I can work with digital marketing or marketing and everything that I’ve always learned. And then because of that digital analytics, I started to get a love for learning data and how to get data to make a large impact. So I said, if I continue doing this, I have several options of working because again, it’s primitives and building blocks, you can apply this to so many things. So I think I started, I worked with like one or two recruiters that found my resume. I think it was in monster.com or either LinkedIn, I don’t remember at that time.

Manuel: And these were two different recruiters at two different companies? Were you using different ones?

Maureen: Yeah, they were actually from recruiting, like recruiting companies and they worked with hiring people for the casinos. So they gave me a few options and I did a few interviews and they said, oh, there’s this option here, go in there. And I did an interview and said, okay, I think it’s a good way for me to start in back in there. I remember that I kind of had to take a pay cut that time because I was getting paid Seattle, Redmond.

Manuel: Salary.

Maureen: Salary and then I came back to Bay…uh to here in Vegas, but it was like if you do the comparison because of living costs, it ended up being similar. So I said, fine, and I will get there. And they basically helped me tailor the resume, fix a little bit here and there to say let’s list some results and how we can reuse what you did in that other job market to the industry. And that was helpful and also they helped to, there’s some positions I learned later that sometimes don’t even go to, they’re not announced or if they announced, they get fulfilled really quickly because there’s so many recruiters bringing candidates. So that helped a lot working with them because they would bring your resume in front of the hiring managers and that makes much easier than doing by yourself.

Manuel: Yeah, and that’s one of the things that people may not be aware of is now you do have to have some experience, right? So if you’re just coming out of college having no experience, it’s hard for a recruiter to go through and get you in there. But a lot of times, especially I’m assuming in your situation where you didn’t live in the Vegas area, you didn’t have a bunch of contacts or a big network of people that you could rely on and say, hey, I’m looking or if you hear of anything, let me know. So that’s where a recruiter really comes in handy because you still have to know the material, right? You still have to be able to interview and do all that successfully. But the recruiters really helping, sounds like they were helping you tailor your resume and making sure you’re putting the right keywords, the right information in there. But they’re helping you get that resume in front of the right people and basically opening the door for you to say, hey, here, let’s get you in. And then at that point, it’s up to you to go through and really win them over. But they give you the opportunity to kind of…

Maureen: Yeah. That’s really important. And even after I started working in that industry, we work with those recruiters to hire more other people. Then one thing that you’ll learn when you’re on the other side of the road that you give them job requirements because, again, you have a project plan. You have something that you need to deliver for your customers. You have a deadline. You need to really know who you’re hiring to get in that team to deliver that. And when you’re working with that recruiter, we’re going to go write the job description in a way that helps them. It’s information for them to go in the market as well. And they go do all the research in their databases as well, based on what the hiring managers or whoever decides that is hiring will tell them to go look for.

Manuel: To go look for that. And as you’re going through and you’re implementing, you’re reading more manuals, you’re implementing all these slot systems, all these technologies, how long did you do that and was there anything within there that you really felt was a good… like a good learning experience? Were there any challenges that you faced that, you know, similar to when you went up in Redmond, right? You’re the only female that was there. So you kind of felt out of place coming back here. Were there any challenges that you kind of had to go through that really… that you feel like at that time felt terrible, but then now kind of looking back, you’re like, oh, this was helpful.

Maureen: I think here in Vegas the market is not as… with that many amount of guys working in… because you’re like… if you think about a casino and a resort and it’s a mini-universe, there’s every single kind of business in there. You work in projects for like food, the food court, like with entertainment, you work with software, you work with hardware because you have to put systems in a casino. So it’s… and hospitality, the hotel part, there’s so many different things. So there’s people from all over with different backgrounds, it’s not as focused and in the niche kind of like when you’re working in a certain part of technology. So that will feel a little bit better because you have more people with different backgrounds. But at the same time I was really scared in the beginning because I never worked in a casino in my entire life and I don’t like to gamble, I don’t like to play. I didn’t relate to that at all and I was like thinking to myself, what I’m going to do to get myself situated in this. And I think it was nice making friends at work and hearing their backgrounds but also going back to all the documentation, technical documentation, it helped me to feel that at least I’m not completely out like an outsider. I learned a little bit and it helped me to make the right questions to the people that actually know what they’re doing. The specialists in there. So if I go in there and I don’t read anything and I have that project, first I don’t even know, it’s not possible for me to do a good problem statement to write a project charter because I don’t even know what I’m talking about. So the technical documentation helped me with that. And then making friendships and asking the specialists, trying to listen to their experiences and they will teach you things and so you combine all of those things and you get really good results, I think.

Manuel: And asking the questions, was that more just out of you wanting to really understand? I guess what I’m trying to ask is how did you know what questions to ask? Was it really just, I don’t understand, I read this in the manual and I don’t understand it? Or is it also more of what are the problems that the person that you’re asking is having a problem? So I’m just curious how you come about with the right questions.

Maureen: Part of you being a Project Manager or a Program Manager, you have to document things. You have to summarize what we’re trying to accomplish. Someone comes to you with a business question. So I’m giving an example of a project that I did when I was at Stations. They said, we want to be able to allow people to log into the slot machines with their cell phones. The mobile phones. At that time there was no technology to do that. So I had to go in there and say, okay, there’s normally what we use to use in there. It’s like a two or three page document where it’s a project charter. So you will have to go in there and say, what is the project? What is the title of the project? What is the timeline? And how do you come with a timeline? So that’s where the questions start coming because you go and you say, hey, developer or software tester. How much time do you think you need to do? When you’re using Agile, you go in there and you define what is called the user story. So you’re going to say, as a player, I need to be able to use my mobile phone to check-in, log-in into the slot machine instead of using my physical card. Then in there, you have a problem statement. And then you go in there and say, oh, there’s this vendor that sells this X technology. So that software developer is going to there. Oh, there’s an API or something like that that you need to implement to connect your phone to the machine. How do you do that? And then they’re going to give you, oh, I need to do these X, Y and Z steps. And I think step one is going to take me two days. Step two is going to take me two months or something like that. And then the team sits together. And that’s how you start like posing the questions. But the overall questions is for you to be able to explain to an executive that actually is going to fund that. It’s going to approve that project. What is that you’re trying to do? What are we trying to accomplish as a business outcome? What are we getting out of this and how much it’s going to cost? And why should I give you that money? So that’s how we put a project together.

Manuel: So then when you’re going and you’re working in, it sounds like at Station Casinos, eventually you kind of moved into Boyd Casinos or Boyd Gaming at that time. The transition there, was it really just going from one gaming business to another? Is it because was there an opportunity? Was there, the projects weren’t just as challenging? So what kind of propelled you to move over to another?

Maureen: I’ve tried to get promoted as Station Casinos and it was not happening. And didn’t have the opportunity at that time. So I thought, let me try something else in a different place and maybe work. So it was in that time I kind of started researching about up is not the only way. You can move laterally as well and then try to get yourself different experiences. I said, okay, maybe now if I go to a different company, I will learn more and have more opportunities to grow.

Manuel: Okay, and did that happen for you? So moving over here, those experiences, did they help you grow? Because I know a lot of times we always think, oh, the grass is greener on the other side, basically meaning it’s going to be better somewhere else. A lot of times that is the case, but I’ve also run into situations where going to another company, you don’t know until you get there, so that sometimes can be a challenge. So did you get the experiences and the growth at the new place that you were expecting?

Maureen: Yes, I did grow a lot in there. So I started there as a Project Manager and then I got promoted to Senior Project Manager and then I moved as a Scrum Master. So I started that from scratch with me and my manager and one other person who started doing that in there. And I learned a lot, got way more projects, got exposed to…for you to have a sense of how much more. I had an opportunity to do deployments, like every couple of days we’re doing deployments. So you actually getting a project, all the development, testing, deploy. So it grew and grew and grew and grew. The reason I actually got to AWS is because I learned so much, at Boyd, and one sweet day I said, you know what, I like this, let me try. In that case, I don’t know how, but I uploaded my resume in the careers site on Amazon and I got a call.

Manuel: Oh, so this is the first one where you had actually just on your own applied for a, I’m going to say a position at a company instead of going through a recruiter or through a network. And I’m assuming just the skills you had learned on formatting your resume correctly to make sure you’re getting those key words that really helped. So how long after you submitted your application did you get a call back?

Maureen: The next day. I never thought that that would happen. I got a call the next day.

Manuel: And what was that process like? So I’m assuming, you know, big company like that, big AWS, getting a call the next day, being just shocked that it’s that quick. What was that process for you to kind of go through and then eventually, you know, move into that role? Like what was the interview process and the preparation that went into that?

Maureen: So in there, I got a recruiter, a call from an Amazon recruiter, which is the first step that you get. And then he went through my resume and then made questions based on what the job description was. And he thought I was a good fit to pass through the next step, which is a phone screening with someone that actually worked in that position or in that department. So I think it was like two weeks after that, I got through my phone screening. And then I passed that one as well. And after that, you get through another process like where you have to write an essay. You have to write a two-page essay. They give you a question talking about something like an innovation or something that you did in previous work. And then I explained something that I did here in Vegas with Agile and how I used that to help the team do how we get to so many deployments and had to make sure that my English was pristine. So it took me several days to sit down and write and write and read and read and ask my husband to take a look and say, what do you think? And he didn’t understand a single thing. That was in there because it was super technical.

Manuel: So you didn’t have a network of people to kind of go through and help proofread for you? So you’re doing a lot of this on your own?

Maureen: I did most on my own. I said, okay, let me ask my husband just to proofread. But he said, yeah, proofreading grammar sounds really nice. I don’t really understand the terms in here. He kind of understood what I explained because it tells a story from a business outcome. And then I uploaded my essay in there and someone liked it and said, okay, now you’re ready to go through the loop, which was those five interviews that you have to talk to different people on the same day. At that time it was still, I think it was a little bit… No, it was already post COVID, but I did all the interviews online and it was really, really hard as you might know. It’s very famous for not being an easy process because it is a very sharp people interviewing you. So what I did to prepare for that loop, I researched a lot online because I didn’t know anybody that worked for AWS before. So I went to learn about the STAR method, yeah, which is like you go through, you need to explain the Situation, the Task that you did, the Action that you did and what was the Results. But they do that not specifically asking about something technical or… They try to use this method to understand how you would resolve an actual, like a real problem and how you will observe that situation and what actions do you take and what results do you get. It’s a really nice way of learning about people and their experiences and it kind of makes me… When I learned about that I said, it doesn’t really matter that I don’t have a Computer Science degree as long as I have that experience and I can explain something that I did to come to a business outcome.

Manuel: It’s really understanding your thought process and making sure that it’s not just like, well, we fixed it. It’s understanding not only what was the problem but what impact you had directly. Because if I remember correctly, a lot of those questions were about you. Sure, you were part of a team but what part did you play? What are the things that you did to kind of help reach that desired result?

Maureen: So one thing that I did to prepare for that, I got online and there’s lots of questions because this is like an interview method. So I think I got a list of like probably 60 to 70 questions and I spent a week or two preparing for it giving myself the answers, trying to remember all the stories that I’ve been through my entire career and I wrote down as if… So it helped me to prepare and then when I looked at that, I was like, oh my gosh, I did a lot of things.

Manuel: You have, I mean, you’ve accomplished quite a lot. So I can imagine you probably have the opposite problem is you might have had too many stories. So trying to find out which stories you felt were the best one for that question or that situation.

Maureen: Yeah, so I think because I prepared, I kind of did some filtering myself to say out of like when you do deployments every other day, there’s so many stories for you to tell. So I wanted to showcase the ones that had the largest impact somehow and I remember when I was in the actual interview, I was telling them for like projects where we actually did impact on the customer here in the casino industry, how we made their… So there was one project I did to help casino hosts to keep track of their communications, to give customers a way better experience because it’s personalized. We did assistance for casino hosts also to schedule events. And then in the other, like when I told that story from Brazil from being able to track so many products and learn about the consumer behavior. So preparing for the interview gave me a chance of like saying out of all those nice things that I did, there’s some projects and nobody cares, so I’m not going to use those as a story.

Manuel: And so you went through, you were able to obviously land the role. When you were applying for the position, the description of what you would be doing versus what you’re actually doing, how close do you think that that was?

Maureen: It was pretty, pretty close. Right now I’m in a different role. I moved already because when I applied as an Engagement Manager, which is basically you are a project manager for the consulting side of AWS, and you do projects, you help the software developers or the cloud consultants to deliver for a customer. So you’re not a project manager on the customer side. That’s why they call it’s an engagement where we’re going to go in there and help the customer to go through a specific project. And in one of the projects, I just did this one project that got such a nice result. The sales data account team said, oh, there’s this position. This is the other posi