Celebrating 4 Years at PayPal! 🎉

Expand your network of mentors both in your role and outside of your domain to better understand different areas within the company. The longer I work at PayPal, the more I realize that it's a people company. Through a Buy Now Pay Later project that I've been a tech lead on, I've met and have been learning from an amazing marketing mentor and later, thanks to a breakout room in the How To Find a Sponsor session, I got randomly connected with a Sales Enablement rockstar who worked on another aspect of Buy Now Pay Later.

I've also connected with other engineers in the mobile domain to understand their architecture and have also gotten a lot of wisdom from engineering managers to build my leadership skills. In these connections, I've realized how each domain plays a role which has helped me big a better picture of the PayPal ecosystem.

Communicate your goals with both your mentors and management. A mentor gave me the advice that it’s important to share my goals and how I’m working towards them as a way to increase the visibility of my work. This opens the pathway to receiving more support and how a mentor can best use their skills to help me. Another mentor also told me that it's ok to ask people for their help because they want to help and don't know how they can help until you tell them. Both advice has helped me become more comfortable in sharing and in turn, I've gotten so much more knowledge on how I can work towards these goals.

Write and draw out your ideas to best communicate them with others. I've read that it’s better to write down and or draw out your ideas when communicating them to your team. That way, everyone can get on the same page faster and start asking questions because there’s less reliance on memory to construct your vision. During meetings, I often take notes and share my screen for everyone when it’s useful to look over. These notes help determine next steps and as a recap in case anyone missed the meeting.

I've also been leading with a few process improvement initiatives such as improving our organization's documentation, how we process feature intake items, and creating a central document of all of the tech stories needed for completing a project. Each of these initiatives involved providing the necessary information to keep everyone on the same page so that the processes can continue running.

In this past year, I’ve been a co-tech lead on a Buy Now Pay Later solution that involved integrating with a pilot partner. After the integration was successful, our director suggested that we write a blog post for the internal tech blog around our Product and Tech wins. This was such a great idea and because I currently blog for my dance pieces, I found it easier to create the tech blog outline. We covered the problem statement, solution, front-end decisions such as using Vite, back-end decisions around architecture and solving multiple environments, and lastly the product KPIs and wins.

Your experiences are yours and the outcome doesn’t directly reflect on your skills. This past April, I got promoted to Software Engineer 3 and it took some time to process and celebrate this win. As a high-achiever, I have a tendency to look at the next thing and/or others who are also high-achieving with experiences that are different from mine. A mentor told me that regardless of what happens, I’ve still accomplished these great things such as being a tech lead for an internal product, moving the team from scrum to a hybrid of scrum and kanban, and being a tech lead for an external product. Also, with a promotion, it’s a “Congratulations! You’re already operating at the next level.”.

A year ago, this is where I wanted to be and with working smart, I was able to get there. A mentor told me that it's important to celebrate these wins (big or small) because I tend to always look forward, whether it's the next project or next level. In expanding my self awareness, my achiever personality has me looking up but not focusing on the outward and down as well. To celebrate the promotion, I had a nice steak and lobster and highly recommend doing this!

When reflecting on my 4th year at PayPal, I'm so grateful that I get to work with such phenomenal team members, have such supportive people managers as mentors (both past and present!), and have an abundance of mentors and mentees. I'm incredibly thankful for the different opportunities that allow you to grow in numerous areas such as engineering, product, business, marketing, and leadership. It's really up to me to push my growth and I'm excited to see how my curiosities evolve into processes, products, and more!

Thank you for taking the time to read! 🙇🏻‍♀️