spoiler alert. We are live now. Who?
Here we go. Well, she blew the punchline. Now everybody knows who show how. Stranger. Why don't you introduce yourself?
Hi everybody. My name is Lauren McManamon. I am one of the senior developer advocates at ServiceNow. So alongside the likes of Chuck Tomasi, Earl Duque and Prada Bagot,
Welcome to CJ and the Duke. We are so happy you're here.
I'm so happy to be here. I'm so flattered to be on your podcast. Thank you for inviting me.
Oh, it's our pleasure. It's our pleasure.
No, absolutely.
So I guess the first question is, how did you find ServiceNow? I.
Well, I think, honestly, I think like a, like a lot of people, it was almost kind of by happenstance, you know? so. ServiceNow kind of came onto my plate in an interesting way. One of my first jobs out of college was for a major defense contractor. It was one of those, entitled like dream positions that you're just really excited to get. but it wasn't that good of a match. , not only was the project kind of different from what I was anticipating, but there was some.
Weird safety concerns, like in the area I was working in. It just, it just wasn't overall a good fit. So I was like desperately looking for a new job. I was, I think I'd only been the defense contractor for a couple of weeks. I was like, this is not for me. And so I was panic searching for a new job. , there was this car reinsurance company in Dallas and they were looking for just general full stack developers. I got the interview.
they were interviewing a couple other people and I think I talked a little bit more about, I. How comp Psci applied to the business side more than the other applicants. And so, , basically the CIO of that company was my final interview and he had said, well, we have this thing called ServiceNow and currently only one guy's working on it and he's doing a great job, but he needs, someone to bounce ideas off of someone to help him with projects and stuff. Would you be interested?
And I said, to be honest, I've never heard of Service Now Day of my life, but will I get a job if I say yes? Oh. And he's like, well, you get the job either way, but that would be a great spot for you. I was like, okay, perfect. So I joined their ServiceNow team. And it was, , headed up by this awesome guy named Ben Tr. So shout up to Ben. He's awesome. And he and I kind of worked alongside each other, I think it was around six to eight months on ServiceNow. So he taught me the ropes.
He was the one that kind of brought me into like knowledge and things like that. And then he actually kind of quickly left to join another company. So all of a sudden I went from this like new hire kind of right outta college to someone that was leading. A good portion of the ServiceNow trajectory at this, at this company.
Wow.
Uh, which on paper was I think terrifying initially as well. Cause I was, you know, he had said such a strong precedent and he had really positively turned the trajectory of ServiceNow in his tenure at this company. And so I, there was very big shoes to fill and luckily it worked out pretty positively.
Yeah, it, it sounds like it did. one thing you said during that is that you talked about, um, how, uh, com psci affects the business more than any of the other applicants, right? And that's, if anybody, anyone who's listening following along, with CJ and the Duke, everyone knows that that's kind of like my thing, right? It's, it's talking about how technology helps the business and, helps it grow, right? So the business can, realize, more value.
Out of their technology investments and just more value in general. talk a little bit more about how you came to be centered along those lines.
Well, it was something that I've always kind of been keenly aware of. Cause I think in actuality I'm probably more of a business oriented person than like a tech oriented person. I think it's very interesting to see how. The addition of one piece of technology or, or the removal right of one piece of technology can greatly transform the production and the orientation and overall even organization of a company. And I've loved seeing how that has played out.
I love seeing how that played out in like case studies in college. That was always what really piqued my interest. And so ServiceNow, as I learned more about it, seemed to be a really interesting origin point between the two. Not only could I build, but I could build in a way that also allowed me the capacity to easily see the overall. Impact of what I was building, right?
There's so many powerful like builtin analytics and reporting aspects of ServiceNow that you don't have to spend, six to eight months building as well to see the overall impact of even simple applications. So that was something that really, really piqued my interest too.
Oh, that's awesome. I totally agree with you, right? Like it's, the impact of the platform is one of those things that is really hard to, uh, broadcast to folks. Right? Until they, until they actually see it.
Absolutely. Yeah.
I hope that, you're allowed to talk about this. If not, we can come up with another question. But, what was one of the coolest things that you built on the customer side?
Ooh, I think probably the thing I was most proud of, and I think it's probably something I'm most proud of to this day, was there was one holiday season, so the owner of this company was very generous and he would always give every employee like a Christmas gift, which was very sweet. And one year he gave us all 50. Bit. So I was like, oh, I like, that's such a cool gift. And like we were all trying to be healthy. Like there was a bunch of like health challenges like that were being done in it.
I don't remember whose idea it was. I definitely don't wanna take credit for it, but someone had suggested , a step counting a tho, right? Like, oh, who can get the most steps? And we do it to some extent for charity cuz we had been given these Fitbits, so we kind of wanted to give back. And so I, I was like, I think we could track that on ServiceNow at the time. I'm trying to remember. I don't know how many custom maps we were dipping our toe into, but it wasn't many.
And so I think when we mentioned ServiceNow as a, like a governing body of this challenge, it kind of raised like a couple of eyebrows. I'm like, yeah, sure. Okay. But um, Luckily at the time, they still had that in its old version, the share website, and someone had built a semi working integration with Fitbit and I was like, oh, perfect. And so I fixed what wasn't working in that. We got everyone hooked up and so we had this big TV that would show everyone's steps. On the
That's awesome.
that's what we ran the charity thing through. To be honest, I nuked our company's like productivity for the, I think it was a two week challenge cuz everyone would just go on breaks and start like walking around cause they were so competitive. Uh, but all in all, it was for charity. So I guess it was in the long run, a good thing.
Nice.
is, that's awesome.
It was definitely fun.
So you built this Fitbit challenge, and you onboarded the rest of your, , colleagues. And so what made you decide to do it with ServiceNow, Versus anything else?
Well, I think it was ultimately the speed in which we could do things. the IT company at the customer I worked for was so amazingly productive, but they were almost kind of a victim of their own success. The backlog for what they wanted to do was so long because they were so good at, at creating stuff, right? , and so that was something that we are almost. Unshackled from like on the ServiceNow team for the things that ServiceNow could do.
Obviously it can't do everything, but for the things that we could contribute to, we could do them at such a smaller timeframe just because we were developing on a platform, right? We weren't having to build things full stack from the absolute ground up. , and that helped tremendously as far as like a bargaining chip of why things should maybe go on the service now. Even it was a non-typical use case for the platform to have.
Yeah, no, I totally agree with you when I'm thinking, when I have new ideas, that's totally how I think about it as well. It's like, well, ServiceNow platform has all this stuff already built into, it's got emails, it's got recording, it's got, you know, scripting platform. I already have the skillset. Right. And, and it already applies there, you know, and rest integrations are easy, the whole nine yards, right? So it's like, yeah, of course.
I'm gonna look at ServiceNow first before I think about building. Something and like note js or whatever, or react or what have you. So yeah, no, that, yeah, it makes a lot of sense to me.
So I'm kind of curious what a day in the life of, looks like at ServiceNow. do you still get to work on stuff? Do you still get to build on ServiceNow?
Well, it probably depends on the time of year. If you had asked me back in April, absolutely not cuz that's only knowledge. , but I would say that most of the time, so currently I'm on the developer advocacy team. So basically our team contributes, It's mostly content focused. At the moment we're trying to expand into more like collaborative spaces and focus more on like community and things like that. But mostly we push out a lot of content, especially around the new releases.
So currently we're, we have our heads down a lot for Vancouver. So I would say a day in the life for me is that I usually start my workday at around like, Seven 30 or eight, I catch up on correspondence that I've gotten. I, I'm traditionally like very bad at getting through emails, so I try to do it first thing in the morning. We usually have a couple of team catch up calls. I would say probably like anywhere between one to three hours worth, depending on the day of, the week per day.
And then the remainder is kind of up to you. One thing I really like about this team is that you kind of run it like your own, uh, like micro. Company, I guess micro brand. for example, I really love advocating flow designer. I think it's a grossly underused for the platform that I wish everyone used. So traditionally, I spend a lot of time learning about its newest functionality, creating videos or live streams for that.
Talking to the product side of the team about what I've said correctly, what I could include about future stuff, et cetera, and kind of guiding my content around that.
That's,
Designer. I love it. I, I, I just had that aha moment about flow Designer like,
Right.
the, all the years are blending together. So I don't know if it was like two years ago, three years ago, or one year ago, but there's a certain point I'm like, I want, I really wonder if flow designer is where we need it to be. And I just like picked it up and, it was hard to figure out at first, but then after it was like hours of catching up, right? It was like four hours later and it, it's like, oh yeah.
Absolutely. And if I, gosh, I'm so tempted to spoil something cause there's something coming out in Vancouver that I, I, I really can't say it cause we, we gonna have done tech now. But I will say this as a teaser to get people on my side for flow designer. There is something that has been heavily requested for years that is included in Vancouver. And that's all I will say, but get excited for it. You've heard it here first.
down my list here.
Yeah.
Yeah. It's so funny you mentioned Flow Designer, your passion for it, right? Because, uh, Robert and I have a mutual client that is running ethically, their entire instance off of Flow Designer, right? Like the, yeah. They've replaced like any instance of scripting, so any business rules, , any workflow, any integrations, APIs that running through flow design, like every single thing that.
it shocked me how effectively it could replace business rules and scheduled jobs. You know what I mean? Just, it's not just, , it's not just a replacement for legacy workflow. It's a replacement for so many other things. I do have a daydream though, and if you could just kind of like maybe, you know, if you ever see the product managers just maybe whisper it
sure. Yeah.
now I know UI actions can basically use code to run flow, but not super clear and easy, but it would be really cool if there's one flow trigger action that was like a UI action has.
Ah, okay. I'll, I'll pass it along for sure. That's, Hey, that's part of my job too, that that's what I like about this position is that we work closely with the product team too. So I will pass that along.
Or even like, script actions
Yeah. Oh yeah.
looks for an event. It's like a business rule based off an event. Like I was, why don't they do that in flow Designer?
You're just making me wanna spoil stuff, but I can't, I can't. I'll get in so much trouble.
I guess you could though. Could you just do like a record create and this event table or something like that, and. I guess you could do it that way.
I understand what you're saying though. You, you want it built. There should be like I understand what you're saying though, like it'd be nice cuz it's such a UI focused environment, right? If that was somehow more embedded into the ui. Absolutely.
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely. And especially , with the move towards, , kind of low-code, no-code, right? Like allowing folks to say, okay, click this button and then execute this thing, right? And you just pick it from a list. Like, I think that would really help a lot of folks out, right? Like, you know, yeah. Us old, old school folks, right? Like, we're always like, no, I just wanna write code.
that's, I mean, that's why I love about it too, is I have a lot of like developer friends, . And they're just like, why? Why? Like I can just code it faster. Yes. But you can't give it to somebody who can't code after,
Oh, absolutely. That's,
this flow designer to like almost anybody. Right? Almost anybody. And they'll be able to cobble it together.
That'll always be my biggest selling point when I hear, cuz I used to hear that argument, especially when I was on sales all the time. We can't use flow designer because I can code faster. And I said yes, but if you print out your code, could your boss understand it? Or your boss's boss understand it And nine times that tan, the answer was maybe no. But if you print out a flow designer, it verbatim tells you what it's doing and you barely have to label anything.
So it's a nice, it's a nice selling point.
And there literally is a competition in time there. Right? Because you.
Mm.
When I say I can code things faster, that means there's a monetary price to the time I'm saving. But what people don't forget and we know that they forget, sorry, what people do forget and we know they forget it because ain't nobody out there doing documentation at scale is, is
What whatcha saying? You saying developers don't, don't annotate and don't document. No, never. I.
uh, and I don't put that on the feet of developers either. I put it on the feet of the entire deployment team. From the most junior ba all the way up to the engagement manager. It's all their fault. Um, but, but there's a speed to inheritance. Not just a speed to deploy, but a speed to inheritance. So x amount of times during a product's life, the people who are in charge of it will change. And how long is it gonna take them to get it?
Absolutely.
And can I just go on a little tiny rant? A little tiny one.
It's your show. Go for all thes you'd like.
It's just ju if we just imagine if these things are placed in the types of workflow that everybody dreams, it could be life sciences, pharmaceutical, manufacturing, manufacturing it, all right, like that. Time to inheritance is gonna matter because when the things fail, the failure is gonna be measured in lives. Lost, not time wasted, money wasted.
Absolutely.
Yeah, I think it matters, right, in those situations because it's a lot easier to quantify, the lost value of that inheritance that you were mentioning. So yeah, like those situations I think are really, really, really, really cool. Lauren, you've mentioned, right, like your previous sales background, I wanted to touch on that a little bit. So tell me what it's like a day in the life, of being on the sales side of things. Right?
Cause you know, a lot of our listeners are mostly on the dev side of things, right? The implementation execution, right? How does all of this look through a sales lens?
It was really, really fun. I think I worked that job. I think if it wasn't five years, it was very nearly five years. So after I joined, so I, I worked with the customer and then I was hired onto what was called demo center. Cause I didn't have any sales experience, but I had lots of, ServiceNow experience. So demo center was like a junior sales role essentially to learn the appropriate skills. So I did that for a year and then immediately joined our creator workflows specialist team as an sc.
So I'm, I was the technical salesperson. So on the sales side, at least at ServiceNow, right, they'll take a technical salesperson and pair them with a traditional account executive or or regular salesperson that person will control all of the aspects of like the contracts, the monetary aspects, the relationship management. They'll more so own the account, , which I really liked because I. Never would have to deal with contract negotiations or any of like the money things.
I could just focus on the value of the product. , so I essentially acted as the ambassador to the customer, to my salesperson. I would translate the needs of that customer to the products that would best fit them to solve their business problems or challenges or goals. And then align that , with my team for what that would potentially cost or what they would potentially need to buy or not buy. You know, like, Hey, you already have this. Did you even know?
And sometimes the answer would be like, We already bought that. You're like, yeah, like here's how you use it, it's great. So, , that was more so my position, but it was only about creator workflow. So it was only about app engine and building apps, which is very different than every other sales team at ServiceNow. Cuz we have all these great products that are sold as like those suites, so like tsm, csm and, and uh, HR and all those things.
But those are essentially done applications or application suites. It's like the difference between selling homes and, and selling land, right?
Right,
you can build whatever you want. And they go, what can we build? I'm like, what do you wanna build? And they go, I don't know what we wanna build. So learning how to handle those conversations, , was very, at, at least initially very difficult because I joined the creator workflows team when it started. So there was no precedent, , of how to handle those types of, of challenges.
the question that naturally pops in my head after, hearing a lot of that, and especially, you know, your initial answers, , earlier in the podcast, did you choose to like to land here? Was this like intentional from you to land because it feels like a really good fit. For your skillset best based on how you, , described it earlier in the podcast, right? In terms of like articulating business value and aligning it with it, right?
Like this seems exactly that, except at at scale for ServiceNow to a number of customers.
Yeah, I, I really just lucked out. I was, because when I joined ServiceNow, there wasn't a creator workflow sales team. And I, I remember thinking like, that's a shame cause we've built so many custom apps and. When I went as a customer, when I went to Knowledge, I thought, oh my gosh, I'm gonna learn from all these companies that have, that are, 10 times, a hundred times bigger than us. They'll of course be building crazy custom apps.
And at the time, that was about 2016, it was kind of a. Shattering moment to realize that we were almost ahead of the curve. And I was like, how is that possible? , and so when I joined ServiceNow in 2017, I was like, oh, I really wish there was a sales team that focused just on that aspect. And then I just lucked out cause it was created the year I kind of finished up on MO Center.
Nice. Tell us about the transition then from sales side, then to developer advocate. . And, having worked with you , on that side of the house, right? Like, you bring , this energy to it that I, that I absolutely love. So tell us how you move from sales to, to over there.
Well, I think it was more so learning what I liked about sales. So, , as an sc my job mostly was doing demos for individual customers, right? Someone would come in with a goal or a problem. , I would translate that into some sort of demo, and then they would. Buy or not buy. Right. And I didn't really understand at the time, but a lot of the things that I was doing as like pet projects, , like for example, I was trying to get better at public speaking.
So I was speaking at any snug that would pop up. I was like, I gotta get better at this. And so I was speaking at Snugs, not traditionally at sc. Responsibility, but it was something I liked doing. , as we participated in conferences, sometimes we would get subbed in to help with them. Again, not traditionally an SC job, but I realized how much I liked them, and I think the more time I spent with customers, , And that, I mean developers, right? The more I liked that audience.
I think in sales you're oftentimes speaking with leadership and it's extremely hyper competitive and , I think that I was fatiguing a bit of the pace of that. And also , I didn't really feel like I had a lot of control over my, what was quote unquote, my success. Right? That, and that is something that is a, a homogenous problem with being a solution consultant in general.
You as a solution consultant, your value comes from your ability to interpret the needs of the customer into , the software, right? But, But overall, you're still always graded on the sales number, which traditionally you don't even have that much control over. Pretty much you prevent the sale from failing, right? , oh, I prove that this thing is valid for the customer, but I was never part of like the contract negotiation or the money, right?
But that was predominantly how you're kind of graded. So I was always feeling like I never had as much control over my quote unquote su success or fate as I would've liked to. And so when this job opened up, I was like, oh my gosh. Not only does it have more focus with the audience that I really enjoy, but I do have more control to live or die by my own sword. And it was just a, a really, a perfect fit.
Oh my God. I love that. There's a couple things in there that you said that really resonate with me, right? Like one of those is how you said yes to taking , some of these responsibilities that weren't typically in your, sphere of, expertise or responsibility, right? And speaking , as snus to better your public speaking skillset, right? Like one of the reasons that I do the podcast , was to better my public speaking, , and so I totally resonate with that. And then, at Knowledge, right.
A lot of what I was saying, and this completely, I wasn't, I should have gotten a check from this, from ServiceNow. , but I, I, I completely didn't. Right. I was telling everyone, , say yes to everything. and it sounds you said yes to a lot of things and that led you from a place where you were doing well, right? And that you enjoy to being able to find what you would enjoy more and give you more control over your career, and being able to jump there.
Yeah, , and I think a lot of people thought it was because I kind of, I Seinfeld it a bit, , because I, I think it was either my last year as an SC or my penultimate year as an SC that I was the number one SE for the world as far as overall like attainment.
Oh, mic drop.
And that's the way to end it, right?
Absolutely,
Use Seinfeld as a verb.
Yeah.
Okay. For the under, for the under 40 crowd. Can you, could you explain what that means?
Oh, to end it, like your peak ver versus end when you've trailed off. I think that's a really important thing, right? Is to not let things spiral into a place where they're no longer positive, right? Um, so I, I was like, I still feel like I'm doing well, but it's maybe not the best matchup anymore, so I should at least keep my eyes, o eyes and ears open.
This is so funny. Like you, you're telling us right now that you've left us the number one SC in the world, and you're like, I'm still like, I still feel like I'm doing well. No.
It really ha So there were, there were two deals in particular it must have been 2020, not 2021. So it must have been 2020. And there were two deals that I had been working on for like years, and my territory was changing. And so I asked my boss, I was like, well, if my territory changes and those deals close in like January. Do I get credit for them? He's like, no.
What.
and so I, I, my poor sales guy, I was like, you have to sell these deals. I was like, you have to. I've been slamming away for them for three years. Just one of them, just one of them has to close. I don't care if it's both just one. And then both did. So it was, it was kind of like a mini miracle that that happened. and then our territory switched. I was like, oh, whew. Thank goodness.
that is, that is awesome.
Did you have any like skills that you learned in the, SE side of things that have served you well on the developer advocacy side? Um,
I still remember my interview for the, for ServiceNow very vividly because part of it was a demo, ? And so my, the hiring manager had asked me, demo something that you've built on the platform. And so I demoed it as a developer, ? This does this and this does that. And this is cool. And I think it's cool cause I built it. And so I could tell he understood that I knew the platform very well, but overall the demo was pretty poor. And so he gave me some notes.
He said, Hey, how about you orient your demo more like a story from the person that's using it. And he's like, I'm gonna come back and I'm gonna come back in 10 minutes and you're gonna do this interview again. And I was like, okay. Oh my God. So I start, I start
pressure.
but he was kind enough to gimme the opportunity to try again. Right. And so, That was the first time I'd ever really thought about a story oriented presentation versus I think this is cool. So you think you should think this is cool, right? And I think that as an sc honing that skill is one of the best things you can take away from it. And it's something that I still use to this day of the narrative of the demo or the narrative of the presentation. , cuz we're really story oriented organisms.
It's why books and TV and podcasts are like also consumables because usually they're oriented around storytelling and technology presentations should be no different. And I think learning that was most important.
I think it's a skill that everybody should learn at a certain point in their ServiceNow career. Like there's a threshold of attainment if you don't learn to tell that story , like an SE does.
yeah.
because , it is just convincing people of larger scale ideas, right? Getting them to agree to the same worldview as you do. And it takes understanding their pain and it takes showcasing how their pain gets solved and in what degree, right? And getting them to, like, getting it to say a back to you. So they're like really selling to themselves if you're careful enough versus, you know what I mean?
Get them to sell it to themselves versus you do feature functions and it's like The peril of feature functions is they can disagree with you. You're like, I think this is cool, and like, I don't care.
Yeah. Right. And that's what my, that's what the hiring manager was getting at. Like, I understand you think this is cool, but why should I think this is cool?
Absolutely. It's funny, , so I, do therapy, right? Like I get therapy, uh, with my guy once, once a week. And I like to bring that into the podcast sometimes just to normalize it, right? So folks know that it's not something that you should shy away from. It's real kind of, you know, something I feel, I feel like everyone should do it cuz it helped me immensely, especially when I lost my mom.
But what I was talking about with my therapist, just this past week was, This entire thing, this narrative of storytelling and how it both, impacts, you know, ServiceNow, my professional career, but also my, my political career, ? And it's two things , that I just took away from that conversation, right? Is one empathy, being empathetic. With your customer and understanding like how they perceive the world and what their problem is, ? And so that you can , help solve it better, right?
Because , you can't solve problems that you don't understand. Now, you don't have to agree with the problem, right? But you have to understand it in order to help solve it. And then the second thing is, a lot of people say, I can't do sales. I can't do sales. Well, sales is really, I'll just make you think. It's their idea. Once you understand the problem, once you know the solution, then you just gotta make them think it's their solution and then the problem solved, right?
So, So I just love all of that and I just wanted to kind of bring all of that together, for folks listening, because I know a lot of people are so, intimidated by sales, but really you learn to tell the story. You have empathy for your customer, right? And then you convince them that they're just doing what they wanna do anyway. , and , that's a good start.
Absolutely. And it's so funny that the word sales has such a bad stigma, right? Like, I understand where it comes from. It comes from like, oh, like the car sales. Like, no, no shame of car sales. But, but you know what I mean, right? Of like, oh, they're just. They're just trying to nickel and dime me.
However, the art of selling isn't just necessary in a business sense, but it's also necessary from a career perspective of being able to advocate for your own skills and advocate for your own talents as well. Like it's, that's just selling too, you know?
And to some extent, I feel like selling is fundamental to life the better. you can get better. So many different things in life. By learning how to sell.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's just a way of getting people to agree on a shared vision of the world,
Yes.
them to
a better way of put it. Yeah, we're, where's Ana's shared
Yeah. And, and for, and for them to take action on it, right? It's not just, it's not just that we agree, but you are also gonna agree to do this thing. And , there's so many skills and disciplines in life that are like this. And if you say I'm bad at sales, it's like, okay, what are you gonna do about it? Cause if you tell me you're bad at sales and you're not interested in sales, that means you're not interested in any other way you can better yourself. That requires other people.
like these nuggets I feel like are so incredibly useful for our knowledge, right? For our audience because there are so many in our audience who are either just starting out or they're developers, who have never really had to sell themselves, . Or, or feel uncomfortable doing so. . And I think just talking about it in this way, kinda unpacking it and de-stigmatizing it, , can be really helpful for folks.
and there was a time when , okay, like I'm somewhere in the point of my ServiceNow career and oh, I don't know how to do sales. Well, there was a point you didn't know how to do ServiceNow either.
It's true just a skill.
you gotta do the hard thing sometimes, right? when I found out I had diabetes, like how hard is it to go from sch flubbing around in life to doing workouts three times a week? How hard is it to, completely change a diet that you've been strapped to , for the last 30 years? All that stuff is super difficult, but so what? You gotta do it.
Amen to that.
Yeah, absolutely.
Okay, let's lighten it up a bit. Um, gosh, man, we had a lot of dark stuff in there. We had like mom's dying and diabetes and
But it's real stuff. Yeah. It's not dark. Is
It's Right. That's life, right?
Yeah. I'm just not to cry. , maybe with the last bit of the show is like the Lauren that nobody else knows.
Ooh. Okay.
Yeah. Yeah.
so I heard something about anime, like a you're an anime person or is it more of a, or a Japan culture thing in general.
I love anime. I think it's a Japan culture thing. More in general though. So originally I, minored in Mandarin Chinese in college and I took it in middle school and high school. So, But the opportunities to use Mandarin, unless you are in China, are not that high, at least the United States. Right? If you live, actually, if you live in Australia, there's like tons, cuz it's, there's tons of Mandarin speakers in other places, but not necessarily in the United States.
And so, With not as many options to travel to China as I would've liked. I was wanting to pivot that, right? I'm like, I don't want all this to go to waste. , and Japanese is close, right? , so they use a type of character system that a lot of the traditional characters are derived from Chinese characters. So the grammar is different. The structure of the language is different. However, oftentimes the meanings of . Nouns and verbs as far as the character is concerned is the same.
Like the way you write fish in Chinese is the same way you write fish in Japanese. So I was like, okay, that wouldn't be that hard of a jump. But I don't really know much about Japan, and so my friends and I went to Japan in 2018 and we loved it. Ironically, I have been trying to go back to Japan since 2018 and something has always come up for three years, of which I think we know what that was. But,
my God. , Lauren: and like I was supposed to go last year and then they weren't opening up, but I was like, come on, , let me back in. , but I do watch a lot of anime too cause I was also trying to get better at the language. I'm still very, juvenile and I refuse to give y'all any, so don't even ask. I'm not looking to embarrass myself, but, , it's been really fun.
Okay. Throw some favorite titles out.
Of anime in
Yeah.
so I, I hate shows that are too long. Like people have been trying to get me to watch shows, like one piece for years. that show has over a thousand episodes.
Oh my God.
mackerel.
would take me years. So I will recommend ones that are consumable and done. , my favorite anime of all time is called Mob Psycho 100. It is three seasons and it's already done. It is perfect. the animation style is unbelievable. I think there's about 12 episodes of season and they're only 30 minutes, so you can rip through it pretty fast, and it is just, it's a beautiful story, beautiful story.
Yeah, I don't have a, a big library to select from. I think I watched and enjoyed Princess Monano. Ages
I love Prince Monique.
Yeah. I mean, but I, I'd probably like, I'd probably watch the animes that non anime fans are supposed to have heard about.
Yeah. That like Evangelion probably.
I knew of it, but I missed that one. But as a kid, I was just obsessed with, Voltron,
Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
different, like, but now, even now as a grownup, looking back and, understanding the, like the business history of the Voltron brand in the US and how they got it from Japan and everything is just absolutely fascinating.
Oh yeah, that's always what's so difficult. Even if you really like anime in the states, , thank goodness for things for like streaming platforms becoming popular because prior to that, I mean, to be honest, like the only way you could get it was, uh, You know, probably not the nicest legal ways cause Cause there's so, cause there's so much red tape. Yeah. Cuz there's so much red tape with regards to the licensing of it.
But now with like crunchy roll and there's a couple other, like high Dive I think has them, there's all these great streaming platforms that have like all the titles. It's great.
Well, I've, I've also heard that manga is eating American Comic Producers lunch
Oh yeah. , Duke: like all the demand is shifted there all of a sudden. Absolutely. Also, just the speed that they can put out, like chapters every week and it's just like pages and pages and pages, like beautiful artwork. I'm like, oh my gosh. How do y'all do like pace of it? It seems unrelenting.
Yeah. See, I love this, right? Like, cuz more competition ends up making better content, right? And so now , and I'm not a consumer of either Mongo or, , anime, , very much. But I was very much a, a Voltron fan and.
Five Lions Voltron, right? The real Voltron.
Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. you know what I love is that just, this stuff's just popular, right? And what I love about the internet so much, right? Is that you can find your thing or your people now because the entire world is connected, right?
so nice, like even if you have a very niche interest, like there is a community for it somewhere. It might be on TikTok, it might be on YouTube, might be on Twitter, but there is a community for it. You just have to look.
Yeah, absolutely. And
know, oh, sorry. Go ahead
no, go ahead.
No, no, you're sure. Go ahead. Um, I was gonna change topics too, so I guess we'll just rock paper.
Alright, cool. So what is, so you mentioned like, uh, you meant community, which is a great segue to, you know, developer MVP and advocacy. Right. And, community as a whole. And what I love about, you know, ServiceNow is that they really get com community, You know what I mean? And you know, and especially when you think about it from the perspective of this is a multi-billion dollar business, right? And. When I'm interacting in the community, I feel like ServiceNow is down the street.
Yeah.
know what I mean? , I know people from across the world and when I see them, like they know me and , it's like we've haven't missed a beat. And all of that is facilitated by the ServiceNow community that this humongous brand is putting together is amazing.
That
everybody feels like one of us, right? Like my friend Chuck, just put out a new video.
Yeah. Uh, that means the world to me. To hear you say that cuz that's exactly how I felt about the brand back in 2016 when I was still a customer. And so that's as we've grown dramatically since then. I look back to see what my employee number was and I realized that I'm one of the few people that has an employee number less than 10,000. Right. I think we're over like the 30,000 now internally.
What
wow.
And so I've always been afraid , at the breakneck speed that, that we're growing. I hope that's not something that's lost. So that means the world to me, to hear you say that. I, I know that there's specific people at the company too that really fight for that. Like Earl Duque, I would say on our team especially is like the number one advocate for keeping that community so close. And, , those people are absolutely like invaluable to making sure this still feels like , a community, . CJ: Yeah,
tell you, as somebody who did, so many ServiceNow hackathons and at least watched hackathons, I wasn't a part of. Earl knocked the hackathon out of the park this year at K 23. I've
I'm gonna send him that soundbite
super, super shout out to earl on that one.
a million percent
hackathon for,
absolutely. Errol's amazing.
and we made sure to have some people s aid you the whole time too. It was perfect. Right?
Oh yeah, the um, uh, the
was right next door. It's perfect. Right? No one got annoyed by that. No one did.
Didn't show up.
Develop under pressure. Right? That's part of the.
Absolutely. That's part of the first round , it's like a, it's survivor challenge. Right? That's the first of all,
Hey, listen, at K 13, they had a live band,
the hackathon.
yes for the hackathon, not
God.
the hackathon. And they had every speaker, like every speaker in that whole
that's really rough. That's really rough.
gotta build a business role to do this. What I said.
Oh, man, that's, that's hilarious. So, Lauren, if there was any parting words that you would give to folks listening to the show, any insight or anything that you'd like to share, what would you say?
Ooh, let me think about that for a moment.
also say it in Chinese, in
Which absolutely not. I, like I said, I refuse until I get at least an iota better. , I will say because I, we've talked a lot about like community and advocacy, both for others and yourself. Oftentimes people are afraid to put themselves out there, especially on things like social media and stuff like that. but, and I, I mentioned this a little bit when I was talking to people at Knowledge, the best thing that you can do is be an advocate for the successes that you have.
, I think a lot of times in life, like we wait for other people to speak on our behalf because we're afraid of appearing like overconfident or braggy or anything like that. I know I personally, I just had , my like half year conversation with my boss and I was like, all right, what could I improve on? And he's like, your confidence level. He's like, everyone thinks you're doing a good job except you, so you need, to work on that. And I think that's a advice a lot of people need to hear.
so many people work so. Diligently and so hard and produce really awesome things, and sometimes people just don't know about them, right? , there's a great book by Austin Kleon. It's called Steal Like an Artist. And he talks about a lot of things that artists do. To make themselves better at art, but there's a lot of applicable knowledge in there as well, just in general. And one thing he talks about is that documenting the process should be part of your process, right?
show you how you built this thing. Create a little snapshot of the improvements made, throw it up on LinkedIn or Twitter. because if anything too that documenting the process is helpful for you in the future. Therefore, you know, like what you did, how it improved. What you have tried and maybe didn't work, but other people can learn from you too and learn from your successes. And I think, , being able to showcase that publicly is a great skill.
I think that is something that we should all work to do. It's pretty cool. Thanks.
I love that.
advice.
Absolutely amazed in advice.
It's advice I need to follow, so that's why I mention it.
But it's hard for everyone, right? Like that's just amazing advice. Seriously , listen to that and take it to heart because none of us really do suffer from promotion. Well, why? I think our culture is really kind of steered to not doing it right.
Yeah.
All right, that's 45 minutes to record and we'd like to thank you again, Lauren, for joining us on this show. , it was our pleasure to have you here.
Oh, it was my pleasure to be here. Thank y'all again for inviting me. I, this is such a fun time. Thank you.
Oh my God. That's amazing. Thank you so much.