Airtable Asian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month Employee Spotlight: Pooja Raman and Jackie Park

During each Commemorative Observance Month, we spotlight two amazing colleagues nominated and voted for by a focus group of employees who identify with the given month. We are delighted to kick off our celebration of Asian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month by spotlighting Pooja Raman, onboarding specialist manager, and Jackie Park, program manager of product enablement. Here they discuss the importance of representation, their affinity for Airtable as a product, and what it means to be part of the API community.?

Please tell us your name, pronouns, role at Airtable, and how long you have been at Airtable? What is a weird or interesting fact about yourself?

Pooja: My name is Pooja Raman, my pronouns are she/her, and I lead our customer onboarding specialist team. The role of our team is to help our self-serve users get up to speed with the product. We recognize that Airtable can be a complex product to pick up so my team is there to help ensure that our end users are successful in adopting it. I have been at Airtable for two years. A fun fact about myself is I am a die-hard New York Giants fan. I even named my five-year-old border collie Eli, after Eli Manning—the greatest quarterback in Giants history.

Jackie: My name is Jackie Park, my pronouns are she/her. I've been at Airtable for more than four years. I'm coming up on my fifth year in July, which is wild.?

I lead product enablement for the customer engagement team at Airtable. This means that I ensure that everyone from sales to customer success has the product knowledge they need to engage with our customers; which is critical as our product surface continues to expand.?

An interesting fact about me is that my background is in architecture, as in the physical, building kind. Working at architecture firms made me realize how much work has yet to be done on designing how a firm actually operates and gets work done, which is what eventually led me to Airtable.

What’s your favorite part of working at Airtable?

Pooja: I never really used Airtable before I started working here and had to start using it for my interviews. So for me it's 100% the product. Specifically, the amazing focus our product and engineering teams have placed on building and enhancing this powerful tool. I think being on the customer side of things, you can see how deeply these teams care about customer feedback and utilizing it to influence their product roadmap.

Not a lot of companies have their engineering teams on the floor actually talking to customers live. I love that our team places such an emphasis on that. I also love the diversity of the product, and how it can be utilized for any use case you can think of. I use Airtable for literally everything. I use it at work for automating my weekly recaps and managing my team's quota, and I personally use it for meal planning each week. I’m also in the midst of planning my high school's reunion, all within Airtable. My team makes fun of me because there's an Airtable base for everything, but I have no shame in that.

Jackie: Personally, it comes down to the product and the people.?

I discovered Airtable while I was at a startup creating solutions for architects when I realized—wait, Airtable is THE thing that all architects should be using. It always bothered me that architects spend all their time designing for others, and yet they don’t have anything that was designed for them and the way they needed to work. So to be able to have this beautifully designed LEGO kit that allows them to build and customize exactly what they need resonated—and I quickly came to learn when I started at Airtable that this is what Airtable was doing for so many other folks beyond architects.

When I came to Airtable, it also made complete sense that the people behind the product were just as magical as the product itself. Regardless of team, everyone was incredibly smart and curious, yet humble and empathetic at the same time. We’ve grown a ton since then, but the quality of the people who have joined has continued to stay high, and I feel incredibly lucky to get to work with the people that I do.

What is it like being Asian or Pacific Islander (API) in tech?(Ex: What do you enjoy/what would you like to see more of?)

Pooja: Overall, there is a strong Asian and Pacific Islander representation in tech, but I also see some stereotypes and generalizations that unfortunately exist even in today’s tech world. One is the model minority myth, right? The assumption that Asian Americans are this uniformly high-achieving minority. That was generalized because we have this commitment to hard work, we're obedient to society, and we place a heavy emphasis on academic achievement. But all this does is create a divide among racial minorities. I've noticed that people expect us to produce results faster than our non-API colleagues because we have this myth hanging above our heads.?

Number two is this foreigner stereotype, which casts us as fundamentally foreign individuals who never fully assimilate in this idea of an American society. It's astounding how many times I get questions like, “Where are you from? No, where are you really from?” I'm from America. I was born in New Jersey. I’ll also get the occasional comment of, “Wow, you speak English surprisingly well.”

So it denies a feeling of belonging and, overall, the effect in the industry is that people can see us as silent and reserved. Sometimes we’re not given a seat at the table or a voice to speak when major decisions are being made. I feel like although we are well-represented, we're still going through hardships that people don't really see without being in our shoes.

I would say what I do appreciate about API in tech is the company's dedication to DEI. I feel like I'm able to celebrate my culture and heritage with my colleagues and we're even given a space to do so. We're going to have an employee resource group for our Asian and Pacific Islander identifying Airtablets. We have a safe space in a private Slack channel. Those are some areas where tech companies really do well in supporting people that share our background.

Jackie: If you look at this from the highest level and ask, are Asians and Pacific Islanders represented in tech—I think most folks would say yes, the box is checked. What I’d love to see more of is how this tracks once you start drilling down. What does representation look like when you start to look at a sales team versus an engineering team? Or when you look across different levels of leadership??

On the second point, I appreciate that we have those examples internally with API representation in executive positions. I also realize that even if this type of representation exists, the message can still get lost. What comes to mind is a recent article published that featured seven self-made billionaires under the age of 30. Three of those seven were Asians and yet the article chose to feature none of them in the founder photos they selected for the article cover. It’s wild that you could be at that level of success and still be invisible.

How has your experience as an API shaped your present-day identity?

Pooja: I am a first generation Indian American, and growing up—I hate myself for this— I tried to rid myself of my Indian identity. I wanted to assimilate into American culture so badly, and I was embarrassed to show any part of my Indian heritage to my friends and colleagues growing up. But something happened, I think in my later years of high school and college, where something switched in my brain. I started to embrace my dual identity.?

I picked up bharatanatyam, which is an Indian classical dance. I learned how to cook my family recipes, and I wanted a voice. I wanted a voice in diversity councils in school, college, and the workplace. But I will say what's difficult about being Indian-American specifically is there are days where I'm like, am I Indian, am I American, am I even Asian? Because some people don't group Desis with the larger Asian and Pacific Islander community, and that's really hard for me to hear and makes me feel left out.

But, fast forward today, I couldn't be any prouder to be the daughter of immigrants. I feel so fortunate to have grown up with these two wildly different backgrounds and mentalities. My values are rooted in Asian principles, but I'm able to adapt them as needed to American culture. I really could not be any happier to have such a rich heritage to learn from, and to teach others about, and just represent so boldly.?

I feel like there's this power and influence that I have now. For example, when we order Indian food for lunch in the office, I do everything in my power to convince my colleagues to order anything other than chicken tikka masala. There's so much other Indian food out there! Let's learn about it, let's eat it, let's try it.

Jackie: There's so many layers to this, and for me it’s almost impossible to think about being Asian American without touching on the other parts.?

The first piece is that being Asian American goes hand-in-hand with also being a first generation immigrant. I can't separate the two, and there's a lot that comes with this alone.?

And then layered on top of this, I’m also a woman. Whether I like it or not, this is what people see first before I’ve even interacted with them. I’m an Asian female—and this comes with whatever expectations and stereotypes are embedded in the combination of the two.?

The last piece of this is that, relatively speaking, I’m new to tech. I spent the first ten years of my professional career in a completely different career path before my pivot.?

I’d say all of these layers combined have made me hyperaware of being in situations that aren’t designed with me in mind, of not belonging. It’s something that I’ve internalized, and it took some time for me to embrace the flip of this—which is that I’m able to deeply empathize with others, which I now realize is a strength.?

What does API Month mean to you? Is there any particular way that you like to celebrate?

Pooja: I use this time to reflect on the success of the API community and how far we've come, especially as Asian Americans. I think this country has finally realized that there's more to our culture than just the incredible food that we have to offer. Right? We have these amazing musicians, comedians, actors, movies, television shows, and even athletes, and TikTok influencers these days.

I get so excited every time around this year as I know APIHM is coming up, but what's hard is there are 60 countries that fall into this category of Asian Pacific Islanders. How in the world are we supposed to learn about and celebrate the people of 60 different countries?

So for me, this month is all about education. I want to hear more about a different API country via a colleague or a friend. I want to hear their immigration stories, how they celebrate their holidays and traditions. What makes them so proud of their culture and heritage? And what I love is even though we're so different and we go through all these crazy walks in life, we still share similar values. I find beauty in that, being part of this Asian and Pacific Islander community. I really, really love that.?

Jackie: I want to hear more stories that celebrate who we are!

I know for me it’s been really tough to feel that every time I look at the news or social media I see another story of another attack on someone from the community.

There’s also just a flattening of us as people, we’re seen as interchangeable. So I want to lean in on sharing stories that bring depth, that bring dimension—whether it’s through the stories that companies like us choose to elevate or the programming that happens on television. More stories, more depth, more celebration!