Women in Leadership: Michelle Perez

Welcome to another #TeamTuesdays! We love sharing how our Verizon Connect Experience Team comes together to ideate on, test, and deliver amazing user and customer experiences! Throughout August and September, we are devoting our #TeamTuesdays articles to Women in Leadership . We also began highlighting the unique and exciting women leaders that we get to work with on the Verizon Connect Experience Team!

Our first conversation was with Alexa Carleo , a senior manager on the UX Research team.

This week, we meet Michelle Perez ( Michelle Morris CCXP ), Associate Director of Competitive Insights!

Michelle is a fierce and passionate leader whose career spans 30 years in an impressive variety of domains. Read on to learn more about her, and learn some impactful lessons from her as well!

Not Just Leaning In, but Jumping In

“I knew when I graduated that I wanted to get my hands dirty,” Michelle shared. “I wanted to get right into the process. I just wanted to get in the middle of it.”

This driving mantra is something we all get to see in action when working with Michelle. She isn’t afraid to jump into new spaces, to tinker with every cog, and to understand how each puzzle piece fits together. And that energy makes tons of sense when you learn more about where she started: engineering.

“I graduated in chemical engineering, and I started in manufacturing as a processing engineer for typewriter ribbons,” Michelle shared, with a twinkling chuckle. “If anybody remembers! ‘Do you know what a typewriter is?’ That’s what I like to say.”

This is especially exceptional given that women in STEM fields were even more underrepresented than they are now. It makes sense that given this progression and upward trend that we also see more growth in women leaders in these fields .?

Chatting with Alexa made me think of what we can do to fix the Broken Rung problem. Talking about this facet of Michelle’s career made me think about what she and women like her have done for all of us with regard to recognizing and breaking the Glass Ceiling.?

Michelle soared through that experience and broke another glass ceiling when moving from process engineering to product engineering, where there is similarly low representation of women in the field. According to the job research site Zippia, only 9.1% of product design engineers are women .

As a product engineer, Michelle was responsible for designing and delivering the elements of a product.? This type of work entails both creating products from the ground up as well as setting the strategy of how that product can be used in order to meet the customer's needs.

“I did a lot of tuning of existing products and processes to learn how we could make them more efficient,” Michelle described. This core experience seems to explain the unique way that Michelle thinks about our users and customers, centering everything that she does around where they find value. (You can learn more about product engineering and their perspectives on users by reading this great piece at dev.to by Viljami Kuosmanen! )

Another interesting aspect of Michelle’s experience is that she followed an evolution in technology as well. She held those prior roles for typewriter ribbons, and then moved back into manufacturing engineering, and soon after, new product development, for laser printer cartridges and devices.?

“I was now in more of a leadership role,” Michelle marked. “Not a people leader, but owning a given set of components.”

Here, Michelle explained how one thing led to the next. She soon had 7 different products under her belt, all of which she started from the ground up. She then evolved into a people leader role, moving into management of a small team of manufacturing, mechanical, and electrical engineers. This came with an expansion of her product line ownership, to where Michelle owned a bigger share of the laser printing device, a whole widget that required Michelle to manage multiple teams.?

I so appreciate Michelle’s formative domain experience here in her early career and first management experiences. It clearly reflects the research that S&P Global and Pew Research Center has done regarding the depth of foundational knowledge that women bring with them into the workforce. And it paints a vivid picture of how strong of an impact this kind of experience makes.

But after all of this growth, Michelle paused to reflect. And her experience incorporates much of the research showing that women leaders often also get less support and fewer resources to lead their teams .

“At the end of 15 years, I got burnt out a little on product development,” Michelle said. “It’s grueling. You’ve gotta come up with fresh ideas in a short schedule, and without much money.”

An Overnight Opportunity

At this vital point in time, a new path made itself known to Michelle.

“I had an overnight opportunity,” she continued, “where the VP of the division that I worked in came to me and said, ‘Hey, I need to start a customer experience program, and I think you’re the right person for that.’ “I said, ‘OK, well, what’s customer experience?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know! But we’ll go figure it out together.’”?

As you can see, Michelle’s combined strengths of fearlessly jumping into the unknown, dedication to finding users and customers value in product solutions, domain knowledge in the foundational areas that her products serve, and experience managing multiple teams of people absolutely made her the right person for this literal overnight opportunity.

“The next morning, I went in and told all my teams that I was going to work on staff for him and create a customer experience program,” Michelle said. “That was 16 years ago, and I haven’t looked back.”

Michelle’s customer-focused path was certainly sparked by this opportunity, but it had always been fueled by customer curiosity.?

“I didn’t know anything about customer experience, but I knew a lot about processes,” Michelle explained. “And I knew a lot about the products that I was making. I always wondered what the customers thought about all of the hard work that we did to put this product in place. So, I was passionate about bringing that feedback from customers to the people who were developing the product. I wasn’t alone in that; everyone wanted to know.”

Michelle’s teams up until this point had no channels of feedback.?

“We would put something in the market, and then we’d celebrate, ‘Woo-hoo, we got it out to the market!’ And then there was nothing,” Michelle remembered. “And then you kind of moved onto the next product. There was a hand-off to another team that really handled the product in the marketplace, but the people who designed it never heard anything.”?

So, how did Michelle bring that knowledge to the team?

Specifically, Michelle shared, “I started the customer experience program and built it out to have a full closed-loop process, a feedback loop, a full quality end-to-end process. We had a very solid list of top ten problems that were going to drive and move Net Promoter Score. I led a bunch of black belt Six Sigma initiatives to make process improvements that would ultimately affect the customer experience. I was creating teams underneath me and in other adjacencies. And quarterly, we listened to what was happening with our products, where things were going well, where things weren’t, and what we could modify and shift for the next generation of products.”

Prior to Michelle’s efforts, feedback on products came from their Marketing team, who would offer potential improvements or new features from what they heard from customers. “But we never got the reasons why we needed it,” Michelle pointed out.

This highlights the value of UX Research teams. “What your team does today,” Michelle said, of our Verizon Connect UX Research team, “that’s bringing it back to the development team so that they can get their hands on that. But we didn’t have that at all, 20 years ago.”

This had me thinking: how Michelle’s teams within Product then respond to getting that feedback in a more direct, systematic way? Were there challenges, or even resistance?

“It was definitely very gratifying to the former colleagues I worked with,” Michelle shared. “The engineering community would come to me and say, ‘Hey, how do I get more of this?’”

After 5 years, Michelle had created this fundamental process for her company. And she had the energy and excitement to do it again in another sphere. Here, Michelle had the opportunity to move from domain knowledge mastery, toward people and team management, deeper into customer experience, and finally experimenting with thought leadership.

“I didn’t know anything about accounting and tax professional services,” Michelle shared, “but this company and industry had a great start on building the foundational elements of a company where the customer experience was at the center. I came in and helped optimize the process. And more importantly, it was about having a cultural shift and change in the mindset of the business so that everybody felt obligated and accountable for doing something for the customer experience.”

Michelle has bright memories of this chapter in her experience. “That was fun!” she shared. “I had a small team of people underneath me. We were doing Voice of Customer. We were doing employee culture. We did a marketing shift, changing our brand to be more customer-centric.”

There were certain factors that helped make this cultural shift successful.

“The CMO of the company had a really dynamic, diverse set of skills across their leadership,” Michelle observed. “I learned a lot of different marketing aspects: how we go to market, overall business language, financial acumen. When you’re in the middle of it, and you’re starting to create budgets and operational plans, things shift and change.”

Michelle’s recognition of her team’s wide and deep arsenal of skills reminded me of the research done by DDI finding that women leaders uniquely recognize and plan around bench strength in order to shape the next chapter for the team, as well as the overall business.?

And in addition to that, Michelle went on to join the board of the Customer Experience Professionals Association, or CXPA . This reminded me of the S&P Global research showing that women leaders who serve on professional boards often have more experience in the domain of expertise than their male counterparts do.

That deep understanding and representation of customer experience work led to a unique opportunity to connect dots in new ways for the business.

“I had full teams of analytics underneath me as well,” Michelle described. “We were doing a whole lot with a lot of data. We were fine-tuning the CRM, because that system was so critical. We still had all of our customer experience work continuing on in Voice of the Customer and in the cultural perspectives. We had market research and competitive insights as well. So, all of those teams were gathering insights that we served up back to the business.”?

And this impacted Michelle’s next career moves. “That kind of opened up an interest in me to have much more of a business perspective. I became interested in strategy and how to guide the future of the business.”

Making the World a Better Place

Here is the nexus at which Michelle’s incredible experience meets Verizon’s special and distinct space.?

“What brought me to Verizon was that I was, what they call, ‘poached’,” Michelle laughed. “I was really happy where I was, and someone came along and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got a neat new job here at Verizon, and we’d love for you to come and apply for it.’ So, I jumped and came over to Verizon, one, because I liked the challenge of something new, but mostly because it was going to give me the opportunity to bring customer experience in the things that I had done into a lot of different industries.”

This point of Michelle’s story makes me think of DDI’s finding that women leaders must often leave companies to take advantage of new opportunities that will give them new challenges, as well as provide them more space to grow.?

“It’s a little Pollyanna-thinking,” Michelle shared, with a warm glow to her message. “My goal has always been to look at the breadth of where I can utilize my skills. I think I can make the world a better place by helping to make better customer experiences. The more hands I can have in that, and the more areas I can influence, then the more I can do to make the world a better place.”

And in that very signature Pollyanna-Michelle hybrid fashion, Michelle jumped over and learned about another new space in which to advocate for the customer experience: contact center solutions.

“I worked with contact center leaders and customer experience leaders of various B2B and B2C companies who were starting a transformation effort,” she shared. “I did pre-sales consulting with them in helping them to make shifts and changes in how they ran their businesses.”

At this time, a major shift happened – not just for Michelle, but for all of us. It’s something that we’ve talked about in our previous #TeamTuesdays articles as well. Something paradigm-shifting, and something transformative.?

“Covid happened,” Michelle replied. “When that happened, there became a real need in the contact center space, specifically in government, where state, local, and federal agencies needed to stand up cloud-based services because their employees couldn’t come into the office.”

This prompted Michelle to shift quickly into sales management.

“I managed a group of contact center sales specialists who understood and knew the contact center space really well,” Michelle shared. “We could go in and sell to these CIOs or COOs within the government space.”

Those cloud-based services were vital to ensuring that people could get what they needed.

“Back to that theme of making a difference,” Michelle drove home, “we were making a difference in people’s ability to eat. To get money. To get unemployment insurance. We were setting up processes for people to get their day-to-day needs met.”

It was also an opportunity to do some really forward-thinking experimentation.

“It was a real opportunity to embed the things we wanted to embed into the business digitally, from that contact center perspective,” Michelle added. “With that, money was flowing through the government. There were a lot of sales, and a lot of work in getting things going.”

Coming Home

As we talked more about that pandemic-borne, rapid shift, Michelle reflected on just how much she learned through all of her shifts, and the impact that work was having on her life.

“I was a process engineer, and now I’m in sales?” she said, amazed. “I had no idea what I was doing. And honestly, the year that I spent in that role had to be the most brutal year of my life. And when I say that, I’m not exaggerating. I worked 12-15 hours a day. Most weeks, at least 6 days, some weeks, 7 days. This is all during the pandemic, when we didn’t really know what was happening.”

And though Michelle was making a strong and positive impact for all of her customers, it ultimately wasn’t sustainable.

“At the end of that, I really burnt myself out. I learned my lesson,” she remarked. “It was not only the number of hours. I was brand new to sales. I was brand new to working in the public sector on a regular basis, which is a totally different way of doing business, and has totally different needs. I was brand new to the ins and outs of the details of the contact centers. Almost everything that I knew, and that allowed me to feel comfortable [in other roles], was gone.”

This experience happening in the middle of the pandemic only exacerbated the exhaustion that Michelle was beginning to feel.?

“About a year in [my role in sales], I felt that I needed to get back to my roots in customer experience,” Michelle stated. “That’s what took me to Verizon Connect.”

Michelle described how she found a position that was centered on customer experience. Through this opportunity, Michelle found a way to do what she really loved: start a customer-focused program, and influence customer-centric change.

It is through this work that we became colleagues on the Experience team, which focuses on user experience design and research.?

At Verizon Connect, we are encouraged by our leadership to think holistically – we are all responsible for the customer experience, and we play different roles in informing the entire journey.?

Michelle’s initiatives and foundational wealth of knowledge helped us form processes to ensure that we connect across the business to share as well as gain insights about the customer experience as a whole.?

And having that understanding is crucial for our current collaborations, one that hearkens back to her very first team’s product development needs: we work shoulder-to-shoulder with our senior leads and directors in UX design and service design to pair user experience research with competitive insights in order to get that customer feedback to the people who design our products and solutions.

Fearless Exploration, and Mindful Conversation

I haven’t yet had the storied career that Michelle has had, but I see in her so clearly this common theme across all of the women leaders that I’ve gotten a chance to work with.?

Through all of the professional experiences that I’ve gotten the chance to be a part of, whether in user experience, customer experience, or academia, and both within Verizon and outside of Verizon, I’ve noticed that our women leaders are all fearless explorers.?

But it takes a lot.

Namely, it takes so much energy, and so much courage.?

It takes courage to jump at these opportunities. It takes courage to give your all for your teams. It takes courage to really self-reflect and think about whether what we’re doing is the right balance of priorities and needs for ourselves. It takes courage to make the kinds of sacrifices that leaders, especially women leaders, make day in and day out, small and large, all with the Pollyanna hope that what we’re doing makes a difference. It takes courage to course-correct when things aren’t working. And it takes courage to try to find that sweet spot of career growth, professional satisfaction, and personal happiness, again and again and again.

“It’s a fine finesse,” Michelle shared, echoing themes of what Alexa shared in her article , “of when to push, and when to pull back. When to be passive. When to be assertive. And when to be aggressive.”

The more I’ve experienced, and the more wisdom that has been shared with me, the more I realize that there is no final state of happiness that people somehow achieve. Life and work exist within a pendulum that swings back and forth, and for as much fearless exploration that we do, especially as women, the more mindful consideration we must do to adjust our levels of energy.

To that point, Michelle shared, “If I reflect back, I would love to be able to say that I was one of those people who knew how to balance life, have little hiccups, and then find my way back on the path. That’s really not my story. I had 3 children along the way. I was managing being a full-time mom, being a leader, and pursuing something in my career. There were those moments of, ‘How do you do it? How do you manage it?’ My standing answer for all of it is, ‘By the grace of God, one day at a time.’”

When thinking about the sales role, Michelle thought about other times in her life and career when she was stressed, and how that stress manifested.

“When you do that to yourself for so many years, it really shows up,” she acknowledged. “I suffered terribly from migraines. My body was screaming at me, telling me to stop. The doctors said, ‘You just have too much stress in your life. You just need to remove some things from your plate.’ And I’m like, ‘Well, what exactly would you like me to remove?’ Because there wasn’t a lot of extra. I was putting a roof over our head, putting food on the table, and trying to be a good employee. I came last in it all.”

I found some interesting overlap here in our experiences – vastly different, and yet, we are grappling with the same things.

Michelle built her career and professional life as a Gen X trailblazer. She took on a field that had an underrepresentation of women, and she took on pioneering new roles in those fields. In every role that she took on, she gained deep and dynamic experiences, but she has also felt the toll that doing that work takes.?

I feel that same burnout, but for a different reason, finding myself somewhat dizzy as I unlearn the toxic Millennial hustle culture, and decouple my work from my worth. This is on top of experiencing burn out from academia, and, well, basically everything that my generation is experiencing as huge life barriers now.

“All those things you hear today, leaders saying that you’ve gotta put yourself first and take care of yourself – I didn’t know how to do that,” Michelle shared.?

Self-care was not built into the parlance of work culture, as it increasingly or holistically as it is now. It’s encouraging to see how workplaces, like Verizon, offer resources and time to devote to that balance. But I continue to wonder and seek feedback on how these self-care conversations are unfolding for all of our generations, in all of our workplaces. Similar to my talk with Alexa, there’s always room for systemic improvement – especially for women.

“I still struggle with it,” Michelle offered. “It’s becoming easier because my children are grown, and the responsibilities are less from a home perspective, but still, I love what I do at work. So it’s hard to step away from that and really focus and take care of yourself. I say that for all the young mommas, those thinking about starting a family, all the kick-ass women and what they do day-to-day… there’s a lot that comes with all of those responsibilities.”

Michelle and I talked about how our conversations become less about “having it all”, and more about making real choices.?

“I’ve spent most of my adult life serving others,” Michelle pointed out, “whether it was my kids or my job. And because that fit into what I think is ultimately important in life, I became a slave to it. That’s where you’ve gotta find the balance. I feel like I’m trying every day to get back on a path of health and wholeness.”

This aligns more with what I’ve learned about self-care through my time working in clinical counseling, and what I’ve learned about myself professionally. There isn’t really an “all” to have, so we don’t have to hold onto the pressure of trying to have it.?

Realizing that, and speaking with all of these incredible women leaders, has given me the freedom to be more flexible. To be guided by what I truly want out of life, rather than ticking boxes for some prescriptive identity or end goal. To be more present in the work that I do. And to be open to these really honest conversations about our experiences.?

“You have to call a spade a spade,” she shared. “That’s never comfortable. But it’s OK to be real. It’s OK to tell the truth.”?

Summary: Where We Are Today

As we wrapped up our conversation, I asked Michelle where she feels like she is today.

When it comes to her personal life, Michelle is in a place of warm and wonderful celebration. “I’m newly married. I love my husband. I spend so much time with him but it’s never enough,” she gushed. “I want to enjoy that.”

And when it comes to career and identity, Michelle has really focused her perspective in a holistic way.?

It helped me get a better sense of how all of our working generations of women are thinking about our careers.?

How do we see growth for ourselves? How do we carve our own paths? How do we ensure that the teams and systems that we build recognize the contributions of women who came before us, while also celebrating the women who come after us?

It’s a lot to think about all at once. But in typical Michelle fashion, she frames this in a way that allows her to take it day by day.

“I think I’m allowing myself to not put as much pressure on myself, and yet, maintain my means,” Michelle shared. “I have 3 things that I need in my job: I need to be challenged. I need a great boss, who will pave the way so that I can be successful. And I need to be able to make a difference. I need to feel like I’m making a difference.”

I know I’m not the only one who feels this way, but if it isn’t already clear, to Michelle: you are absolutely, absolutely making a difference, and I’m so grateful for the opportunity to get to work with you!