Stephanie Hannon
CTO for Hillary Clinton
Discussion
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Stephanie Hannon
@twephanie · CTO Hillary For America
Hi — I'm Steph Hannon, CTO at Hillary for America. Over the last 17 months, I've grown a team of almost 70 Brooklyn-based engineers, product managers and designers who are building tools and tech to win this election. I was the product lead for Google Wave. I helped create hosted Gmail which became Google Apps for Work and Education. I helped launch Google Maps in almost every country in EMEA. I helped create General Transit Feed Specification and Google Transit. I worked on elections and disaster response and civic engagement at Google. I've succeed at things and failed at things and I'm happy to talk about all of the above. Scuba diving is my favorite past time. I'm delighted to be here — ask me anything.
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Chris Sacca
@sacca · Chairman, Lowercase Capital
Steph, with your incredible experience of building and launching products, you're a dream hire/founder for any company in the world. So how did you choose to work on the campaign?
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Stephanie Hannon
@twephanie · CTO Hillary For America
@sacca You are too kind, friend! I was approached by a number of the Obama 2012 Tech alum at ORDCamp in early 2015. I had never worked in politics or campaigns before but believe you should always be curious and learn more when approached about amazing opportunities. I said yes because I thought it would be a massive challenge, a massive learning opportunity and a chance to have big impact by being a part of the team to put the first woman in the White House.
Hey Stephanie, thanks for joining us! Can you talk a little bit about how the campaign is using technology to connect with younger voters? Trump Yourself from a weeks ago was brilliant. Nicely done. 👌
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Stephanie Hannon
@twephanie · CTO Hillary For America
@nivo0o0 I’m so happy to hear you liked Trump Yourself (http://trumpyourself.org)! It was an incredibly fun project to work on and we are proud of how popular it was. It’s apps like that which help us reach young voters, and highlight what’s at stake this election. For many, this will be their first time voting so we want to not only inform them, but make sure voting is simple and easy for them.
There’s many ways to do both of these things - especially by using social media and building mobile applications. New features like Facebook Live help us broadly share important speeches or host valuable discussions while features like custom Snapchat filters help us show off special campaign moments with delight & whimsy. Additionally, we build a lot of custom tools that we share through all our social channels and you’ll see over-time incorporated into our mobile application.
Our team is full of bright, diverse and young designers and engineers so often times they are the best source of ideas when we brainstorm.
Serhii Vasylenko
@serhii_vasylenko · CTO, YourServerAdmin
What are your main responsibilities as CTO of politics candidate? Im asking because had the same position, but in IT company, and it's very interesting to know how it's different. Thanks!
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Stephanie Hannon
@twephanie · CTO Hillary For America
@serhii_vasylenko We are responsible for delivering the tools and technology to power this campaign. That spans a broad space: fundraising, organizing (empowering field organizers and helping volunteers be efficient in canvassing and phone banking), voters (registering to vote, GOTV, voter protection), data analytics infrastructure, storytelling and rapid response, engagement and mobile apps. We also have ops teams to build an infrastructure to make development easy and fast and to keep everything up and running. We work with partners but we do alot of this with in-house development. This has been one of the biggest surprises of this job, I could not have predicted how many different tools and products we would build and launch. The count is likely over 50 now.
Serhii Vasylenko
@serhii_vasylenko · CTO, YourServerAdmin
@twephanie Wow! When you talk about tools and products, do you mean some software used for internal purposes or something that is targeted at the electorate? By the way, I noticed you said "we" but never "I" - why? :)
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Stephanie Hannon
@twephanie · CTO Hillary For America
@serhii_vasylenko Because there are almost 70 talented amazing engineers, product designers and product managers building all the stuffs. We are a big team working together and I'll take every chance to recognize that. :)
Corley
@corleyh · COO @ Product Hunt
Hi there! Thanks for joining us today.
I'd love to know what has been the hardest part your transition from the private sector to the public? And what has been one of the most surprising things about the shift?
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Stephanie Hannon
@twephanie · CTO Hillary For America
@corleyh I went from 10 years at the best resourced company in the world to the most scrappy environment. When new engineers start, I offer them a stack of empty boxes to build their own standing desk. We have a Monday morning scramble to keep our chairs from being grabbed when new people start. Instead of bonuses or equity we have a cardboard "Slaaay" sign we hang above desks when people launch something very cool. At Google, we have the best infrastructure and tools and ops teams and services to build on top of. Here, we didn't inherit much from previous campaign cycles and we are supremely cautious with spending our funds so we've had to be creative about bootstrapping and building our infrastructure. Also, we pay engineers (I often get that question, yes my positions are paid), but the salaries are not competitive with private companies. So I just want to give a huge shout out to the people who have joined this team, they could be doing any other job for a lot more money and a fraction of the work hours. If you meet someone from HFA Tech, give them huge hugs and gratitude.
Vanessa Pagan
@vanessapagan · founder, Songbirdtek
In what ways are the strategies for personalization of content and gamification with small touch points within the mobile app working to drive engagement, grassroots organizing and donations for Hilary?
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Stephanie Hannon
@twephanie · CTO Hillary For America
@vanessapagan We’ve talked to a lot of supporters and so many of them want to help. However, there’s a big gap between being on the email list and feeling comfortable phone banking or knocking on doors; a lot of supporters feel like they don’t have the time and resources to do more of these traditional asks. The mobile app is for them, a way for everyone to participate in a way that feels personal, where a supporter with only 3 minutes a day can pick concrete impactful actions that are helpful to the campaign. Whether it’s reading up on Hillary’s policy proposals, signing a commit to vote card or sharing an event with a friend, the app provides a host of tools that help supporters join the campaign. The personalization helps supporters feel like these actions are within reach — they can pick actions that feel the most natural and meaningful to them. The gamification is a great way to help people do the work that is so important as well as create a great experience with many opportunities to surprise and delight our supporters.
Don't know what we are talking about? Download the app here, iOS only (for now): http://hillaryclinton.com/mobileapp
Andrew Ettinger
@andrewett · Product Marketing, Twitter (ex-PH)
What has been the most insightful thing you've learned from Hillary? What do you think has been the greatest thing you've taught her?
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Stephanie Hannon
@twephanie · CTO Hillary For America
@andrewett I've been impressed with her extreme preparation and appetite for knowledge. I helped host a round table with Silicon Valley leaders from the sharing economy like Airbnb, Box, Lyft, Instacart and Uber last August. I knew that she wouldn't be a user of the tools, as she probably hasn't had to find her own transportation or go to the post office in quite awhile. But she absolutely knew every bit of those companies, products, users and challenges. And she led a deep and thoughtful conversation about the regulatory, tax and infrastructure challenges that make growing those businesses challenging. She is an information sponge and it is truly a thing to see the genuine listening. I know I am a kool-aid drinker but I left that room confident of her commitment to my industry and community.
Mariano Pappalardo
@parisivy00
SV companies are obsessed with culture and Google’s SVP of People Operations says “culture eats strategy for breakfast”. What’s your role in shaping your team’s work culture?
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Stephanie Hannon
@twephanie · CTO Hillary For America
@parisivy00 Team culture is something we spend a lot of time thinking and iterating on. You have to when your team grows from 1 to almost 70 people in under 17 months! One of the things I am most proud of is how diverse team our tech team is in terms of gender balance (we’re a little under 40% female), ethnicity, and background. It took significant investment to get there, so the early part of culture was our recruiting process. We focused on sourcing from diverse meetups groups and communities in NYC, we were deliberate about diverse interview panels and we prioritized emotional intelligence and soft skills along with technical skills and experience.
As an operating team we have remained focused on building an inclusive culture. We encourage our team members to attend and discuss unconscious bias training. An unexpected stumble on building an inclusive culture came from the early days of the campaign. We have a number of engineers who came from Google who have never used Github before. They were made fun of for this by other team members which was, of course, a negative experience working with our team. We also had bad experiences with team members shaming other team members for wanting to use certain technologies that they have experience with, like MongoDB. With such a diverse team that uses so many different technologies (Python, Ruby, PHP, Node, etc.) we’ve spent a lot of time working with the team to use inclusive language so that no team member feels less than the others for their background or the technology they work with.
As a team we’ve also worked together to figure out how we celebrate wins and ensure that individuals and teams get recognized for great work. At Google we had peer bonuses where you could gift a $200 bonus to a coworkers for doing an amazing job. Though we don’t have that kind of resources on the campaign we created an alternative called a Pear Bonus. Team members will gift a hat with a Pear on it to reward work and then post a picture in Slack. We also have a Backsweat award for teams that work after hours when the HVAC may not be working and a “Slaaay!” sign that we hang above a team that ships a huge product. We celebrate a lot!
Our culture is very unique and we’ve received a lot of positive feedback about it. I’m so proud to have worked with everyone on building a team culture that works for such a fast paced and work intensive environment.
Mariano Pappalardo
@parisivy00
@twephanie thank you very much for your time. Incredibly insightful :)
Titus Capilnean
@titus_capilnean · Growth Manager, DigitalGenius.com
Hi Stephanie, I just arrived to California about 6 weeks ago and want to volunteer on the digital side of the campaign (I have loads of Public Affairs & Digital PR experience from a mining project job a few years back). Is there a place where I can see what are your most pressing needs or what I can contribute with - i.e. non-phone bank work?
Also, what tool or mix of tools do you think is critical to win in November?
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Stephanie Hannon
@twephanie · CTO Hillary For America
@titus_capilnean Thanks for being willing to jump in! We actually have a tech-oriented volunteer community called DevProgress (http://devprogress.us). There are hundreds of volunteers there right now who are working on specific projects the campaign asks for as well as community driven projects. We need folks both with product and coding experience along with marketing and P.R. to help get these projects shipped and make an impact.
We really want people to get involved in the campaign and get their voices heard, so some of the most critical tools focus on that. For instance, our team has built a call tool (http://hillaryclinton.com/calls) and mobile app (Hillary 2016 on the Apple App store) that let volunteers get involved in their own way. We also build tools that help with canvassing and data entry so volunteers spend more time with potential voters. Technology helps in some ways of places but this election is only won with the help of volunteers so our tools are built with that in mind.
Linda Bivens
@linda · I love to sew-invented hardware
@twephanie @titus_capilnean when we see clinton supporters/volunteers breaking laws about registering voters &encouraging to vote 4 clinton- will they be fired or prosecuted?
Titus Capilnean
@titus_capilnean · Growth Manager, DigitalGenius.com
@twephanie Awesome, thanks for sharing the site with me, hadn't seen it! Will be in touch :)
My view is that this election will be won on turnout numbers, not just with the internet crowd, but also with the non tech connected individuals out there.
Ina Herlihy
@inaherlihy · Growth, Zumper
Given that you're effectively running a startup with an end date (election day), what lessons will you take to your next startup?