252: Use Informal Mentors and Be as Hands-on as Possible with Krista Seiden

<p>Phil’s guest on this episode of the IT Career Energizer podcast is Krista Seiden. She is an experienced leader in the digital analytics industry.  She has led analytics and optimization at companies such as Adobe, The Apollo Group, and Google.</p> <p>She is also a frequent conference speaker as well as a winner of ‘Digital Analytics Rising Star’ in 2014 and ‘Practitioner of the Year’ in 2015.</p> <p>In this episode, Phil and Krista Seiden discuss how she got into digital analytics and how she used informal mentors and social media to learn and network. She also explains how volunteering has helped her to gain new skills and she shares her thoughts on the future of IT.</p> <p> </p> <p><strong>KEY TAKEAWAYS:</strong></p> <p><strong>(3.35) TOP CAREER TIP</strong></p> <p>Use informal mentors. From the start of her career, Krista has been doing exactly that. When she saw something that interested her on social media, she would reach out to learn more. It proved to be an effective way of making connections. When she finally met them in person, after following them and reading what they had to say, she always had plenty to talk about with them.</p> <p> </p> <p><strong>(4.47) WORST CAREER MOMENT</strong></p> <p>When Krista´s team came up with a way to increase the number of people signing up for a free trial by 20%. As was customary at Google, Krista sent out an email letting everyone know.</p> <p> </p> <p>Unfortunately, it turned out that a significant percentage of the free trial conversions were from the Philippines. Most of which never became paid customers. However, their idea was still a good one, just not as effective as they had first thought. But it was still quite an embarrassing situation. Now, Krista always digs deeper into the numbers before sharing anything.</p> <p> </p> <p><strong>(8.20) CAREER HIGHLIGHT</strong></p> <p>After only 3 months at Google, Krista came up with a simple homepage that converted better than anything else. That in itself was an achievement. Better still, the stats for her idea eve