What has been your business/work highlight of 2024 so far?

We just celebrated Five9’s 10-year IPO anniversary in early April and rang the opening bell at NASDAQ. To stand alongside CEO Mike Burkland, Five9 team members, and my family was an experience I won’t forget! It was an important milestone and one that I’m very proud of. Helping this company continue to grow all while working with incredible people has been rewarding on many levels. As you can imagine, the journey to become a public company is huge – and continuing the growth trajectory and achieving continued success year-after-year has been amazing.

Who is your business hero and why?

My amazing mother. She was in IT in education for over 20 years, during a time when women in tech (let alone IT) weren’t something you saw every day. Watching her learn and achieve great things helped shape my perception of what’s possible. In fact, it was my mom who inspired me to pursue a technology path in college. Watching her have to get certifications in Novell, then Microsoft showed me that in tech, you have to always be learning and adapting at a very fast pace.

As a child, we might have had different ideas of what I’d become in life – truthfully, I had aspirations to be either a lawyer or a Zamboni driver – but what she saw in me was potential and a natural interest in understanding complex concepts (like how does one drive a Zamboni!). She nurtured that interest and instilled a work ethic in me that helped me become who I am today. I owe my passion for exploring the transformative power of technology to her influence and example.

What’s the biggest business mistake you’ve made and what did you learn from it?

I would say early in my career as a leader, I thought that building the best team meant hiring the smartest people and relying on my abilities to get the team to all work together. Easier said than done!

A great analogy – especially as a former college athlete – is that having 11 quarterbacks on the field in football does not make a strong team. That’s the approach I tried, failed, and learned from. For some reason, in the technology world, I thought I could make it work, but it became very clear that was not the way to build teams – on or off the field.

What does work is building a team that is diverse, where everyone brings different ideas and talents to the table, and my job as a leader is to blend them together. I love this quote by Steve Jobs (https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/22/never-hire-the-smartest-person-in-the-room-says-hint-ceo-kara-goldin.html
#:~:text=Whenever%20someone%20asks%20me%20for,tell%20us%20what%20to%20do): “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do. We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.” I now put an extreme focus on hiring and building teams by looking at how easily a person will fit into the group and how their specific skills make the team.

What’s the most inspirational book you’ve ever read and why?

Great question! I get asked about recent books but the ‘most inspirational ever’ piqued my interest. I went into my Kindle app which has probably 60% of the books I’ve read over the last decade. So many to choose from, however one I read many years ago that I still draw regularly from, is “Turn around the ship” by Lieutenant David Marquet.

Lt. Marquet was known for turning around the Sante Fe, an atomic submarine, from being the worst-performing submarine in the Naval fleet to one of the best. More importantly, the Santa Fe continued to be the best after he left. I read this book early in my leadership career, and the concept that the truest measurement of an effective leader is defined by how the team performs after you are gone was fascinating to me. Leaders who focus on empowering their teams and nurturing the next generation of leaders is the definition of success and legacy.

In the book, Lt. Marquet talks about the traditional ‘leader-follower’ model which worked in the top-down Industrial Revolution age. But during the shift to the Information Age, where work is mostly cognitive, the top-down model is very inefficient. The ‘leader-leader’ model is what you want to build. Empowering everyone to lead and manage their business creates passionate employees, who aren’t dependent on being told what to do or be centralised in their decision-making. Following this model, if I’ve left things in better standing than when I found them, I’ve done my job well.

What’s the biggest challenge you face in your role in 2024?

This question is very simple, and it’s equally a challenge and an opportunity. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has changed the CX landscape so dramatically and within a very short period. As a company, we need to ensure Five9 is focusing on the real and practical benefits AI can bring. We’re already tapping into its potential with solutions like Agent Assist (https://www.five9.com/news/news-releases/five9-introduces-agent-assist-20-ai-summary-powered-openai) and GenAI Studio (https://www.five9.com/news/news-releases/five9-launches-genai-studio-first-enterprise-ready-solution-offering-click-and), but there’s so much more ahead.

To do this effectively, it’s our priority to first understand the business challenges our customers are facing before thinking about AI’s role in the solution. We must always deliver real business value first and improve the experience for both agents and end customers. Our job is to give customers the technology and tools to be better, and we’re doing that now better than ever.

What technology will have the greatest impact on your business this year and why?

Artificial Intelligence — what else?! It’s already transformative and I’m excited to see Five9 continue its course on shaping how our industry taps into AI.