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In our first episode of The Hidden Chasm, Natasha Walton shares her remarkable journey from urban studies to becoming a tech product executive. Together we explore why having a long-term strategic vision is crucial, especially for companies in the critical $20 to $200 million revenue range, as well as how unnoticed issues like tech debt can lead to serious customer retention challenges and stifle development velocity.
Creators & Guests
What is The Hidden Chasm?
An ongoing discussion of how tech debt and legacy solutions become barriers to growth and innovation for established SaaS companies.
You're listening to The Hidden Chasm, a discussion of how tech debt and legacy solutions become barriers to growth and innovation for established SaaS companies. The Hidden Chasm is sponsored by UnitedFX, where our purpose is to help companies break free from legacy tech, improve retention, and empower m and a growth. Learn more at unitedfx.com. Alright. Welcome to the first episode of The Hidden Chasm.
Bo Motlagh:I'm Beau Matlock and my co host Josh Smith and we're joined here with Natasha Walton, a product executive with 20 years of experience building commercial solutions. Natasha, it is, great to meet you. Welcome. Tell us a little bit about yourself.
Natasha Walton:Yeah. Absolutely. I'm so thrilled to be here. Thank you again for having me. So a little bit about me.
Natasha Walton:I moved to San Francisco from Philadelphia after college. I had been intending to use my urban studies degree, but happened to graduate into a recession in in 2008. And so a lot of the paths I had been planning to pursue didn't end up being open to me after all. So I ended up joining an early stage startup and got totally hooked and enamored with the tech industry. And within a couple of years, found my way into product management.
Natasha Walton:That's really where I felt I could have the biggest impact. And let's see. I started on the consumer side, first working in social and mobile gaming, and then found my way over to B2B. So initially was the first head of product for a company called LiveFire that at the time was the largest enterprise commenting platform on the web, as well as a social curation tool that publishers and brands used in order to capture the earned media that they were garnering around the social web and repurpose it on their owned and operated property. We were acquired by Adobe about 4 years after I joined for we were part of the Adobe Experience Cloud, their marketing arm of software.
Natasha Walton:And more recently, I joined a company called Maverick as the VP of product, another social marketing company in the influencer marketing space. And Maverick also has merged with a company called Later, a social media management tool, and is now under the Later banner and brands with their influencer marketing platform. So that's just a little bit about my background.
Bo Motlagh:Very cool. Urban studies and then product management from there. That's quite the journey.
Natasha Walton:Yeah. You know, it's funny. I found that even though I didn't end up pursuing a career where I was creating spaces for people in a physical environment, that ultimately I could apply that energy and design Charette type of experience towards creating digital spaces.
Bo Motlagh:Very cool. And, Josh, you introduced us to Natasha. How do you guys know each other?
Josh Smith:I don't remember. We've known each other for ages. That's why. Social circles so many common social circles, school. Natasha knows my whole family, actually.
Josh Smith:My parents, my siblings, we knew each other all throughout early school k 12, kind of parted ways, and then I was following Natasha on LinkedIn with specifically with her tech disability project and then realized, oh my goodness. She has so much experience in the product space in tech. Let's reconnect.
Bo Motlagh:So Very cool. Natasha, have you seen anything about this hidden chasm concept that we've been putting out into the world at all? Happy to give a quick overview of that if you haven't really been because we've only put, like, one article out there so far. But it's an interesting topic that we're exploring right now. I'll go ahead and tell.
Bo Motlagh:So basically what we're looking at and really the point of this podcast over the next however many episodes we get through is we're exploring this phenomenon we've noticed. When you're a startup and when you're early business going through the good years, you make a lot of quick decisions. You've been through it, it sounds like, where you're more interested in just immediately getting some growth and some traction. And so things like how's the organization structured? Are we making shortcuts in terms of tech debt and legacy technology?
Bo Motlagh:Do we have a 10 year strategy? Like those things aren't necessarily high on the agenda and that's normal. But what we found is that these companies in the 10 to $200,000,000 range, as they get to year 15, these types of decisions and having not addressed those over time because they didn't really need to tend to sneak up on them. And it becomes this brick wall that event that they sort of slam into that seems like a surprise to them. And it's usually precipitated by a lot of market pressure, new competitors coming in and making it very difficult for them.
Bo Motlagh:And because it's something they didn't see coming, even though we've found a lot of potential indicators that helps that I think that you could see that it could be coming. It's hidden. And, you know, that's where the name the hidden chasm comes from. And so we're really interested in learning more about companies that are experiencing this or have experienced it and just kinda curious about your journey and if you've run into this kind of thing as well.
Natasha Walton:Absolutely. And I did check out your blog post, and it immediately resonated with me. I I think it's an interesting title as well, that it's just chasm, but it's hidden and you might not realize that it's there until you're already in it. And, of course, finding yourself in a cabin can feel like an uphill battle, and it can feel intimidating. And I think that socializing our awareness about the issues of accumulated tech debt and what types of strategies companies can employ in order to improve it and also ways to notice it or notice it sooner, I think, is really valuable.
Josh Smith:So it resonated with you, Natasha. Have you been at a company where you saw those signals? You found that they were in a hidden chasm. What was your first clue that something was wrong? Whether or not you knew that there was a chasm there, but, yeah, tell us a story.
Natasha Walton:Absolutely. So there are a couple of different environments that I've experienced over the years in relation to tech debt. So one has been an approach where, essentially, every couple of years, you are replatforming. And so you do have a long term vision, but you're kind of managing tech debt alongside new features on a very ongoing basis. And so while every company has some amount of tech debt, it's not as though getting it down to 0 is feasible or desirable that there's kind of that proactive strategy in place.
Natasha Walton:And then I've also been in the experience where I've found myself kind of in that moment that you're describing where I thought it was actually going to be a scenario where we could address some of the developer velocity concerns. That was kind of my first cue. I'm quite excited taking so long in order to build new stuff. And I thought it was maybe more about, like, retooling processes, retooling the way we organize teams, and kind of picking more of a product management or program management approach to it. And even though that was maybe part of what was contributing to it, ended up finding as the months went on that the issue was a bit more deeply rooted than I had initially
Bo Motlagh:survived. Sounds like you guys were thinking through, like, an agile transformation or something like that.
Natasha Walton:Exactly. And I think even getting to that point, I see now retrospectively since I was going through it for the first time, took me a little bit longer that first time than it would the next time, perhaps, but you're exactly right. I think that the agile transformation was something that was called for alongside somewhat of a a technical transformation as well.
Bo Motlagh:One of the indicators we see a lot before it even gets to the agile transformation piece is the company begins to notice customer retention issues. Is that something you were seeing as well?
Natasha Walton:Yes. I would say that wasn't the first thing. Notice I'd say that wasn't ultimately what kind of, like, led us to understand what was going. I think that the developer velocity ability to execute against plans that we had as a product team, as an organization, we, of course, have exciting ambitions and then end up scoping it and being like, wait. What?
Natasha Walton:I don't know if that's gonna work. Why is it gonna take that long? And then going under the hood and realizing that maybe the platform hasn't had the opportunity to be replatformed in a while. It was kind of been building and building and making bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger without really necessarily having a technical plan employer going with that or being kind of releasing features that might not be fully baked, having thought through every part of what makes a a feature full fledged. And if you have enough of those, that ends up every time you touch a piece of code, something breaks, And having that working with a more brittle structure where then it becomes less possible to build on those future dreams that you have and that you want to be sharing with your current customers so that you can keep retention up.
Bo Motlagh:Right. That makes a lot of sense. And that tracks. I mean, we've been hearing similar stories. The estimates come in and everybody's trying to understand why is this gonna take a year.
Bo Motlagh:So in the experience where you were focused on sort of agile transformation elements of it, the product management sort of elements that you could control, did you find that that was helping? Or how did that impact the problem space as you guys were moving through it when you began to bring those types of changes to the conversation?
Natasha Walton:I would say that introducing an agile transformation was supportive for our organization overall and for helping us to essentially be able to run parallel priorities. Previously, there had been a bit of a, trying to remember the right word for it right now, and it's escaping me. But an approach where, essentially, you say, okay. What are we gonna work on? We're gonna get that totally scoped.
Natasha Walton:We're gonna execute on it. And then when we're done, we're gonna figure out what's next. And in that type of environment, I think it's hard to say, okay. Let's put 35% of our resources towards paying down some technical debt. And every sprint, we're gonna pull in a couple of stories about that, and we're just gonna steadily make progress on that alongside 50% new features and 15% bugs and kind of creating the conditions to empower product managers as well as tech leads or engineering managers to be doing both, paying down tech debt and building new features.
Natasha Walton:Because as we all know that no matter how much tech debt you have, I don't think you would want to completely start building new features and be like, you know, we're just gonna pay down the step for the next x number of months. You might never end. Your customers aren't gonna be able to tolerate that. And so I would say that that was, you know, one of the big positive elements of agile transformation in addition to team empowerment, team happiness, and and feeling like they were able to be charting the destiny of the strategy that they were executing on.
Josh Smith:When the organization noticed the velocity issue, as you mentioned, one of the first things companies usually look at is process and operations. So then there's some sense of this transformation. Let's do an operational or process transformation. And suddenly now we have more visibility than we did before. We're more efficient, and we have what what you mentioned, capacity allocation in place now.
Josh Smith:We have levers that we can pull. Was there a point in your experience where you mentioned, well, at least now we can pull the levers and we can say 35% tech debt. No. 65% feature development. Now these transformations are excellent for the points you stated.
Josh Smith:At the same time, that 65% feature development, the operations may be more efficient, but the time to implementation, it may not have shaved off enough. And suddenly there's this question of, as you mentioned, how much tech debt do we push on versus feature development that will enable us to move faster on feature development eventually? Have you experienced that kind of tension? Then the second question is, was there ever a point where it was like, hold on. Under what conditions would an organization have to go feature development off, tech dead on, just fix this problem.
Natasha Walton:That's a good question. I think that when it comes to considering the question of should we completely turn off feature development in favor of tech debt, at least in my experience, I haven't been in a scenario where any of the stakeholders at the table were championing, stopping feature development, including any of the technical leadership. I wasn't certainly my business counterparts. I think that we did need to have cross functional negotiation about what our tolerance was and what that percentage would be and coming up with what it would be. And going under 50% customer facing value is ultimately where we built consensus of, like, no.
Natasha Walton:No. I don't think we could quite afford to do that and ultimately hit our numbers and satisfy our customers and work against the vision that we have for what we're accomplishing here. Is that the answer? Is that the best answer? I don't know.
Natasha Walton:I'm sure there are a lot of different ways to do it or different companies or in different decisions, but in my experience, turning the dial all the way down on customer value has never been on the table.
Bo Motlagh:What I just heard though, Hain, I think it's probably an interesting thing to call out is at one point, and I'm curious for how long, it sounds like you did drop down to maybe not quite 50, but close to 50% of your capacity as an organization was basically just toward tech debt, maintenance. Is that right? That's massive.
Natasha Walton:This is a pill to swallow. But when you are in this chasm, you find yourself and you realize the impact that technical debt is having on your ability to build your vision, the only thing you can do is come up with a way to address it. I'm happy to go into some of the details of the way that we address it, but it did involve making a big commitment and having transparency with our organization about what that was going to take. And because it's sort of something that we could just kind of put a sheet over, put this in the corner, something that we all felt. It's a hard place to be, but it's important to reckon with it and address it.
Josh Smith:Yeah. As a product leader, I'm speaking to other product leaders who are going through this or who have gone through this or who may soon go through this. What kind of advice would you have for for them, and in what way did you approach it, that negotiation, when you know that you're incentivizing the organization to ensure that feature development is at its maximum?
Natasha Walton:Great questions. In terms of how I initially would think about tech debt as a product person was, I was kind of like, well, the engineers are gonna do that. And, and I've grown in my career. I can take a bit more responsibility and accountability as a product leader for the integrity of the platform and realize that there are no parts of it, regardless of how technical it is, that I can't be ultimately accountable for as the person whose job it is to ensure that we are building and selling whatever it is that we're building and selling. That was an initial shift for me was just stepping into a bit more of a mindset of taking accountability and then using the skills and tools that I've used as a product leader to build new features and applying them to this more technical challenge, which was ultimately prioritizing having the team dig into the issues, Itemizing them all out.
Natasha Walton:Just get everything on the table, big or small, coming up with a way to categorize and score these and understand the different ways in which each of these line items was impacting our platform health, our customer experience. So some of those categories is making it easier to introduce bugs, is reducing developer velocity, is potentially getting behind the ball on things related to compliance or keeping up with partner APIs or security or how we deploy. There are a lot of different categories that these types of initiatives could fall under. I think that makes it easier as well to understand the business value of addressing which ones and understanding which ones are urgent versus which ones will be urgent. Then, of course, starting to take a swag and size, and maybe there are some smaller ones we could start with.
Natasha Walton:Maybe there's bigger ones that we need to start now because, look, this is gonna be a 2 year effort, and we're gonna need to put 1 story and sprint in it for 2 years. And that's how we're going to ultimately upgrade a language that we're using or whatever it may be. So that ended up being kind of our tactical approach to helping to turn it from something that's just like, ah, this is bad. This is big. It's having a big impact to, okay, we understand this and we understand how to make decisions about it.
Natasha Walton:We understand how to communicate about it, and we know how we're going to pay it down.
Bo Motlagh:I love that. It sounds so obvious when you say it. You're applying business metrics to the actual technical work as well instead of only sort of relegating that to feature development. You're describing a framework to discuss relative cost, relative value, relative risk. And that becomes the driver just as it would for any other feature for the actual tech enablement as well.
Bo Motlagh:It's always interesting to me how often that is missed. Often that's a thing that has to be discovered. And so it's really nice to hear that's how you began to think about it as well because I think that makes a lot of sense.
Natasha Walton:Ultimately, we're talking about culture. And there are different types of cultures and different development teams, different companies, different size companies, different age companies, different types of products. And so there really, I think, isn't a one size fits all, and there are some software organizations that are more product led, that are more engineering led, that are more design led, that are more sales led. And depending on all of those different factors, you're probably going to have a different way of approaching something like technical debt.
Bo Motlagh:Through your story, you've said my favorite p word several times. You've said the word platform several times. And I'm kinda curious, I've run into so many different definitions of that word. When you're using it here and when you were using it in the midst of all of this, to give some context into this question, I often hear a reaction to this type of thing is the platform play or replatforming or trying a new foundational platform. And we've been guilty of using some of these terms as well.
Bo Motlagh:Commercial platform or technical platform, it can mean a lot of different things. I'm curious, was that a conversation for you when you were in the middle of this? Or was there just sort of a broad consensus? How did you approach that word and fundamentally what it begins to mean to the organization?
Natasha Walton:It's a really good question. Every time I mention something about a replatform to any engineers that I work with or my life outside of work. The first question is, well, what do you mean by that? Especially working in the B2B space where the word platform is used commercially and in your conversations with your customers about essentially representing what you're selling. I have had the experience before where I described this a bit at the beginning of the episode, but where essentially every 18 to to 24 months, essentially you're creating and selling the next version of whatever it is that you're selling.
Natasha Walton:I have heard the word replatform used for that. And what can be really successful, I think, is when you can take the approach of 1, what do we need to change technologically and about the technology itself as part of this in order to continue to have the best software platform that we can in order to enable the new types of functionality that we wanna have in this platform and beyond, as well as how do we package, something that is new and is adding additional value or potentially has upsell levers that are new or will allow us to sell to a new sentiment of the market or to be competitive in a certain way. So, essentially, combining your technical goals and your business goals under the banner of a replatform. Sometimes it's gonna look like more software that's built from scratch, and sometimes it's gonna look more like reusing a lot of tech that you have, but maybe building some new features. Or maybe you're gonna rebuild a lot of the features that you have already.
Natasha Walton:But the tech that you're using, you're gonna build them in a new, more expensive way that's gonna help you build off of them in the future. So, essentially, when I think of replatforming, that's what I think of. And because I'd had some experience in that when I found myself in a different situation with a bit more of this hidden chasm concept, I did have a kind of gut reaction of, like, well, this is where we need to get to. How do we do that? I kinda learned through experience was that it was important to have that plan for our tech debt first to understand the full extent before endeavoring to have a new platform that we're selling.
Natasha Walton:And because it is a long term plan, when you're going to reprogram, it's going to take probably at least 18 months. It is going to be a long term thing. And so that's my experience and how I've thought about that.
Josh Smith:I like how you phrased it, the idea of platform as a way to connect your business and your technical goals, like, at the highest level with a level of flexibility at an organizational level, with the level of flexibility to adapt to the conditions that are constantly changing around you. And then you mentioned that this is the third factor in capacity allocation. We were talking about tech debt and feature development and the levers you pull, but then the idea that the mounting tech debt may be indicative of the need to reassess how your business and technical goals are aligned at an organizational level. That requires an additional level of effort that cuts into your capacity. Then suddenly, how do you negotiate?
Josh Smith:We need to focus on replatforming versus the tech debt versus the feature development. And then you're saying, in your experience, saying, let's keep working on the tech debt while working on the replatform actually can counteract some of the intent.
Natasha Walton:Based on yourself experiencing something for the first time is when it can be hard to have the courage and conviction to make a really long term commitment to the company. And part of that is just kind of growing as a leader and finding yourself in different situations and learning by doing. I think that this question you're having, I have too, and I'm kind of interested in what you all think. It's always easy to go back and replay different scenarios that you found yourself in. And there's some value in that, I think, in being able to personally retrospect and think about what you do in the future.
Natasha Walton:I think I'm far from having all of the answers and I'm kind of curious what you all think on your favorite p word as well.
Bo Motlagh:I come from a technical background and I cut my teeth really designing some of these platforms earlier in my career. And for a very long time, I always thought of them the way you said the other engineers did, which was like it's a technology foundation. It makes it possible to do other things quickly. I was always a little confused by the commercialization of that, which I think is fine as long as there's a definition of what you mean by the commercial platform versus the technical one. What I liked about what you were saying before around organizing the technical components and tech debt really and the enablement elements around a business framework is that when you start thinking that way, and eventually I did, you begin to realize that it's all part of the same conversation.
Bo Motlagh:At the end of the day, what we're saying is how do I bring this feature, whether it's analytics or whatever, to the customer? How do I make it possible for sales to go out and sell something which is their job even if we don't have it yet and have that not completely derail the company? And how do I make it so that product managers can come up with new ideas and actually achieve them within a year period so that they are hitting their goals and we're pushing product forward. That's where my sort of personal definition of the P word has come to is it is absolutely about making it possible to bring these features to market as quickly as possible and doing so in the most adaptive, flexible way possible. And I think that entails that there's a commercial version of that potentially.
Bo Motlagh:It doesn't have to be though. You can have a really amazing platform that enables product functionality, but speak to it in a very sort of siloed sort of way from a business perspective in the market. It really comes down to what you're selling and why and how. As long as under the hood you're able to do that and you're able to enable those elements of your organization, that's what platform boils down to in my mind. It is technical in nature, but it's also business driven and has to be business driven.
Josh Smith:From the experience side, I promoted the word platform in instances where businesses face conundrums with their product positioning because they are starting to expand into other solutions within the same market or different users in the same market. They're starting to solve other problems in the context of, Oh, this is another product, or they acquire. And then they realize that there are use cases and there's information that's across some of these experiences that they don't know where to put. And they say, wow. Okay.
Josh Smith:Started in this whole mental model of this customer that we're serving. We are serving now more than just a couple spaces, and there's information that operate like steel threads across. There's cases that suddenly operate as threads across, not vertically. We wanna serve those interests. How do we do that?
Josh Smith:And then that's where I usually say, okay. What does it look like now instead of being an organization that sells point solutions, to become an organization that sells a suite of offerings? Because you now have a suite of offerings, you need a platform. Why? Because the customers are no longer just desiring, of course, that your organization continues enhancing features and building value in the products.
Josh Smith:But now they're gonna become frustrated at the lack of communication between those products or that you need to sign in multiple times or that there's redundant data. And those are problems that's is part of this chasm. Sometimes unforeseen problems in the experience of growth suddenly starts to hit your retention, your sales to say, why do I have to sign in this many times? What's going on? I changed something over here, but I have to change it over here and over here as well.
Josh Smith:And you're like, oh my gosh. These are new problems. I noticed too that the operational transformation, the agile transformation is often differentiators. And they don't want to talk about it when they're going through it. Nobody wants to share that they're in that space.
Josh Smith:Sometimes we're going through digital transformation because, okay, now everyone's kinda talking about digital transformation. It's the cool thing because we're talking about where we're gonna be when we get out of it. But in the similar way, what you mentioned, there's this sometimes missed piece, which is, yeah, that technical side, that platform side. And we're always curious about when you're in it, do you talk about it when you're out of it? Because I feel like organizations have a lot more commonalities, shared commonalities that they aren't discussing about this space.
Natasha Walton:Absolutely. And that's one of the reasons why I think it's really cool that you're hosting this podcast and starting to talk about this because just like anything, whenever we find ourselves in a hard spot, there's no way that we're the only ones. And a lot of companies are going through this. And that reminds me, Josh, of something else that you and I have talked a lot about, which is the technical challenges that accompany m and a. And I've been through a number of m and a's throughout the course of my career.
Natasha Walton:It's always very exciting to be able to have the press release, and it feels like growth. And it is growth for a company, but truly from a product perspective, from a customer value perspective, being able to realize their full potential of 2 companies coming together is as challenging as starting a successful company, really. And I think that the success rates are very similar, like 1 in 10 or something for an acquisition or merger to actually accomplish the financial goals that you assume it will when you forecast, when you initially do the deal.
Bo Motlagh:That's super interesting. We definitely hear these types of companies talk about M and A quite a lot as well. And it makes sense. One of the first things you might think, especially if you've been generally successful for 15 years or more, is, okay, we're getting outcompeted. We have some capital.
Bo Motlagh:Maybe we can buy our way out of this. That, of course, like you're saying, if you have those issues already in place and you haven't addressed them about how you work and how you pull those things together, you're really just compounding the problem, not solving it at that point. I think that makes a lot of sense. I'm curious, when you were going through this, was there a pattern around the types of features you were trying to bring to fruition that you were sort of running into this wall with? I'm asking that for a reason because I have a theory, but I wanna hear what you have to say first.
Bo Motlagh:Did you notice that any time you were attempting to do a certain kind of thing, it was more problematic than another? Or was it sort of just general purpose, This isn't working. What do we do now?
Natasha Walton:I've spent the majority of my career working in social. And one thing, no matter what part of social you're working on is that it moves very quickly. And so just in general, even elements of running a social marketing technology company where you have dependents on social networks and they are making changes and you didn't get to keep up with them. Basically, there's this kind of competitive rush constantly. Feed is of the essence.
Natasha Walton:That's one type of feature that has to do with API integrations. And then I would also say that across the board, anything relating to data just seems to take longer than one thinks it will.
Bo Motlagh:You said what I was thinking. Yeah. The more we dig into this, the more, you know, yes, there's a lot of elements to it, pillars of the problem, so to speak, legacy, organizational structures, tech debt. But fundamentally the issue seems to be how the organization processes data. And that does seem to be sort of the central theme.
Bo Motlagh:It's interesting.
Natasha Walton:You've got a good theory over there.
Bo Motlagh:In your experience, have you had success coming out of or mitigating the chasm? Have you had failures? I'm curious if you could tell us a story.
Natasha Walton:Absolutely. I think we've covered some of the challenges and essentially the decision points where I think the main challenge that I faced was just, like, how quickly am I coming to realization about what is going on and what we need to do in terms of success? We've been mentioning it can be a long term road. It's not the type of successors Yeah. How you get it.
Natasha Walton:But getting those dashboards hooked up and being able to measure the progress and learning to celebrate going from 12% to 15% of whatever metric you're trying to move and, like, celebrating those wins along the way when you are working towards a really lofty goal, I think, is important. So, essentially, how you define success and making sure that you're measuring it and making sure that you are celebrating all of the mini milestones along the way. But, yes, think that in the various times when I've implemented something like this, over time, we do see the velocity go up. We do see bugs go down. We do see those other success metrics that align with the various line items that we're measuring trending in the right direction.
Natasha Walton:And that is a really exciting feeling, especially because being in that chasm, like, realizing you are in that hidden chasm can be a really difficult experience that is kind of, like, counterproductive by how great it feels once you're able to measure the success as you march your way through it.
Bo Motlagh:What advice would you give to a CEO or CTO or CPO who's just coming to realize that they found themselves on that chasm?
Natasha Walton:My advice would be that trying to tackle anything really ambitious that's gonna make a difference in business takes a level of foresight and conviction and follow through. And that this particular type of chasm that a leader may find themselves in, as we've been discussing, can feel different. It can feel unique. But to resist that temptation to have this be any different from, woah, there's a new entrance in our market or woah, AI is disrupting something or, wow, I've got a huge idea and there's a one in 10 chance that I can make it work, but I'm gonna raise money to go do this because I think this is the future. That same type of attitude that helps any business leader be successful through any challenge that they face doesn't have to be uniquely different from those.
Natasha Walton:And to keep up the faith, do the homework, get the opinions, get your plan in place, and then go ahead and execute.
Josh Smith:There's another challenge you've faced in your career that I thought your response, your leadership was admirable. I'd love to learn if you're willing to share a little bit about your journey with the Tech Disability Project.
Natasha Walton:Absolutely. Thanks for asking that, Josh. Several years ago, when I was working at Adobe, I ended up developing a disability and needed to go on leave. And it was certainly not the easiest time. But I was so grateful for that benefit that I had that I could take advantage of and for the support that I experienced for my employer that when I got back, I felt really motivated to tap into disability from a community perspective.
Natasha Walton:Like, I was really curious, especially because I was working in a big company, if there were other people who were maybe going through something similar and figuring out how to navigate their career alongside managing a disability and all of the unique elements that come with that. And so Adobe has ERGs, employee resource groups, for various underrepresented groups of employees who wanna come together and support each other or create resources. And there was one for people with disabilities called Access Adobe, but as I looked into it, it actually hadn't been initiated yet. There wasn't, email list for it or monthly meetings or any of those artifacts. And so I just decided to run with it and set up a booth on our community fair day at the San Francisco office and was able to thankfully have a friend join me so I wasn't sitting there all by myself, which I really appreciated.
Natasha Walton:And people just started signing up. And this is back 20 16, 2017, and it was before a lot of the conversations that has, thankfully, really heavily entered the conversation about the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and disability when people were talking about AI, disability often kinda wasn't part of that conversation. And so it did feel quite vulnerable to put myself out there and raise my hand to be identifying with something that has been historically stigmatized quite heavily in all sorts of areas of our society, business and work included. But once people started joining me, this is, like, my favorite part of going to work, and I really enjoyed the organizing work. I really enjoyed getting to know people and with what to me seemed like pretty small effort of just, like, throwing something on the calendar or asking people to sign up.
Natasha Walton:We were able to create something and had, like, maybe 40 or 50 members in North America that joined during my time there. Then I ended up needing to step up from work full time for a period of time. But with the time and energy that I did have, that's when I started Tech Disability Project, which is essentially kind of like a meta ERG for anyone working in the tech industry who has a visible or invisible disability and wants to be connected to their community. And so when October also rolls around, which is Disability Employment Awareness Month, We usually put something together for the community, be it virtual or in person occasionally, in order to connect and support members of our community.
Bo Motlagh:Wonderful. Very cool. Thank you so much. It's been awesome to get to know you here. And thanks for taking the time to chat with us.
Bo Motlagh:Hopefully, you had some fun with this. Is there anything you'd like the world to know before we sort of wrap up the call here?
Natasha Walton:I think we just covered, that most important piece. So really just wanna thank you both, Bo and Josh. This was an awesome conversation, and I'm really excited about what UnitedFX is up to.
Bo Motlagh:Thank you so much. Thank you. And we will catch up with you soon. If anybody wants to catch up about tech disability, please go to the website. And Natasha Walton.
Josh Smith:Thanks, Natasha.
Bo Motlagh:You've been listening to The Hidden Chasm, brought to you by UnitedFX. If anything in our conversation resonated with you today, please reach out. We'd love to hear from you. Email us at podcast@unitedeffects.com, or simply visit us at unitedeffects.comorthehiddenchasm.com. Thanks for listening.