Hi, everyone. Thanks so much for being here and for watching. Today, it's, an honor to be here.My name is Laura, and I lead The UK and I solution architect in AWS. I've been in AWS for nearly eight years. And today with Hara, who we'll introduce in a minute, we'll be talking about the espresso shot that launched a community of thousands. So, pretty much how we, put our passion together, talk over coffee, and how we launch an amazing community that we will be telling you about. Kara?

Thanks, Laura. Hi, all. Thanks for joining our session. My name is Cara Gravani. I'm also at AWS. I'm leading a team of, architects and engineers in the generative AI innovation center. We're both based out of London, and I have been with Amazon almost six years now. And as Laura mentioned, we are going to be presenting you how a casual coffee, over break launched that idea and the execution of having a community of thousands of women in tech. So before we go into the details of how, our journey developed, I wanted to introduce you to the to the community that we actually launched. It's called AWS Scout Women Community. If you're not familiar with it, I will present a bit what we do. But stay to the end, we're gonna also share a QR code that you can follow on LinkedIn to follow us later on.

So AWS Cloud Women aims to build a safe space for women and underrepresented groups to share knowledge, acquire new skills, network, and seek support. It has been launched in 2022, so we have completed three years, and we have 5,000 members now. We have delivered 18 networking events with more than 100 attendees each, that average a customer satisfaction of 4.7 out of five. We have also delivered 24 technical events that average 30 attendees. And all of this, in all our journey, we have partnered with AWS customers and partners, more than 15, actually, of them, and which we are grateful to have, in the journey along with us. We have also mentored more than 1,300 women in that community, that span 12 EMEA countries. And we have also launched eight videos, within two series.

One solution architects at AWS talking about their role, talking about technology and how they help their customers, and the second series around women leaders from our customers that explain their career journey in tech.

So, as Sarah said, like, it's, it's a community that it has been driven by passion. Hara and I have been always been the almost the only woman in the room. And maybe if you're here, you will, feel this, share this feeling where normally, it's a it's a room full of guys. And the main question that we have been asking ourselves for a long time, it was like, why there are no more women in tech? Tech is an amazing place. It's changing the world. There's so much innovation happening. Why we have to be the only one there? And that passion and that conversation stayed there for a while until the moment where we realized that, pretty much a good intention was not going to drive us anywhere.

And we decided to take a coffee and start thinking of how we were going to turn this into reality and how this passion was actually going to make a sustainable change into, society. And that's how our, AWS cloud woman, community started. Exactly.

And what did we do? What did we do? The first thing, was to basically, write our plan down. If you're not familiar with, Amazon culture, we do not do usually PowerPoints unless, you know, in occasions like this one today, we usually set ideas through narratives and documents. And that's what we did. So we sat down with Laura, and we put on paper what the idea was about, what the community's vision and mission would be, how would we execute on this, what are we aiming to achieve, but also what the asks were to AWS senior leadership. And that had many benefits, writing all these ideas down. The first one is the clarity of thought. Basically, clarifying the ideas, who thecom what the community would be about, who are the people that would attend the community, and how would we make this, useful to them.

The second one, having this clarity of thought and the execution plan and also the asks helped us to get buy in from senior leadership at AWS. And, we have sponsors to launch the community, but continue support throughout the journey. And third one, which is important, that narrative, that first document is a living blueprint. And what I mean by that is that we use it every year in the start of the year to look what we have done, what we have achieved, what went well, what did not go as expected, and what should we do the next year. So it's moving on and we, kind of change, the execution plan as we move ahead. So the first suggestion, if, you're considering about launching a community like this, is write down your ideas, be very clear about what it is about, how are you going to execute on it, and also very important, what is the asks to get to to leadership or stakeholders to get you there.

10, in our journey, probably you pair as well that's alone you get there faster, but together you get there further. And for us, it was very important to rely on other people. Probably, you know, like, we have our full time job. We all both are very busy, and we do this as a we do this as a side gig. It means that our time is a little bit constrained, and scaling through others is very important. And it's so easy to find people who shares this passion, so that's what we start doing. We start, like, just voicing what was our idea, trying to get, ideas from others, and try to invite them in and how's how we build our our village.

There's how we operate nowadays is we have a core working group. So it's people who leads the main initiative. So we have initiatives as mentorship, initiatives as events, as digital channels, and so and they are the sole responsible for, these work streams, but we also have a Slack channel of volunteers. And there's people who are always willing to help, but maybe they cannot commit the time, and they can only come once, twice, help for an event, and so on. So we also have this this slide where we say, like, hey. We have this event, or we need, help building this video or doing these assets, and people will come once, twice, and we'll help. So here, if if you once you write it down, as Hara said, and once you start, like, putting your ideas together, then try to build your village.

And it could be, like, people who think similar than you. It could be, like, people who might want to help but cannot commit to the time. And you start realizing who are your allies and who you can count on because that way you will be able to scale your community, much faster and further for sure.

And then, when we handle this in place, and thinking about now executing on what we had on that first document along with, the brilliance that we have built with, Laura, it was very important, to get commitment that we're going to start small. And by that, I mean that we have set for ourselves goals that we thought were achievable. Again, mentioning what we said at the beginning that we have other main roles at Amazon, and time commitment was restrained. So for the first year of the community, we set the goal of delivering three events, and that was for, growing our community members, but also getting to know getting the name known to to people outside that are interested in communities like that. That lower kind of barrier helped us to build momentum, to get the community known, to grow the numbers of people that were coming in our events. And most importantly, by doing that, it was more under our control to learn because we saw it as an experiment. And by that, I mean, we run it once.

We we found out what works really well, what are the things that could be improved, and what can we do better next time, and improve and iterate. And that way, we have built that momentum and quick wins over the first year. And the first year, I believe the community has grown from zero to 1,000 members, and that helped us to move on to the next steps that we are gonna touch in a bit. So if, again, you are planning to do something like that, it is very important that you do not even if your idea is big, which is wonderful, try to break it down and start with something small to experiment on it, learn from it, and iterate in order to make it better and better every time.

So that first event, as Sahara said, we we put, small goals, realistic goals as well. But that first event can be very daunting because you have no community, you have no followers. You are going to prove your idea. You don't know if this is this is, important or not, and you are pretty much very scared. So what we did is we partner we asked for help, and we partner with different companies and meetups. So there is an AWS user group. It's for everyone, male and woman. And we went to them and we presented our idea. We want to create a community of cloud woman, and we'd like to talk into your audience. And they help us.

So we cohosted this first event where they help us to pretty much voice the message of this new community among their their members. And the second thing is we also wanted this first event to be very cool in a very cool location, maybe partnership with a cool brand. So we took one of our very well known brands in Europe and in The UK. And what we did is we went, we asked them, like, are you interested in actually partnering with us for this launch event, women in tech community? And they were, like, super, happy to do it. And they have, like, really cool offices, and that's how we did it. So through through this company, we start also promoting the event through the AWS user group. And, eventually, in the first event, 80 people, show up.

And, of course, it was, like, super rewarding because, yes, there's an audience for women in class, and and that's what we wanted to do. Like, women in tech, there's a lot of events, a lot of community, but women in cloud, there was not that many. So here, if you want, our main advice is one, go and ask like so many the EI groups and networks. I think that we all aiming for the same goal. We want tech to be a more inclusive place, and we share that that passion. So we're not competing, so I would suggest that you go and ask for help on on that lounge, even for mentorship, for guidance, and that's a really good place of people who can actually help you. But, also, like, what are the local meetups? What are the local, groups that are not necessarily DEI, but are in tech? They can also be great allies.

And this last thing is, like, go to customer, companies, partners. Like, all of them I have I have, realized that they're really happy to promote and sponsor this type of event. So many times, they don't know how, because they don't have their own communities. But when you come with a proposal, they'll be really happy to, let you use their space to maybe buy buy some snacks, buy some swag, and so on. So you won't be, here alone.

Alright. And, now let's talk about, the inspection side of it. I mentioned a bit in my in the earlier slides. So as I said in the beginning, we have set this as small achievable goals. And then at the end of the year where it was time to inspect. And by inspect, I mean, we had time to go through what has happened, taking the feedback from, the events and our community, take feedback from stakeholders, look at the numbers, and basically understand, what we should continue doing and what we should do differently. And with that, we understood that they were things were really good and it was going in the correct direction. But that launched, for example, the idea to get new work streams out. So the first events were all about networking, having a very wide audience coming from all types of seniority, all types of, businesses.

And then we got feedback that while that was great, because people were networking and learning from this diverse audience, they wanted also to be able through the community to gain digital skills and cloud, computing skills. And that's when we decided to launch a new work stream, which is about, the technical events that we are doing, which gives opportunity to people to come in, network, obviously, but also get the opportunity to get hands on with some of AWS cloud services and learn more about it, from, from an Amazonian.

The second thing was that, again, networking was great and people were getting, were coming again and again and again in the events, but they wanted also to have one to one mentorship. So we decided to tap into the huge, talent pool that Amazon has, and we launched mentorship. And for the mentorship, what we did is basically pair women from the community with Amazonians, to help them with, customized advice on career progression, but also around how do they progress their technical skills in order to get a career in tech. And the third one was that all of these, all of the first year was happening in London. And this is because Laura and myself and then most of our working group was based in London. But many people were saying, okay. But what about the other locations? So we got again, we extended the rails that, Laura mentioned in the beginning, and we were able to launch local communities in, Northern England, so in Manchester and also in some EMEA locations such as, The Netherlands and Belgium.

And, again, this is not touching all the JOs that were interested in what we were doing. So we decided to launch something called digital channels and also share contact and knowledge and experiences through YouTube, videos. It's the series that I mentioned in the beginning, and you can find that in in YouTube if you're interested. So the advice here is that when you go through the execution, take your time to get feedback from your stakeholders, from who your customers are. Take time to inspect your metrics. Are you measuring the correct things? Should you shift should you should you pivot in anything? But also take time to think big. Don't whatever the restraints might be, think big and then plan on how to get there.

So how do we measure? I think this is one of the most important questions because when you're launching a new community or when you're doing normally DEI work, it's so hard to measure and to see the impact because the impact will be seen in the long term. If we do an event and somebody comes and they get inspired to get certified, probably they'll get certified six months later and we won't know. Or if we have a mentee who work with, an AWS mentor and she landed in the in her first, tech or cloud role after this mentorship. We won't know because maybe probably it happened three months later, and we had lost track at that point. So that's that's one of the most, for us, it's been one of the most, difficult bits, especially, Amazon being super data driven.

So what we have done and what I would suggest for anyone doing a community is focus on the input calls. Like, make sure that you're asking, that you're tracking the number of events, the number of attendees, the number of, what's the CSAT, that you're tracking, like, the number of mentorships that you have done, and and so on. And the most important bit is if you like, as Hara said before, if you're asking for feedback, if you are keeping, like, that inspection mechanism, then you will know that you are focusing on the right inputs. And if you're if you're focusing on the right inputs, then the output will come. Eventually, if your content in your event is really impactful, then it will touch people's life. And eventually, that person might end up in a job, might end up doing a career switch, might end up inspired. And it will happen.

You will know, maybe yes, maybe not, but you focus on the right input goals. The second thing is anecdotes, and we get them, I say, often, where people comes and says, like, you know, I just got certified thanks to your, boot camp or, you know, I just landed on my first cloud job. And, of course, we love that. I think that's probably one of the best moments in every single event when or every single email that we read from the community. But it's very anecdotal. Like, you cannot track it. You cannot know how many. So just, like, keep focusing on the input goals. Keep the consistency. I think that's very important as well. Like, maybe you're not seeing the results that you want, but if you keep just, going on, eventually, the the outcomes will come.

Alright. And there is no journey that does not have lessons learned. And, we mentioned, like, we come from a technical background. We have never been, community managers or leaders. It's the first time that we did something like that, and there were many lessons along the way. I wanted to share two of them. The first one is around budget. So many times, when you are going to launch something like that, that is not into the main business or the main goals that you have as a as a role in in the company, you might have budget constraints, and it was our case as well here. That means that it came with a positive, to to be clear. It came with a positive that, we were kind of forced to think creatively about how do we deliver the events with this, very small budget.

And by creatively, I mean, we were able to ask for help and support from stakeholders and customers and partners, and we had our sponsors. And, at the end, you we were able to do more with less. The second lesson learned was around the volunteer commitment. And because, again, this is a sidekick, for both of us, but for everyone that, is the working group of AWS Cloud Women, It is based on a on a volunteer kind of, commitment. And many times priority change in people's lives and in their roles. So we have cases, many cases that people priorities change, and they were not able to deliver on their commitment. And that put a strain in the community and the work streams.

So what did we do in order to kind of mitigate this this type of, risk that exists, because of that volunteer kind of nature, is that we have put in place, kind of interview process for people coming into, the working group, especially if they were to take bigger responsibilities such as, for example, driving one of, the work streams.

And in that interview, we would try to get what the motivation is and try to understand the workload, try to understand what would they do if they had to drop out, what how would they mitigate if they were not available all of a sudden to to to deliver on what they undertook.

And also ask for the manager's kind of approval for that time commitment. So the advice, to all of you here is around the budget. Don't be shy. Again, be clear around your asks. You might be surprised that you might get what you asked for. And if not, think creatively of other ways. There are many ways to to get there without having a huge buzzer behind the program. And the second one on the volunteer, make sure to work with people that are passionate about this because, especially if it is a side thing on their own, and it is not tracked specifically on performance.

Okay. Well, we're almost, on the end, but it's your time to brew now. It's your time to actually go for that coffee chat with your friends, with yourself, and actually translate that intention into execution because as, Jeff Bezos says, like, good intentions don't matter. If you have that passion, if it's been sparkling there for quite a while, well, use this playbook, sit down, write it down, what is your mission, who's your audience, what do you want to achieve, what are some of the small goals that you're going to do, adapt it and share it back.

And, like, do not be afraid of go and ask for help, ask for sponsorship. You won't be alone. As for other communities, there's plenty of people that you can ask. Because at the end of the day, if you're watching this, if you're in this conference, it's because we want to make tech equitable together for everyone, and we can start now.

So thank you all. It was wonderful to have you here today. So here you have a QR code for the community. Follow us on LinkedIn. We also have our alliances on LinkedIn if you want to connect later. And, again, thanks a lot for your time of joining this, and we look forward to hearing from you if you build something similar.