One of Tana Jackson’s greatest learning moments was when she realized there’s a limited to how much she could accomplish on her own. “It might seem faster to do things myself which was what I always fell back on rather than wanting to train someone else but I eventually learned that it is worth the investment to train team members,” she says. “When I finally figured that out, I morphed from being an individual contributor to a leader, and that’s when my title leaped from team leader to director to vice president. Jackson has worked in facets of engineering during her entire career – from her first position as a co-op with IBM to her recent appointment as vice president of engineering for SOASTA, the performance analytics company she helped found.
One of her proudest moments with the company was the live launch this spring of the SOASTA Digital Operations Center, an industry-first web performance command center that simultaneously displays and integrates an organization’s dozens of digital moving parts – on a giant wall screen – or in the palm of your hand. Designed from start to finish by Jackson, she did a live demonstration at industry trade show Velocity– the first time a product has been introduced in that manner.
Now, she says, the company is currently in the phase she describes as a “collision with the real world,” where they are doing lots of demonstrations and taking the product from prototype to implementation. “This is the process when we learn what people actually need the product to do in real-world examples and we can tweak it to make it a success.”
Along the road, she has learned many valuable lessons, but she knows that it was useful to enter the industry as a co-op when she was just a student at Valparaiso. “I was in the corporate world before I even graduated so I didn’t have a lot of assumptions and it was easy to adapt,” she says. One lesson she did find was that although she had expected to be focused on complex problems, as you do in school, much of your career success ends up being your focus on communication, managing relationships and all the interpersonal qualities that have nothing to do with working at your desk.
That has played out in her remarkable career success – just this fall she was claimed the top spot at the 4th Annual CloudNOW Awards, among nine other distinguished women in tech. The awards honored these 10 women for their advances in using technology to solve real world business problems and move the tech industry forward.
Models in the Workplace – and Closer to Home
Over the years, Jackson has benefited from the opportunities she’s been given over the years from her sponsors, as well as many of her managers who have acted as role models by exemplifying the qualifies she wanted to emulate – most notably, a strong work ethic. But her real role models in that area are her parents, neither of whom had a college education but always worked her. Her mom worked for the same CPA firm for nearly 20 years, and her father was a controller for a temp agency for many years, then segued to a position as a business manager for a K-12 school. “They both worked really hard and always took their responsibilities very seriously,” Jackson says.
And that has played a role in what she counts as her “recipe for success:” hard work, combined with frequent communication and checkpoints against milestones. “But I haven’t yet found a substitute for hard work, nor will I,” she says.
She emphasizes that with the women she sponsors, noting that her company has been extremely supportive of hiring and retaining women, and advancing them into senior management positions.
The company is prominent in its support of diversity: Most recently it helped sponsor diversity scholarships to the Velocity conference. The program targets technology professionals often underrepresented at industry conferences, including but not limited to women, people of color, people with disabilities, or LGBTQ. In addition to participating in the full Velocity program of main stage events and workshops, they participated in onsite networking opportunities.
Training for Success
Jackson is just as focused in her off-time: she has participated in 35 Ironman Triathlons and earned 10 world championships. Just recently, she placed fifth in the Tahoe Ironman (podium). I’d say this has been a pretty remarkable week for her.
She sees it as a healthy outlet: “Some of us would work all day and all night, so an Ironman on the horizon allows me to realize I need to get away from my desk,” she says.
But it has another benefit too: “Training parallels the hard work of engineering,” she says, noting that lot of Ironman athletes are Type A CEOs. “The type of people in the Ironman community are very similar to my peers and customers.”