7. An Interview with Corey Leigh Latislaw

Written by Enrique López-Mañas

Corey is an international keynoter, an avid sketchnoter, and the Head of Engineering at Kin + Carta | Create Europe. She has developed high profile Android applications over the years, including Capital One, XfinityTV, and Pinterest and ran teams large and small. She’s a former Google Developer Expert (GDE) in Android and Google Developer Group (GDG) organizer.

Connect with Corey

Twitter: @corey_latislaw

Website: CoreyLatislaw.com

Interview

You spend a lot of time volunteering. What drives you to do this? Can you talk a bit about the specific causes and groups that are important to you?

I want to have an impact on our world and I want my work to mean something and to benefit millions, if not billions, of people. I’ve worked in many organizations that are operating at different scales and I get excited by the ones that are solving real, human-scale problems.

One of the places I found to have a meaningful mission and a solid plan for implementation was installing solar power in rural Tanzania. They are connecting people to the world. I also worked with a nonprofit, installing computer labs in emerging markets. That was about connecting children with computers and technology and changing the course of their lives. That’s the sort of thing I’m interested in.

In my daily work, I make space for individual mentoring, especially with women. The tech world can be a hostile environment, and I want to foster the opposite. I’m frustrated by the slow pace of change in the tech culture—there’s been a lot of money invested in diversity and inclusion, but we haven’t gotten anywhere—but this makes me feel that I’m making an actual difference.

Do you think we could do better than we’re doing now?

Yes, absolutely—though I don’t know exactly what that answer is. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about how to embed diversity and inclusion into competency frameworks so that it becomes part of the fabric of the business culture and shows up on performance reviews. If we say that it’s important we should be measuring it and we should be accountable for moving our companies and the industry forward.

In London last year, you were giving the keynote at a conference. How do you prepare for something like that?

I’m terrified of public speaking, believe it or not. I failed my first public speaking course back in college and slowly got to the point where I am now. Luckily, public speaking is a learnable skill.

In the beginning, I tried to look smart on stage. I overcomplicated the talks with technical details and spent loads of time preparing—for example, for my first keynote I wrote a 30-page research paper with citations for the script! I read more or less from the script on stage, but it felt too wooden. That was a lot of work and a whole lot of stress.

Recently, I’ve shifted to talking about my own experience, which is much easier to talk about. I’ve also shifted to a more fluid preparation style. For my “The Creative Technologist” keynote, I came up with the idea and wrote that talk in two weeks using improvisational techniques. I would record myself talking about my topic off the cuff, play it back, and keep the parts I liked.

To come up with a topic, I do a mind map to generate talk ideas. Then I find themes and write up an outline or abstract—either in Google docs or in a rough sketchnote, which is a visual note with a mix of drawings and words. I ask other speakers for feedback on which topics might be the most compelling.

Once I have settled on a topic, I do a sketchnote. This helps me outline the ideas and major takeaways. The next step is to make thumbnail sketches for the slides. I make myself practice aloud instead of just editing the script. I always do dry runs in front of people to refine the talk and mentally prepare.

The keynote I gave in London was called “The Art of Intentionality,” and it was about how to be more intentional with your time and energy. At some point, I decided that I’d draw live on stage, and I ended up creating a ten-page worksheet for everyone.

I prepare intensively, which is probably why I don’t do several talks in a short period. I usually like to give a talk at least seven to ten times. That gives me time to refine my presentation style and material. I try to choose topics that are going to be relevant for a long period.

Your keynote speech, “The Art of Intentionality,” will be relevant for years to come.

It’s about figuring out your guiding light and setting goals and tracking success, as well as cutting things that are a drain on your time. It should be relevant forever.

Should all software engineers be involved in public speaking?

It’s certainly accelerated my career and helped me develop better communication and research skills. I don’t think that everyone needs to necessarily speak at a conference, but I do think that public speaking and storytelling are skills that everyone is going to need.

We all engage in public speaking at some point in our careers. If you’re in a meeting, it’s a smaller audience, but you still need to prepare for that so that you can contribute your best work. Meetups are a great place to share your unique view with the community.

The only people who shouldn’t speak are the ones who can’t keep sexual jokes out of their talks or people who are actively working against diversity and inclusion. Those people create a hostile environment.

“Once you know you’re building the right thing, it’s important to make something that both technical and non-technical audiences will understand.”

What skills are the most underrated or under-appreciated for software engineers?

I don’t like the term “soft skills,” but our industry is seriously lacking them. If you look at senior engineering job specs, about half of those skills are related to communication, leadership, influencing, and growing those around you. These skills are really important, but I think that a lot of people focus on deep technical knowledge instead of growing the full toolbox of skills. It’s going to limit your growth if you don’t focus on them, so you might as well start now!

The ability to zoom out and see the big picture is very important to understand what we’re doing and why. As engineers, we should be empowered to push back and ask questions to ensure we are building what’s needed. It also helps to take a step back when solving a problem. Take a walk, take a nap, talk to someone else. You might find that the answer jumps out at you when you are “doing nothing.”

Once you know you’re building the right thing, it’s important to make something that both technical and non-technical audiences will understand. That brings it back to thinking about the audience and to speaking and storytelling skills. Being able to bring people along with you and making your products understandable by everyone is a really important skill.

How can we improve our soft skills?

Books are my favorite resource. There’s a business book I like called Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan and Al Switzler. It’s about non-violent communication. The whole concept is that we make up stories for why people act the way they do, but, in reality, it’s rarely about us. For example, if I walk by you in the morning, and you say hello, and I don’t respond, you might think I’m snubbing you or are angry with you. In reality, I might have a lot on my mind or not even have realized that you had said hello.

In these stories, we often place ourselves into the category of victim, and we label others as villains. This book helps illuminate that mindset and offers curiosity as a solution. The phrase that best illustrates a curious mindset is “tell me more.” When we default to a “tell me more” reaction, we avoid creating these stories. I tell everyone to read this book.

What other books can you recommend?

One of my favorite books is Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards because it changed the way I think. It talks about left brain and right brain research, tells you how to tap into your creative side, and describes the five components to drawing. It focuses on drawing as a teachable skill, and I have seen a difference. I didn’t know how to draw when I started to read this book. I first picked it up in 2005 (and twice more since), and now I can draw fairly well.

This book also really helps you to find flow. With coding, you build a picture of the architecture or code structure in your head. It’s fragile. Being able to maintain it is important, but it’s also important to get back into it quickly if you lose it. This book teaches you how to quickly tap into your intuitive side and see things holistically.

One of the more interesting things it discusses is how to bore your inner critic and make it drop out. For example, you would turn a photo upside down and then draw it, and your brain is thinking, “What are you doing? That doesn’t look like anything real! Why are you doing this? What is happening?” Eventually, it gets bored and disappears and then you are just drawing. Different tricks like that are really helpful.

Another creativity book I love is called The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron. It’s a 12-week program to recover your lost creativity. The basic idea is that creativity is a teachable skill and we all can tap into it. Its central practice is writing three pages every morning and taking yourself on an “artist date” once per week. In the morning, you get all the heavy stuff out of your head and onto paper, and then during the artist date, you’re refilling the well of your creativity. Both of these books were influential to me.

Finally, I read The First Ninety Days by Michael Watkins just before starting this new job. Its overarching theme is how to be valuable as quickly as possible in a new organization. An organization invests in a new employee, and then it takes a while for that employee to start giving back—which can take about six months to break even. This book is all about front-loading and trying to get to value more quickly, which helps both the business and your career. Something I took away from it is the importance not only of building vertical relationships with your boss and her boss, but also horizontal relationships across the entire organization.

When I started with this company, I set a goal for myself to meet twenty people in the first week. I met thirty. I set up coffee and lunch dates with people and asked them who they thought I should meet. I kept branching out based on their recommendations. That helped me when, in the first three months, I launched an internal program for the company to get people into conference speaking and participating in meetups. I don’t think I would have been able to get that off the ground without the support of the people inside the organization.

I’ve integrated key takeaways from each of these books into my life. You don’t have to adopt everything, but there might be one or two key concepts in there that you’ll find utterly invaluable.

What’s something you wish you’d known at the beginning of your career?

How to understand people and their motivations. It’s important to figure out how to work with and how to influence your colleagues, especially when you don’t have formal authority. I think that those are all hard-earned lessons. I guess at the core of this is politics, which is seen as a dirty word in tech, but it’s about building effective relationships. Learning how to work with different people, even if they are jerks or make you sad. It’s important to figure out how to forge a productive working relationship with everyone.

What do you see trending in the industry?

Machine learning will be transformative, but it’s hard for people to get up and running with it right now as it requires a base of theoretical and mathematical knowledge. Commoditizing it and making it easier to use will allow anyone to leverage machine learning to inform their decisions.

I’m also excited about the potential for 3D printing to solve medical and other real-world problems.

Finally, the usage of technology in art is really interesting and I have been seeing more installations and works recently. There will be a marriage of tech and art, which will redefine what art and technology itself means. These are the things I’m excited about right now.

Do you have any morning routine that sets you up for success, or in the evening if you work in the evenings?

I have a morning and evening routine. In the morning, I wake up at 6:00 am and do my morning pages for 30 minutes and then meditate. Then I go to the gym or run in a nearby park for at least 45 minutes three to five times a week. After that, it is breakfast and coffee, and that’s when I start creative time.

Usually, I will try and do at least two hours of creative work before I go into the office. That way, I get to work on my passion projects because I found that if I tried to do that in the evening, I was too tired, which made me feel like I was just a work machine. Now, I honor my values and make space for creativity.

In the evening, when I leave the office, I’m done. I don’t look at emails or Slack or whatever. At home, I meditate or create, and then I make dinner and stop using electronic devices at 8:30 pm. I go to my bedroom around 9:00 pm and read—often falling asleep to the light of my backlit Kindle.

Does meditation play an important role in your creativity or concentration?

Yes. I started doing meditation in 2016. In general, it’s made me more grateful, less stressed and anxious, and more tuned into what I’m thinking and feeling. I’m generally calmer. It’s been a great addition to my life, so I’ve been doing it nonstop since then. I enjoy it.

What makes a good leader?

Empathy and the ability to create psychological safety are super important. If you’re afraid of making mistakes, or if your employees are afraid of making mistakes, they’re not going to tell you the truth when things are going badly, and they’re not going to make the best decisions. It’s better to have happy, motivated teams who believe in honesty and transparency. As much as they can, leaders should eliminate barriers that create a culture of blame, and they should create and reinforce transparency.

I also really value creativity in a leader. You can be creative in how you resource a project and build people’s careers. The whole idea around creativity is you are taking what you know and somehow creating something new from that, and that can change the course of an entire business or a career.

The skill I want to develop is storytelling. I want to get people excited and bring them on a journey. I want to be able to explain what my mission is and have them be excited about it. I think I can do that in a keynote now, but I’d like to get better at doing it off the cuff and in person.

Have you had any useful experiences with failure?

I have only ever been fired once. I knew it was going to happen because I was protecting my team. I chose to do what I thought was right, and it led where I thought it would lead. Still, it was a shock because I am an overachiever and I like to excel. There was just no winning in this situation at all. I was afraid for a while about finances and whether I would be let back into tech. All these anxious thoughts were running through my head.

I was able to calm down and found out that failure wasn’t so bad and scary. I took the opportunity that this unexpected time off offered me and started my own business. That shocking failure pushed me into trying something new, and it’s been successful, so I’m really happy with it. Right now I have a salaried job, but I have the ability at any point to consult instead, which is a nice comfort.

Corey’s Recommendations

• Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High | Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan and Al Switzler

• The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity | Julia Cameron

• The Bullet Journal Method: Track the Past, Order the Present, Design the Future | Ryder Carroll