Lauren Reeder

For as long as I could remember, I’ve been an avid listener. My dad worked in the public markets, so the conversation at our dinner table was often about companies—what was working, and what wasn’t. He and my mom are both accountants by training, too, so finance was something I learned about early—maybe even earlier than most. I would listen to them talk about everything. Eventually, I found my voice in those dinner time conversations. I remember being 8 years old and learning about how interest vs. principal payments for mortgages worked, and declaring that it was too skewed towards the banks—there had to be a better way.

Listening to customers was the best part of my job both as a software engineer building online exam software in college, and as a product leader at Segment and Twilio. The best aha moments came from hearing why a feature we were so excited about wasn’t necessarily working for a certain customer, or what we needed to build to solve their next problem. The journey of building new product lines and constantly shifting to the next big challenge is both fascinating and hugely rewarding to me.

Looking back, I always found myself trying to understand the bigger why. Why did this work for certain customers and not others? Why was the industry shifting towards one direction and not the other? My curiosity has always been how the world is changing—and listening has always been a key part of getting to that aha moment for me.