From a career rooted in tech consulting to helping companies drive innovation with Unqork’s no-code platform, Jane Tran spends her time focusing on understanding customers’ business challenges and how to solve them. We discuss her morning routine, how the leadership team at Unqork stays aligned while remote, what enterprise no-code can do for financial services, and more.
"I found myself frustrated with the pace and bureaucracy of corporate America, and I wanted to be at a company where I could have an outsized impact."
Full name: Jane Tran
Current job title: Head of Solutions
Company: Unqork
Current location: New York
Works from: Home
Jane Tran has spent most of her career working at Fortune 500 companies, from JP Morgan to MetLife, managing large technology projects. Finding herself frustrated with the pace and bureaucracy of corporate America, Jane desired to be at a company where she could not only have an outsized impact but also could work on a technology that could help disrupt that tech logjam that she had previously experienced.
Jane joined Unqork as their Head of Solutions in 2017. Unqork’s enterprise no-code platform gives businesses a way to build better software, faster. Unqork has created a new way to build mission-critical enterprise software as a completely visual, no-code platform that supports the complexity, scale and security that enterprise apps require--all without a single line of code.
“For our clients in financial services, Unqork has transformed software development and helped companies replace traditional processes that weren’t designed for the digital age in order to improve efficiencies and provide better services to their customers.”
“We are just scratching the surface of what enterprise no-code can do for financial services companies. From my years in the industry, I know firsthand how outdated so many of the standard processes are, and how much opportunity there is for digitization if they only had a platform that can deliver complex capabilities quickly.” Jane explains that as traditional industry processes become increasingly digitized through no-code, it will allow companies to dedicate their most valuable resources (time, budget, and personnel) to unlocking new opportunities for innovation.
“In my role as Head of Solutions, I oversee three different verticals: Sales Engineering, GTM Product, and Enablement. My team’s goal is to help our customers get the most out of the Unqork platform. We work to drive adoption of the Unqork platform by understanding our customers’ business challenges and how we can solve them.”
Jane has overcome several challenges throughout her career but recalls one in particular as she previously ran an innovation challenge across a technology group.
“At the end of the challenge, we only moved forward about 5% of the ideas. However, being inexperienced, I wrote declination responses without understanding the viewpoint of the idea submitters, and they came out tone-deaf. I immediately scheduled time with the group to get their feedback and learn for next time.”
Her biggest takeaway from this experience was that it’s important to understand who your stakeholders are and what drives them.
Jane's Diary:
Monday
6:50 am: (Jane’s morning routine) I usually wake up before my alarm. I have my ritual of making coffee and asking Alexa to play WNYC. Nine times out of ten my breakfast of choice is a PB&J open-faced, always Skippy and blueberry jam. Before my first meeting, I scan a number of publications - the Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, TechCrunch, New York Magazine, and Gothamist. Always in that order because this morning routine I found is what keeps me anchored throughout the day.
8:00 am: Zoom call with our Senior Leadership Team. We started doing these morning calls at the beginning of COVID to keep us aligned given how crazy our schedules are. We discussed our recruiting strategy with Ben, our Head of Talent Acquisition, and did a readout of 2020. We grew more than doubled headcount in 2020. It’s wild! (By the way, we’re still hiring! Visit unqork.com/careers if you want to join the No Code Revolution!)
10:00 am: Catch-up with our Marketplace Listings team. We’re launching a public Marketplace this year and we want to make sure we have a cohesive adoption plan. We asked Olga, our head of Enablement to join. She brought a lot of learnings from her experience with Stack Overflow. I love it when different teams get to work together and learn from each other.
11:30 am: Reviewed a proposal from one of our Solutions Integrator Partners with our GTM Product team. The GTM Product team is fairly new, with a focus on developing accelerators for common industry use cases. Since the team formed, we’re constantly looking for ways to partner with different parties to see how we can help others also gain more efficiency.
1:00 pm: Weekly call with my Solutions leadership team. We usually go around the room to see what folks are doing. We’re zoomed in from Russia, Las Vegas, Texas, New Jersey, and New York. I bring up a few new initiatives our team will likely get into, including one for COVID Rent Relief. Given the timing, I also remind all of them to submit their year-end reviews by the end of the week. I’m a stickler for these things.
2:30 pm: Quick meeting on Stack Overflow moderation. Stack Overflow is a great resource where people ask questions and get answers about different technologies, including Unqork. We’ve had a 50% increase in monthly active users, which also means we have to revisit our guidelines. Took some to-dos for the rest of the team.
5:00 pm: Went to our weekly staffing meeting. It’s always a slow trickle in but attendance is always packed because everyone needs resources. Between pre-sales support and delivery, it sounds like the rest of January is going to be busy (as usual). Margot who leads the meeting runs it with grace, everyone is aligned and happy.
6:00 pm: I’m quarantining in a town with a shop dedicated to natural wine, so I pour a glass and catch-up on emails and slack messages. Andrew the Architect, a bot we have in one of our channels said this: We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit. I mentally thank the bot for the motivation and move on.
Reach out to Jane on LinkedIn.
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