This year, for International Women’s Day, we’re profiling two of BuildOps’ best and brightest women on what it’s like to take on a major project leadership role, collaborating creatively, and solving our customers’ pain points all in one fell swoop.
Biyanka Datta, Product Manager, and Lauren Hedberg, Senior Software Engineer, were recently part of the predominantly female team responsible for building one of BuildOps’ latest set of time-tracking features. The project aimed to help customers process their payroll quickly, eliminate paper time tracking, and keep accurate budgets—all while reducing approval times from several days down to hours or even minutes.
Biyanka was responsible for defining customer needs and communicating those needs to our engineering team. “We all got to wear different hats and take on our own verticals,” she told us, describing the production process as a quick and seamless experience. Not only that, but she also had the opportunity to connect with clients, often other women working in the back office of predominantly male-run service operations, and witnessed her product’s direct impact on their daily workload.
Her efforts resulted in the single, unified time-tracking experience our customers know and love today. The automated time-tracking feature has become something of a company-wide game-changer for some of our clients. “I was told that the Sigma export I built is going to reduce the payroll process from several days to just a couple of hours,” she said. “It’s going to free up personnel and allow them to focus on other important parts of their business.”
On the other hand, Lauren was in charge of taking those customer needs and turning them into something tangible.“When I came to BuildOps,” she said. “I was clear about my intention to take on a leadership role.” An aspiration that has since come true after becoming one of the only female team leads on the development side of the company. “It is a challenge to be a woman in an engineering environment,” she told us. “But there’s this additional drive and accountability that comes with it—you absolutely want your projects to be a success.”
That attitude and dedication to her craft landed her at the helm of this project alongside Biyanka. “We were able to improve performance on the timesheets page by over 300%,” she said—a benefit that’s been passed down directly to our customers. Her efforts were also responsible for streamlining the platform’s data models and optimizing their codebase to make it more maintainable. And her work didn’t end there. With the help of Biyanka’s keen foresight into our clients’ business needs, she was able to develop our timesheets page—which now supports enterprise-level customers with a staggering amount of new data.
Their combined efforts were responsible for what has now become one of the product’s strongest selling points.
Today we’re celebrating International Women’s Day by showcasing just one impressive example of the exceptional female talent we have within the BuildOps team. We hope to see more women follow in the footsteps of Biyanka and Lauren as we continue fostering new growth opportunities for women throughout our organization.