Name: Saskia van Daal

Job Title: Product Marketing Manager

Expertise: Helping people and organisations see and understand their data with Tableau

Education: BSc Economics, MSc European Politics

Growing up, my father worked in IT, controlling and BI. I had no clue what he was doing and showed little interest. When people asked I’d say “he works with computers”.

I studied economics and then politics for my Masters’ degree. Some of my favourite courses were maths and statistics but I never thought of working in the data field because I thought I wasn’t technical enough.

I ended up working for a management consultancy, which meant spending most of my time building PowerPoint decks and doing analysis in Excel. One day I met some of my uni friends over brunch and one of them started telling me about this amazing company she’d just joined. This was 6 years ago and the company was called Tableau.

I can honestly say that that brunch changed my career. I joined Tableau as a Product Consultant in their pre-sales team, and then going on to manage that team. I learned not just how to analyse and visualise data, but how to advise organisations on their data and analytic environments. I work with customers all over the Europe, Africa and Middle East region and I definitely had some challenges. Some men didn’t take me, a young woman, seriously when advising them over the phone. When I presented at events, people in the audience would sometimes address their questions during the Q&A to my male colleagues, and not to me.

Luckily, I always feel supported by both my male and female colleagues and have noticed big changes even in the 6 short years that I’ve been a part of the industry. I know there’s still a lot of work to do and I’m grateful to all the women who’ve opened this path and allowed me to see that there’s space at the table. This is just the beginning!

I’m currently part of the product marketing team at Tableau, and with a young child and a second one on the way, there are definitely some new challenges to address. Both my family and my career are important to me and having an employer that offers family friendly policies and promotes gender equality is not something I take for granted.

Now when people ask me what I do, I certainly don’t stop at “I work with computers”!

Name: Archana Ganeshalingam

Job Title: Senior Product Consultant, Tableau

Expertise: Building content for product demonstrations and training workshops for Tableau customers.

Education: BSc. Business Mathematics and Statistics

Shortly after graduating from university, I joined Tableau’s Customer Consulting team as a product consultant. As my first ‘real’ job, I had no idea what I was getting myself in for! Luckily for me, presales at Tableau ended up giving me the chance to try a little bit of everything, going from advising a start-up on their data strategy to getting into the weeds of the architecture for some of our enterprise customers. Every day I can learn something new and get out of my comfort zone. There’s no better example of this than my personal journey with public speaking.

When I started at Tableau, I had no idea how much public speaking would be involved. Day-to-day, I give product demonstrations over video conference and in customer meetings. What I didn’t know is how often we’d be presenting at events and conferences, delivering keynotes and training workshops to huge rooms of hundreds of people.

Back in high school, I had to do a *mandatory* public speaking workshop and it was the first time I’d ever spoken without notes. I remember standing in front of all my class, hands trembling and tearing up because I was so nervous!

With this role, I’ve been thrown into many situations where I’ve had to present to bigger and bigger audiences. For me, this culminated in hosting the keynote presentation at our conference back in July to a room of over 2,000 people! Looking back at the person who could barely stand in front of ten of her classmates, I wish I could tell her that it’s not one presentation that makes you a ‘bad’ public speaker.

I’m lucky to have a lot of support with Tableau sponsoring Data + Women, a meetup group for women who work in, with and around data. As a co-lead for the meetup group, I try to organise monthly events in London where all are welcome. Our aim is to promote and celebrate the achievements and success of women working in the industry and give them a platform to share their knowledge and experiences.

If there’s one piece of advice I want to share with anyone reading this, take every opportunity to speak that you can. If you’re being asked to present, then it’s because you’ve been identified as an expert on the topic or as someone whose story is worth sharing. Don’t let imposter syndrome get the better of you! And even when you haven’t been asked, step up to the plate. Public speaking is a skill, not an ability. Hone your craft!