Cindy Sanders on managing engineers, organizing chaos, and finding opportunities

It wasn’t so much that Cindy Sanders looked for a career in tech. It’s more like tech found her. After earning a degree in business, Sanders headed to Denmark to find her roots. When she came back to the US, a friend reached out—WordPerfect was looking for editors who spoke Danish! After she joined WordPerfect, her internationalization role led her into international marketing, and from there, she landed in engineering project management.

“One of my earliest successes in engineering project management was introducing Agile methodology to a team of engineers who didn’t think they wanted to do it,” remembers Sanders. “I had to sneak it in one principle at a time. After about three months, with all the changes going well, I told them, ‘Guess what—you’re doing Agile!”

Knowing she’d found her niche leading engineers, Sanders followed a manager’s suggestion and taught herself Java. Then, when he handed her a heavy tome on C++, she learned that too—in just six weeks.

Sanders honed her business and tech skills at Novell and Symantec. Then, when Adobe acquired Omniture, several of her Utah-based friends became Adobe employees, and they urged her to join. She knew her trademark get-things-done approach would be the right fit. “I came to Adobe because I just wanted to build stuff,” she says.

Sanders joined Adobe without an official title—the team knew they needed her, but they hadn’t found the exact right spot quite yet. She soon became chief of staff for the vice president of engineering. From there, she negotiated for her own team of engineers. “I told them that if they gave me a team, we’d save money in the first year and make money the second year. And that’s exactly what we did.”

Sanders’ latest role is director of operational excellence, site reliability engineering. “I help teams see how they’re doing with their cloud engineering journey, and where they can improve,” she says. “And I give guidance to engineering teams so they can make business decisions—I like to think of it as gathering up the goodness.”

Leading, and finding your opportunities

As a leader, Sanders hires people who don’t want to just do the status quo, and who are, as she says, “better at things than I am.” And then she gives them a lot of responsibility. “I say, here’s the vision. But I want them to do it, and own it. That way, everyone has more fun, and higher satisfaction with their work.”

For folks looking to build their skills and career, Cindy has solid advice based on her own experience. “Look for opportunities, and ask for them. Show how your unique skills can add value. For me, that value comes in making other people successful, and in organizing the chaos. If there’s a problem, I’m on the edge of my chair saying, ‘please let me do it!’”

Not sure of the best place for your skills? Sanders says, “Find what differentiates you. Know what you are and aren’t good at and what you like. Every job has some ‘work tax,’ those things you don’t really love, but when you find a role that matches your skills and the things you like, you’ll find your momentum.”