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Pam Hernandez (she/her)
Product management leader and EDI advocate
Pam Hernandez (she/her) is a product professional with over 10 years of experience in both enterprise and startup environments across Canada and the UK.1 She is currently a Product Lead at Air Canada, based in Toronto, Ontario.3
Career Highlights
- Current Role: Product Lead at Air Canada in Toronto3
- Previous Experience:
Achievements and Recognition
- Recipient of Tech Nation's Exceptional Talent Tier 1 UK visa in 20191
- Elected to the ProductBC Board in 2021, focusing on championing EDI (Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion) initiatives1
Areas of Expertise
- Product management
- Team leadership
- EDI advocacy
- Mobile-first and accessible UX
- Data-informed decision making
- Cross-functional collaboration
Personal
Pam recently moved to Toronto after spending time in London, UK, and Vancouver.2 She is passionate about mentorship, sharing her journey on panels, and connecting people across her network.1
Pam Hernandez's LinkedIn username is pamhernandez, as mentioned in the query.
Highlights
A tale of 2 TELUS origin stories today:
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Day: Co-led kicking off a 4-day “Plan-the-Plan” week for a holistic, cross-functional 2-month Discovery phase for an Air Canada initiative from downtown #Toronto. This otherwise intimidating “problem-to-be-solved” will get thorough insights’ due diligence & alignment decision-making milestones galore, giving stakeholders (& us!) peace of mind we’ve dug into details well ahead of even thinking about Delivery. What a luxury. Gracias fellow TELUS alum Jose P. for the opp to join your Air Canada product pillar!
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Night: In the same TELUS Harbour Toronto tower I visited for offsites 2015 (where I met Jose), TELUS was the Content Management case study & host for Uniform’s event by Andrew Kumar.
Backstory: In 2007, Andrew was my TA for Kamal Masri’s Management Information Systems course (as a requirement for my business degree,) with both encouraging me to explore a career in tech way back then. Less than a decade later, I’d somehow blossomed as a digital #ProductManager with TELUS & decided to move from Vancouver to the UK. Almost simultaneously, Andrew joined the team I’d left, now boasting TELUS as one of countless Uniform clients.
I’m unbelievably lucky that after 4 years in London & returning to Vancouver during the pandemic, I moved to Toronto 10 months ago, welcomed into its tech community by Jose & Andrew. If you know anyone exploring a Toronto relo, e-introduce me to help their research (Discovery!)
PS: Typing from Scotiabank Arena where Timbo, Busta, & Ciara just opened for Missy, what a MONDAY.
#Collision2024 Takeaways, in between mingling galore around Toronto:
- VC panel: AI is a means to an end, like Email, with AI “startups” are largely a feature, not a business, that companies can easily replicate/improve for their own specific use cases. Advances in AI have led to quantifiable benefits to convey as KPIs (value to customers) vs. subjective “improvements” previously not easily measured at scale.
- AWS gen AI VP Product: Evolution of an innovation starts as a single use case, gradually increasing in specificity (specialization) & eventually, an entire ecosystem
- An ML Model = a cake you find… do you eat it? Latent, malicious issues & secret management might be in a hidden spoonful! Parallels to when orgs hesitated to move data into cloud infras
- Move faster, but at what risk — security, privacy, bias.
- Large enterprises’ silos might mean models are in production having circumvented processes & protocols’ rigors (understand/audit/monitor for vulnerabilities)
- Willing to let AI operate autonomously & understand its decision-making, or can you intervene/course-correct?
- Goal is to delegate increasingly complex tasks, so need to ensure it’s right for important/sensitive use cases Regulation & Insurance as guardrails (forcing functions) for trust, security & peace of mind
Leadership applicable to all, via Latinas in Tech - Canada DEI workshop by Verônica Heringer & Stephanie Gomez:
- Add your grain of salt: be a sponsor/mentor/panelist because representation matters.
- Who's your “go to” mentor/support system at work? What did they do for you to think of them right away?
- People we trust = people like us… formerly a survival strategy.
- [Thinking Fast = biases, reflexes, “known” instead of Thinking Slow = Aware & conscious, analytical] --> employ that with your relationships!
- Invisible common ground is so vital to forge ties, try to find it beyond the visible demographics & overt tendencies.
- As a leader, you have power… & it is your job to have empathy & support others upwards
- Create psychologically safe spaces, be cognizant, curious, commit, collaborate & embody courage emotional/cultural intelligence.
& as for the future of comms, a Snapchat dev founded a video AI generator for translation/localization/full-on “avatarization” for those uncomfortable on-camera… will this replace charismatic communicators? My generational bias disagrees, especially after meeting incredible entrepreneurs with palpable passion beyond salesmanship.
…but my number 1 tip to get the party going at your next tech event: make “Inflection Point” a drinking game. CHEERS!
