#9 ACLU's Product Chief, Deepa Subramaniam on leading product for the Clinton Campaign and Adobe
+ Pod with Priya Krishna and our new sister platform
Welcome to Trailblazers! We bring you trailblazing by and for South Asians every other Monday. Visit our IG, FB, and LinkedIn, and archives.
From HQ: Next week, we’re launching our sister platform, @shopsouthasian, where we’ll connect you to South Asian businesses around the globe. Tis’ the season to shop till you drop — so why not support trailblazing South Asian entrepreneurs?
Catching Fire 🚀 your news roundup
🇺🇸 The polling problem
It’s no secret election polls were more than a little off this year. But the errors deeply impacted a number of South Asian candidates seeking office.
There’s the obvious in Kamala Harris — most pundits predicted a Biden-Harris victory at a landslide, not at margins of error. There’s also Sarah Gideon, a Democrat from Maine who challenged 4-term incumbent Senator Susan Collins. She led every poll in the days leading up to the election. But when election day came around, Collins coasted to victory with a lead of 7 points. Former Diplomat, Sri Preston Kulkarni, who ran for Texas’ 22nd district also faced a similarly surprising loss.
Pollsters have now become the centerpiece of scrutiny, unable to chalk up 2016 errors to one-off anomalies. As we settle back from election anxiety this week, give a shout to the newly-elected South Asian public servants, and also trailblazing candidates like Gideon and Kulkarni who gave it their best.
🤝 Biden-Harris and the Kashmir question
Trump and Modi are (were?) the best of political friends. Though Modi celebrated the victory with an ode to Biden and Harris, there remains an open question about U.S.-India relations.
Human rights violations and disputes related to Kashmir have plagued India for generations. It’s been brought to a head by the Modi administration, and the new U.S. administration is expected to take issue with it. Read Aljazeera’s take on how diplomatic ties might develop between the two after the new admin takes office. The short of it: former diplomats believe an amicable relationship will remain a strategic priority, but that a Biden-Harris ticket will address Kashmir more actively than the Trump admin.
📺 Fabulous Lives of Bollywood Wives
We weren’t exaggerating when we said South Asians on television was the 2020 gift that keeps on giving. Netflix announced this upcoming reality series, that puts a Bollywood spin on Real Housewives. It’s positively Kardashian, and probably something we’re all going to have to hate-watch with our families this holiday season.
Hot off the Pod 🎧 Priya Krishna, Food Journalist
Subscribe to know when the pod drops tonight. Priya Krishna is a contributing food writer for the New York Times, the New Yorker, and other prominent news outlets.
She’s also the author of two cookbooks, Indian-ish, one of the top cookbooks of 2019, and also Ultimate Dining Hall Hacks, a college-themed cookbook. Priya’s also a YouTube personality, known for fashioning her famous dishes on video for the Food Network and Bon Appétit’s Test Kitchen channel. As many of you know from a previous issue, Priya exited the Conde Nast-owned video platform this Summer, in response to pay inequities for its PoC contributors. Listen in to hear her path to food writing and how she managed brave leaps like this one.
Fireside Chat 🔥 Deepa Subramaniam, Chief Product Officer @ ACLU
Deepa currently serves as the first-ever Chief Product and Digital Officer for the ACLU. She’s been a trailblazer in the digital product design and development space, with more than 15 years of product leadership across renowned organizations. After spending a decade at Adobe in product, she led product at charity: water, a non-profit that provides clean water to populations in the developing world. During the 2016 election cycle, Deepa led digital product efforts for Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Before landing at her current role at the ACLU, she served as the VP of Product and Design at Kickstarter, and launched her own product consulting business, Wherewithall. Deepa’s career spans the gamut of digital product development from the big tech to politics, from the private to the public sectors. Most recently, Deepa was named to Fortune’s 40 under 40.
Product management is a new and growing but relatively nebulous role. How do you explain what you do a product lead over the various organization you’ve worked with from Adobe to the ACLU?
I explained it to my mom once, by saying that as a product manager, I'm like the mom of the product. I am trying to figure out: What should this thing be? What do people want and need? And how do we give them that in a way that is secure, sustainable and delightful, and at a pace that we can keep meeting? So I say, when there's like a new release of software, if everyone is really excited, and happy and satisfied with it, I did good as the mom. I plan things really well and kind of gave them what they want. If the customer is frustrated and angry and there's bugs, and they feel like it’s a waste of money, then I did a bad job as the mom of the product. And so it is a truly interdisciplinary role. People don’t go to college and get a Bachelor's in product management. You are part engineer, part designer, part marketer, part business developer, part legal, part data scientist. And that really spoke to me — where you were meant to be savvy in a number of different fields. It was all about how you synthesize that together to develop a roadmap or future for this product. You have to be nimble. It's a mixture of being both proactive and reactive. And I just really enjoy all of that. Product management has been the right fit for me and my career for the last 15 years.
Do you have any poignant memories working with Hillary Clinton on her 2016 campaign?
Hillary Clinton is someone I truly admire. I think about her every day. It was a devastating loss. I do have some memories that stand out. My mom actually became a citizen during the 2016 campaign, so that she could vote in that election to because she really wanted to vote for Hillary Clinton and to support me working on that campaign. I remember telling that story to Secretary Clinton. And she said, ‘That's so amazing. Tell your mom, thank you.’ And then and then she said, ‘I hope your mom's okay about that fact that you haven't gone home in a long time and have just been working so hard on this.’ And I responded, ‘Yeah, she understands it, it's okay.’ And then a couple weeks later, my parents got a personally signed letter from her, thanking my mom for becoming a recent citizen and showing her how proud she was that I was working on the campaign.
The pod with Deepa drops in the next issue!
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