Tracy Edwards, SBI

Trac Bannon: 

Doing our normal timeboxed guest research on SBI’s Chief Technology Officer, Tracy Edwards, was both difficult and curious. 

Why curious? Prior to 2018, this Tracy Edwards spent her career more focused on humans and not technology. Once exposed to the idea of product management and bridging the divide between business and tech, she completely reinvented herself and her career, pivoting to product development and leading engineering teams.

Why was the research difficult, though? There are multiple Tracy Edwards from New York City. 

Tracy Edwards: 

Until recently, the most famous Tracy Edwards was the person who escaped Jeffrey Dahmer, which was a real interesting thing in the Google searches. Then there is a Tracy Edwards, NYC, who is almost an exact doppelganger to me with like glasses, blonde hair, whole bit, although she seems to have a much more fabulous socialite life. So I kind of like that runoff. And now there’s Tracy Edwards, the very famous sailor who has a full documentary about her.

So I feel like I’m in good company and I don’t mind if I’m buried on the second or third page. 

Trac Bannon: 

You are listening to Real Technologists. I’m your host, Trac Bannon, coming to you from Camp Hill, Pennsylvania. Each week we choose a unique guest behind leading Edge Tech innovation to explore their genuine stories, their true journeys. Technology touches nearly every aspect of our lives. It’s being driven by diverse perspectives and experiences of real humans.

You’re in the right spot to hear about the real technologists reshaping our world. Stay tuned for stories that will give you something to noodle on.

Tracy Edwards is very well spoken and reminds me of a cat with 9 lives. In her own words, she feels like she has lived four or five lives already and chuckles when she considers what 70 will look like someday.

This California native hails from the agricultural heart of the state, Central California. She grew up in the midst of pomegranates and almonds and chickens as well as a lot of dust, a lot of mosquitoes, and a lot of heat. This is one of the richest agricultural areas in the world, and not what many think of when they consider the classic California experience of LA or San Francisco. 

Tracy displays a few tell tale signs that she’s an only child. Independent, achievement oriented, and ambitious, there’s also strong communication skills and a natural presence that comes from not competing with siblings. 

Tracy Edwards: 

You end up just getting exposed to more adult things because frankly you’re outvoted. 

Trac Bannon: 

She is now the parent of an only child and a strong advocate for single sex education.

Back in high school, Tracy was an overachiever who gobbled up AP courses on her way to being valedictorian. And like most kids who had a good GPA in Central California, the school district funneled her towards the University of California system. There are 23 campuses within the California State Higher Education System, making it one of the largest in the world.

 Since she loved chem and biology in high school, she picked chem and evolutionary biology as her major. 

Tracy Edwards: 

And I started at UC San Diego, and within a month I hated it. I dropped out. I couldn’t quite find my footing. And really just needed to pause at the fresh age of 18 and figure out what I actually wanted from education, not what was the traditional track that they give to kids.

Trac Bannon: 

This is often a situation where parents can be upset or disappointed, but not for Tracy. Her parents did not set an expectation of her going to college. While her mom had a very trendy 1970s degree in recreation from Fresno State, her mom had bounced around with some jobs being more stable than others.

Her dad never graduated from college, and he was a truck driver. Between the two of them, it seemed to Tracy that they were always working, and it was always a little bit wobbly. 

A high school English teacher saw her capabilities and pushed her the last two years of high school to make sure her essays were ready and the college applications were on time. There was no typical college tour with her parents. It was actually the mother of a high school boyfriend who would seed ideas in Tracy that would change her approach to college. 

Tracy Edwards: 

My high school boyfriend’s mom was amazing. She was the dean of a law school. She had gone to University of Chicago and it wasn’t so much that she pushed me into UC… it was just kind of that track. But she actually was the one that got me to be a PLE major with the very sound advice of when you get to a school, open up the catalog… this is long, long ago, and they had printed catalogs… and go through the whole catalog and circle the classes that look fun and that’s what you should be, because it’s undergrad.

Trac Bannon: 

With a short stint as a chem major, she began to consider her own learning styles and needs. Smaller classes, conversation, and collaboration led her to the idea that she needed to attend a small private college.

Gender and single sex education did not occur to her as she set out on her own college tour adventure. 

Tracy Edwards: 

I had a Volvo Station wagon and drove around and looked at all the classic cases of Occidental and Pepperdine and all these places. And I ended up driving onto the campus at Mills, and it was stunning. They had a stat that they had seven trees for every student. There were 750 undergrad, all women. It was this enclave in the hills of Oakland and it smelled like eucalyptus and they had all these old buildings and amazing history, and there was just this kind of calm to it all… and it really exceeded my expectations. So that’s why I opened up that course catalog and said, what looks fun?

Trac Bannon: 

A private education would be costly, so it was a strategic decision to spend the first two years at San Diego Community to get the gen ed requirements out of the way as economically as possible. Once at Mills, her major would be PLE, Political, Legal, and Economic Analysis. That is quite a liberal arts school major, wouldn’t you say? 

It was economics and law that really gave her energy, especially law. She thrived on the natural tension and the realization that there’s really no perfect answer. This framework of evaluating tradeoffs and finding best fit compromises would later help her as she took on management of engineering teams.

Mills College provided the perfect environment for Tracy Edwards to thrive, making her a strong advocate for single sex education. There are multiple academic and government studies that all indicate a clear and measurable advantage to single sex education. It is highly controversial, however, and the American Civil Liberties Union asserts that single sex education is unconstitutional, and it has filed suits against schools that have offered that as an option. 

Tracy Edwards: 

I cannot speak more highly of it. My daughter’s middle name is Mills. That’s how much I love it because this was more profound than probably anybody else in both lines of family of the experience that I had there. We all were there for one purpose and that was to get an education. We weren’t there to party. We weren’t there to get our MRS. We were there to truly experience. Something unique in the tiny hills of Oakland and be really purposeful with what we chose to do. 

Trac Bannon: 

Recently, Tracy was a speaker at a company wide event celebrating International Women’s History Month. A total of four senior women would each give a short talk, and she realized that all four of those senior leaders had some type of single sex education experience. In Tracy’s words, single sex education removes the distractions and competitiveness allowing students, including herself, to find their voice. 

During her time at Mills College, she dated someone that she had met and dated briefly in high school. He was a few grades ahead, and as soon as she graduated from Mills, they married. She was 22 years old. As she shared this part of her origin story, she added “I was a baby”. 

They would stay together for many years as she navigated from college, to a job in healthcare, to becoming faculty at Fresno State. 

2003 was a difficult time to graduate from college. The Dot Com bubble started in the mid 1990s and culminated with the dot com burst. By March 10th of 2000, the Nasdaq Composite Index peaked at 5, 048. By October of 2002, the Nasdaq index would fall to 1, 139. Many tech companies went bankrupt, investors lost substantial amounts of money. 

In 2003, in Fresno, Agriculture and Agribusiness, education, and medical fields were the top draws. Tracy would start her career as a marketing administrator for a small women’s Medical group. 

Tracy Edwards: 

I remember being overqualified to get a job at Quiznos and being underqualified to be an executive assistant and not knowing what to do. So frankly, went back to California and started working as a marketing administrator for a healthcare practice, which was connected to family in a loose way. Now this was interesting because it was all women providers and all women patients because it was an OBGYN.

Trac Bannon: 

She stayed for 4 long years and it taught her what she didn’t want to do. I often advise the folks that I mentor and sponsor that if you don’t know what you do want to do for your career, start by listing out the things you know you don’t want to do. She was a bit of an athlete who went well beyond marketing administration to take on billing, front desk and back office processes and policy, and was even involved with implementing electronic medical records. As a business environment, healthcare is uber complicated, and it was time for a change. 

Tracy Edwards: So here I was in another very, very female dominated environment, which was highly different than college. All sudden this was a very rough culture. And I think frankly, I got too much thrown on at me too soon. I ended up managing all of billing, doing the contracts, managing the front office, managing the back office by the time I was in my mid twenties.

Trac Bannon: Medical, Agriculture, and Education. The three main industries in Fresno. She had done her time in the medical industry and would next try her hand with education. Fresno State has a 388 acre main campus and a 1, 011 acre uUniversity Farm located at the northeast edge of Fresno. It’s at the foot of the majestic Sierra Nevada mountain range. 

Her first stop in education was using her marketing experience directly supporting the president of the university by coordinating events, promotions, and marketing initiatives.

 That role would morph into the assistant director of development for fundraising before she got involved with the Craig School of Business and the creation of an executive MBA program with a specialized track in agricultural economics. 

Remember that Tracy’s undergraduate degree was Political, Legal, and Economic Analysis. She saw an opportunity to use more of her education and apply it to building the curriculum. Fresno and the region is home to mega farms and agricultural factories like POM Wonderful, known for its pomegranate based products, and Sun Pacific, known for their Cuties brand of citrus fruits. 

Tracy Edwards: 

So this was an executive, MBA program for all frankly, the farmers in the area who had huge logistics firms or they were running the Cuties factory or POM Wonderful… like these very high end multi-billion dollar industries, and they needed a little bit more business acumen. So we were developing a track specifically for them. So it was a great job. I loved that.

Trac Bannon: 

Scholarship funding drove Tracy’s decision to get her own MBA while working with Fresno State.

Tracy Edwards: 

When I finished my MBA at Fresno State, the one thing that it taught me was to say yes to things because I knew my own limitations. So prior to having my MBA I would’ve probably been underwater as I was in healthcare and not known I was in over my skis. And my MBA taught me just enough to say… oh, I can sign up for this because I know when to ask for help. And I also have a group of people that I can ask for help on.

Trac Bannon: 

While she was faculty at Fresno State, there was an opportunity to start consulting for a company called 360 Media Direct. The founder and CEO, Kelly Vukovich, sat on the board of the Craig School of Business. It didn’t take long for it to grow from a side hustle to a full time offer. 

Tracy Edwards: 

Do you wanna stay in Fresno or, we have a satellite office in New York. And I said, nicely f it. Let’s go to New York. So away I went. 

Trac Bannon: 

Her true journey has amazing twists and turns and complications.

Her life was filled with tremendous changes that were both exciting and terrifying all at once. She and her husband had divorced while she was still working at Fresno State. While working with both Fresno State and consulting with 360 Media, she started an unexpected new relationship. 

Tracy Edwards: 

So I was running down my contract at the university I was teaching. I had a very nice lazy summer and… I had a fling with someone and ended up quite unexpectedly pregnant because I had infertility issues for years and years prior to that… and never thought I could possibly get pregnant.

Trac Bannon: 

Her infertility doctor laid the facts on the table for her, saying that if she were to come back in, say, five years and say, now’s the time and now is the person, the doctor said I cannot guarantee you’ll ever get pregnant again. 

Tracy Edwards: 

So if you wanna be a mom, this is probably your only chance. No pressure. 

All in one. I moved to New York 22 weeks pregnant, which was a very wild leap. And I was lucky enough that he went with me on a hope and a prayer, and he has turned out to be a really exceptional father. A very good co-parent and just not quite the spouse for me.

Trac Bannon: 

Tracy feels very lucky that her daughter’s father lives nearby. That they are co parenting and that they have a very amicable relationship. Their move to New York City to be with 360 Media Direct is where Tracy experienced a series of catalyst moments that would put her on the path to being an unusual CTO – one without a technical degree. 

With 360, she was client facing, coordinating technical integration. In that client services role, she would often end up copying and pasting emails between two technical teams and hoping they could figure out the details. She realized that if she was going to be able to do her job, she had to understand the underlying technology. She made a beeline to the CTO, asked for help, and he took her under his wing. She learned about the development processes, was exposed to concepts like APIs and the importance of loosely coupled architecture for system to system or business to business integration. 

Tracy Edwards: 

And then on the other side of it, all of a sudden the people in client services were like… Tracy can speak to the engineers, she knows what’s going on over there. So you should go ask her what you need and then she can translate it and figure out when they’re gonna get it done. So essentially what I was doing is product management. I was the quarterback between the business and engineering, and that in its simplest form is a product person.

Trac Bannon: 

She began coordinating between the business and engineering teams and loving it.

She got an idea, working with one of the sales leads, to build a direct to consumer survey product that could help find the right demographics for these publishers. 

With the help of the engineering team, they began to build. While they were building, there were several corporate leadership turnovers including the CTO who had mentored her and a short lived CIO. The corporation turned to Tracy and asked her to take on managing the engineering staff… she dove in and she loved it. She was part of a transition from waterfall to agile. How did she get from there to insider intelligence? 

Tracy Edwards: 

It really has been a lot of serendipity and a lot of putting yourself out there. I wasn’t like on a job hunt when I found any of these positions. And the same goes with insider.

Trac Bannon: 

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? So many alumni of Real Technologists had a catalyst moment kick started by a simple conversation. For Tracy Edwards, it would be a discussion with one of the other parents while cleaning up at a birthday party for preschoolers. 

Tracy Edwards: 

And she’s like, huh huh… and you don’t have like a direct technical background. I’m like, no, but this is kind of what it looks like. And she said, uh, do you have a business background? And I paused ’cause I thought, how am I gonna answer this? Like, Should I say? Like I was in marketing and… and I was like, oh, I have an MBA! And she’s like, yeah, that would qualify as a business background. So she said, will you just come talk to my CEO?

Trac Bannon: 

The CEO had been thinking about making a change in the CTO role from a core technologist to someone who would be more oversight and product focused. At first, there was not an open role though Tracy met and collaborated with the CEO and the VP of products for about five months on how to make this new product-centric CTO model work. In time, she would join insider intelligence as the SVP of Products and Systems. She stayed for 2 years until a series of corporate mergers and acquisitions in 2020 forced her to take personal stock of her own happiness and growth. It was the midst of the first round of global lockdowns in 2020; Tracy was meeting with new leadership and she thought to herself, “if this person was interviewing me now, would I go work for them? The answer was a hard no.” It was time to pop her head up and see what else was around. 

There was a serendipitous moment and a random ping from the incredible Jennifer Ives, a founding member of CHIEF, simply saying that there’s a company in our portfolio who’s looking for someone in tech. After a difficult and rigorous interview process lasting over four months, she was offered the role with SBI, also known as the Sales Benchmark Index. Leaving her team at Insider Intelligence was difficult. Though it was time to go. 

Tracy Edwards:

I realized the advice that I would give someone who is in my position would be you’ve gotta go leave. Like you, you’ve gotta get outta here. You’ve gotta go find the right place for yourself. And what I’ve noticed is if I’m not aligned with my direct boss or the executives, it’s going to put me in a position where I’m either lying to my team, which I never wanna do, or an insubordinate, which I don’t wanna be either. And it’s an impossible position. 

Trac Bannon: 

In her nearly four year long career with SBI, she has had three different titles while doing the same job the whole time. Tracy thinks this is indicative of a company that is building a product and a technology for the first time. From Chief Platform Officer, to Chief Product Officer, to Chief Technology Officer… and the entire time spent building software for clients.

 Tracy has no personal regrets, though she admits her heart is heavy about her alma mater.

Tracy Edwards: 

So my heart is broken because Mills had to integrate… they lost funding during the pandemic because they were very committed to not raising tuition.

And they were a huge giver of scholarships. I was a scholarship kid and a grant kid, and that’s the only reason I was able to go there. They got, frankly, bought out by Northwestern. And so now they are a mixed gender school, so my Mill is no longer, but I really had an incredible experience and I would still encourage anyone to find that space.

Trac Bannon: 

When it comes to relationships, mentoring, and sponsorship, Tracy Edwards wears two hats. She is part of a network of women CTOs in New York City who constantly question each other and really give each other the opportunity to be vulnerable and explore their own moments of imposter syndrome and self doubt.

Tracy Edwards: 

It was really interesting seeing that regardless of your background, you are gonna feel some type of insecurity or imposter syndrome sitting in that seat. And I don’t know if that’s indicative of kind of the hybrid between a executive and a technologist, or if it’s more along the lines of kind of women working their way up through the system.

Trac Bannon: 

Tracy’s other mentoring and sponsorship hat is a bit of a DevRel – this is a newer phenomenon in industry. DevRel, or Developer Relations, is an interdisciplinary role that sits in a border space between product, engineering, and marketing. It is a rapidly growing field within the tech industry that focuses on fostering relationships between companies and their developer and engineering communities.

Tracy Edwards: 

I love advocating and evangelizing the engineering team. That is my real happy place. I think they are some of the most smart, amazing, creative people and are often overlooked in a non-product organization, which is where I’ve been and I kind of like that challenge.

And for me, the idea of the two-way street of not only having the business understand the value that they are bringing, but really closing the loop so that the engineers know what they have built has made an impact on the business and the customers. That’s my happy place. 

Trac Bannon: 

She is young and mid career with a precocious daughter. So what is next for Tracy Edwards? 

Tracy Edwards: 

I want to make sure that we’re growing and I have something new and challenging in front of me. I really love working in security and IT, I know that is a place that people don’t love, but I feel like it’s transformative for an organization and again… often kind of that overlooked underdog within an organization. I will gladly stay at SBI as long as we have continued new challenges and growth ahead of us

Trac Bannon: 

As an advisory and consulting organization, SBI is doing their diligence to understand the use cases for generative AI with a focus on OpenAI and ChatGPT. Tracy Edwards believes it will change the way we work, but it won’t be the end all and be all, where people are massively losing their jobs. Her hope is for the best case, that generative AI will improve the monotony of stuff that people have to do and make things a little easier. With so many technology changes on the horizon, and so much more of her career to go, what would she say to her younger self?

Tracy Edwards: 

Say yes. Take a risk. It’s been the biggest areas of growth or opportunity for me. They’re by far the most chaotic and challenging, but those year periods where everything gets tipped upside down is really where I take leaps of faith and make really big strides in my career. 

Trac Bannon: 

And that’s a wrap for today’s episode of Real Technologists. I want to thank my guest, Tracy Edwards for sharing her story. Your insights and experiences are truly inspiring. I’m grateful for the opportunity to share them with the audience. This podcast is a Sourced Network production and updates are available weekly on your favorite audio streaming platform. Just search for real technologists and consider subscribing. Special thanks to our executive producer, Mark Miller, for making this show possible. Our editor and sound engineer, Pokie Huang has done an amazing job bringing this story to life. Thank you both. The music for today’s episode was provided by Blue Dot Sessions, and we use Descript for spoken text editing and audacity for the soundscaping. The show distribution platform is provided by CaptivateFM making it easy for our listeners to find and enjoy the show. 

That’s all for today, folks. This is Trac Bannon. Don’t forget to tune in next week for another intriguing episode of Real Technologists and something new to noodle on.