GoTo accelerates product innovation and enhances its go-to-market capabilities based on customer experiences, including our first customers, our own IT teams and employees using GoTo’s product suite through the Go-Pilots program. We sat down with two of our GoGetter’s, Brittany Mandeville and Danilo Sousa, to trace their career journeys and hear how they inspired their teammates to drive our Go-Pilots project forward through deep collaboration and their unique skill sets.
From United Airlines to GoTo
Since college, Senior Change Manager at GoTo, Brittany Mandeville, has been interested in psychology and business – specifically the organizational human resources world. After seven years in an analyst position, Brittany took on roles aligned with her passion for people and organizational behavior. “Understanding how United Airlines handles changes from an HR perspective versus a Corporate Communications perspective was an awesome learning experience.”
Moving to an IT role at GoTo allowed Brittany to focus on IT changes from a people perspective. “All these perspectives were very different but crucial to my learning.” Annie Brown, GoTo’s head of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, has believed in Brittany’s career path and helped set Brittany up with a minority women in leadership mentoring program. “I had great opportunities to advance my skillset in contributing to my career mobility.”
From Customer Care to Digital Workplace
Danilo Sousa, a senior IT project manager at GoTo, has a secret power when adapting to new teams at GoTo. He strives to mimic the behavior of the people around him. During Danilo’s days on the Customer Onboarding team at GoTo, he took note of his colleague Ricardo Oliveira’s ability to speak to customers with empathy and another colleague, Kaue Nunes’s ability to communicate their technical knowledge to customers in an accessible way. “We’re a group of excellent and smart people, so you always have something to learn at GoTo.”
When Danilo was ready for the next step in his career, he leaned on his open relationship with his manager to express interest in transitioning to the Digital Workplace Project Management Office. In this new role, Danilo continues to look up to people, from his colleague Adrian Pantelics who has a knack for asking the right questions in a meeting, to Brittany Mandeville, who can gather information and communicate it concisely.
Blending knowledge to build confidence
As the leader of the Go-Pilots program, Brittany works to create relationships across the organization and demonstrate the value of GoTo’s internal teams using its own products, such as GoTo Resolve. This allows the Sales, Product, Marketing, and Care teams to better position GoTo’s products in the marketplace through having a direct source of innovation, testing, and feedback. The Go-Pilots program has been an eye-opener for Brittany to get a deeper understanding of the intricacies that happen in the background at GoTo to keep the company up and running. As a result, it’s allowed Brittany to build confidence in giving her opinion in a room with people who have more knowledge on a topic than she does. “It’s more than just giving an opinion; it’s being able to have influence when you’re coming from my perspective, which is more people-focused than technical-focused.” As Brittany learns more technical language, she can ask more profound questions and problem-solve. “When we run into an issue, I’ve impressed myself with my confidence in sharing my ideas as good workarounds or solutions.”
Putting studies into practice
Although Danilo’s roles have changed, GoTo has taught him how to apply his skills and collaborate across the organization. “Managing customer expectations was my key skill in Customer Care, and in my work on the Go-Pilots program, I help technical people who may not be used to project management.” It was key for Danilo and the team to convey how the Go-Pilots program accelerates feedback and improves products. “I make sure that information about the project is available to all stakeholders and that people understand how they are helping.” Danilo balances expectations across teams through empathy. “As a project manager, you need to study different techniques, and most agile frameworks and techniques are based on software development workflows.” By applying his studies of a myriad of project management frameworks through the Go-Pilots program, Danilo learned to speak the same language as GoTo’s product teams. “I tried to translate the IT requirements so that someone not in a technical role could understand.”
While the Go-Pilots program provides GoGetters valuable insights into the needs of GoTo’s users, it also allows Brittany and Danilo to flex new skills. Gaining valuable market insights takes a village, and Brittany and Danilo represent just two of the faces behind this mighty effort.
At GoTo, we use the words bold and brilliant to describe our people and work.
