Since 2017, Robin Ducot has been working as the Chief Technology Officer at Momentive. Momentive is an agile experience management company that provides cloud-based software services and solutions and is also the developer of SurveyMonkey. Ducot has led the engineering and infrastructure departments of the organization over the past five years. She collaborates with product, design, and data teams, bringing Momentive’s technical product vision to their consumers.
Previous Achievements
Ducot completed her Bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Massachusetts in Boston. Before joining Momentive, Ducot worked at DocuSign as the Senior Vice President of product engineering. Her role there was to expand the engineering team and its operations. Ducot also developed a multi-product platform with a service-oriented architecture, allowing DocuSign to integrate delivery models seamlessly. Before this role, Ducot was a Vice President of Engineering at Eventbrite.
Joining Momentive
Becoming a part of the Momentive team was a sudden career choice for Ducot. She was happy in her previous role and was not looking for a career change. However, one of her former colleagues joined Momentive and shared the job opening for the Chief Technology Officer. Ducot thought she should apply and check out the company as her former colleague praised Momentive and its culture.
Ducot recalls her thoughts about switching to Momentive: “Even though I wasn’t looking for a career change at the time, once I met the team, I was so excited by their talent and energy, the clarity of the company mission, and the exciting product vision that I decided to come on board.”
Ducot is thrilled and, more importantly, satisfied about trusting her instincts and joining Momentive. She enjoys the work environment and new challenges that allow her to learn and expand her skillset. As the Chief Technology Officer, Ducot is currently responsible for providing the technical vision and engineering delivery strategy to the engineering team. She is also on the negotiating team that handles aspects of engineering.
“It is my job to work with my team to negotiate about different engineering aspects such as building new features, technical innovation, scaling for a larger and larger customer base, and delivery process improvements. These negotiations are quite important as they align all teams and ensure that everyone is getting the best use of their time.”
Ducot believes that every team member is essential for scaling the company and improving its operations. She ensures everyone is assigned a set of goals to show their potential and productivity levels. In addition, Ducot is constantly focusing on improving the developer experience for the engineering team so that they can come up with new and exciting services and products.
The Employee-Centered Culture
Ducot shares that the culture at Momentive is employee-centered. She further says, “Momentive’s vision is to raise the bar for human experiences by amplifying individual voices. Our goal is to power and promote curiosity in our employees. We encourage people to share their creative ideas with their teams as we believe this will bring us to provide better services to our customers.”
The culture at Momentive is perfect for creative and curious people because the company trusts them to shape the future with new technological inventions. Momentive also has core values that help employees stay in touch with the company’s vision. Ducot believes those core values are an opportunity “…to stay curious, innovate for customers, make the innovations happen, trust the team, and stand for equality. We at Momentive have a culture of accountability, so it’s important for us to live by these values each day.”
Future Projects And Opportunities
Ducot shares that the company is scaling and advancing in high technology. Momentive has started several new projects focused on analytics and AI. Ducot and her team are excited about these new projects because they align with new use cases and support their new personas. She believes that these projects will prove beneficial for the company in the long term.
Ducot further shares that these two fields, analytics and AI, show good potential and traction in the tech industry. She also recommends Momentive customers and tech geeks to stay tuned with Momentive’s platform because they will continue to launch new services and products to help users create exceptional experiences.
The Hybrid Transformation And Transparency
Like other companies, Momentive has also experienced a handful of changes in its recent history due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Ducot believes their biggest challenge was the transition to a true hybrid working model. She recalls that most employees had trouble navigating the remote virtual world as they had no experience whatsoever. This expectedly created a lot of difficulties, but with support from management, the transition to a remote-first world became possible.
At Momentive, most people are still working from a remote location, but some have started to return to the office. Ducot states, “This is our first real test of a hybrid workforce. Everyone was on the same playing field working remotely, but now as some people return to the office, we are working diligently to ensure a positive and uniform experience for all employees.”
In addition to introducing the hybrid model, Ducot and her team worked on promoting strong communication between teams and employees. Ducot ensured that more information was available to everyone, no matter where they were.
She anticipated that distance could create a communication barrier, so she proactively shared ideas online or through videos with teams instead of relying on in-person interactions to disseminate information. She confirmed that such a technique has continued to allow them to better work asynchronously. In this way, they can support their employees no matter where they work.
Insight Into Rebranding Of Momentive
Ducot shared the inside experience of Momentive’s rebranding from SurveyMonkey. She mentioned that this was the biggest change for the company in its 20-year history. But by making sure that every team understood the goals of the business, they managed to have a smooth transition from SurveyMonkey to Momentive.
“We kept our sole focus on who the customers are, what problems we are solving for them, and why it matters,” said Ducot. By keeping these three main points at the forefront, Ducot and her engineering team could grow and scale the company to bring it where it is now, as Momentive.
Ducot shared her perspective, stating: “For engineers specifically, it’s the “why” behind everything we build and every change we make. Momentive made sure to provide these answers as we operated to grow and scale the company. As a result, we were able to be more creative in our roles.”
The Best Candidate For Momentive
Ducot is consistently looking to recruit new talent as she believes new perspectives are responsible for the organization’s success. She shares what characteristics she prefers to have in her team members to make them a great fit. Those characteristics include: “…someone who is self-motivated, collaborative, and has high integrity. For the engineering organization, we look for candidates who love technology, are curious about the business, care about the needs of the customers, look for innovative solutions to the most pressing problems; and enjoy getting things done while collaborating with others.”
Ducot is leading Momentive to unprecedented heights of success and working on projects that will further scale and grow the company. She feels fortunate to have joined the organization as it offers an exceptional working environment to its employees. She advises young people to learn new things and expose themselves to new experiences. Momentive is now a hybrid workforce, and Ducot works relentlessly to bridge the gap of communication through videos and online meetings. With her leadership and continued dedication to the tasks at hand, the company is bound for greater things.