A Day in the Life of Caroline

A Day in the Life, a series started by Kensho’s Diversity and Inclusion committee, showcases Kenshins and their day-to-day experiences. Check out the Kensho Blog for more Day in the Life posts.

My day starts at 6:15 am. I’m finding it easy to be a morning person lately with these long summer days and early morning sunshine. I stay in bed for a few minutes catching up on my news feed, social media and email. A few interesting new leads came in from the website while I was sleeping, which is a great start to the day.

A few minutes later, I wake up my 12-year-old son, Nathan. Nate is not finding it easy to be a morning person today, and pulls his sheet back over his eyes when I open his blinds and cheerily greet him.

Nate showing off the 3D printed bust of himself. It actually looks like him!

We eat breakfast together at the kitchen table — oatmeal with almond butter and fresh peaches. He shows me the 3D-printed bust of himself that he made in STEM camp last week and explains how he made it using 3D modeling software. This week, he’s in a camp where they do community service projects, like charity car washes and working at a farm. He loves it. I get him dropped off at 7:15 and head to the office.

Kensho’s Tysons Corner office, known on Slack as #geo-dc, has special parking spaces for hybrid and electric vehicles, so I pull my Prius into my normal spot and head in. My role at Kensho is running the marketing efforts for one of Kensho’s commercial products, Visallo. Visallo is a link analysis tool used by the intelligence community, law enforcement, fraud investigators, cyber analysts and researchers.

First thing in the morning when the office is still quiet is a really productive time for me. I check in on our active ad campaigns, look at our web traffic trends, and follow up with some of our Visallo customers about a case study project we’re collaborating on.

At 8:30, I have a video chat with our COO, Bhavesh, my manager, who’s in Cambridge. He’s researching a new product idea and asked me to help him evaluate the opportunity from a marketing perspective. I run him through my projections and discuss the brand impact the product might have for Kensho.

The Visallo product owner and #geo-dc site lead, Jeff, and I talk nearly every day about ideas, strategy, and things we could improve. He’s a great sounding board for marketing ideas. This morning, we talk with Patrick, who runs our Business Development team, about the new pricing page we plan to add to the website. We also discuss the engineering timeline for some key features and various options for how we can present the pricing tiers.

#geo-dc’s Women of Kensho lunch

It’s already noon, and today, we have a #geo-dc Women of Kensho lunch. Our newly promoted engineering lead, Susan, is in town for the week, and we just had a new back-end engineer, Jennifer, join our team, so we thought it would be a great time to all get together. It’s a beautiful day, and we walk across the plaza to Earls. Of course we have to catch up on who’s watching Season 2 of Big Little Lies and where everyone’s going for vacation this summer (we all love Kensho’s unlimited PTO policy!), but we also discuss practical ways we might implement Danja’s idea of turning our office into a zero waste facility. Does McLean have a compost pickup service? We should buy more silverware so we wouldn’t need plastic forks when we get lunch catered on Fridays. How could we make the recycling rules clearer in the kitchen?

One of #geo-dc’s premiere Bevi aficionados, Chris, with his Kensho-branded reusable water bottle

Our office manager, Chelsea, tells us that since installing the Bevi machine in our office last month, we’ve saved more than 700 bottles! We used to go through entire recycling bins full of empty LaCroix cans on a daily basis, so we’re really excited to be getting our carbonated beverages from a more environmentally friendly source these days.

After lunch, I get a scoop of M&Ms from the extraordinarily well-stocked kitchen and read through the new reporter questions coming into my HARO (Help a Reporter Out) feed to see if there are any media questions we can answer. Today’s questions aren’t really applicable to Visallo or Kensho, but it’s still interesting to see what tech topics the reporters are covering today.

Mid-afternoon I get a surprise email from a friend who happens to be in the building and wants to grab a Starbucks to catch up. An iced green tea with a friend on a beautiful day sounds pretty good. We sit outside in the plaza and catch up about what podcasts we’re listening to, our jobs and travel plans.

The plaza outside the Tysons Corner office with restaurants, coffee, live music in the summer and lots of places to hang out.

After tying up some loose ends at the office, it’s time to pick Nate up from camp. I’m listening to a new podcast in the car this week while I commute. It’s called The Dream, and it’s about multi-level marketing schemes. Podcasts and audiobooks are my favorite way to pass the commute quickly.

Tonight is a climbing night for Nate and I. After a quick dinner, we meet friends at the gym at 7:00 and get to work. I unsuccessfully attempt a balance-y 5.12, but crush the new 5.10 route they just set yesterday. Nate is working on a hard, overhung 5.9 with a tough sloper move in the middle. In case you’re interested, here’s a description of how climbing routes are rated.

Little things that make my day great: when the route setters have put new climbs up at the gym

It’s 9:00, and I still have more Visallo work to do. I pop open my laptop and catch up on email and Slack while doing a load of laundry and reminding Nate to get to bed earlier so he’s not so tired in the morning.

I can’t complain. It was a pretty good day in the life of this Kensho mom.