Diva Tech Talk interviewed Jeanine Heck, Vice President, Artificial Intelligence and Discovery Products at Comcast, the world’s second largest broadcasting and cable television company, by revenue; the largest pay television, cable TV and home internet service provider in the U.S.; and the third largest home telephone supplier in the U.S.
As a child, Jeanine sometimes felt like “the lone soldier” as a female “mathlete,” consistently drawn to numbers and science. “I loved things that had to do with STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math). I wasn’t made for the medical field, because I don’t like blood. Engineering popped up as she chose a college major. “I didn’t like chemistry very much,” she said. So, Jeanine ruled out environmental engineering, among other options but discovered “I loved programming.” As an undergraduate, she felt fortunate to graduate with her BSE in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, which also housed The Wharton School. Consequently, “I got a really good, well-rounded perspective on both tech and business.”
Post-graduation, Jeanine spent six years at Gemini Systems (now EssexTec) working on Wall Street, serving the New York Stock Exchange, first as a programmer. Then, “my main responsibilities, over time, shifted. I raised my hand pretty often to become one of the people who decided what we were building: a business analyst role.” One of her watershed projects was building a Java-based visual tool/system that helped monitor and regulate the behavior of individual NYSE traders, a revolutionary concept at that time. She learned and grew quite a bit. “I liked all the technical challenges. We implemented agile methodology, including a sub-category called extreme programming, which was ahead of its time. But I didn’t have a passion for the financial markets,” Jeanine admitted.
With a “career switcher mindset,” Jeanine entered Columbia University to get her MBA and then “discovered that I missed technology.” Fortunately, during the pursuit of her master’s, she landed two internships. One was at Google where Jeanine worked on advertising sales; and the second was at NBC, where she worked marketing an online Web video player (called NBBC) an innovation pre-Hulu. “In both jobs, I was not on the software team, but craving to be.” The good news was that “I found an industry that I loved: the digital media industry. I wanted to be somewhere where I could jump on to this rocket ship called streaming video. I knew it was going to be exciting.”
As she graduated, Jeanine honed in on getting a role at Comcast. “It was more of a humble culture, which stood out in the media industry” and a great opportunity to return to her Philadelphia roots. Her first role was as a product manager for a Comcast website called TV Planner, “the first time we brought together all of our content in one place.” With 1.5 million unique users, this was a large undertaking that Jeanine thought “was a dream! When you have that kind of scale, you see amazing trends and patterns and data insights.” Jeanine became impassioned about data discovery and “I have built a career, on that, since then” staying consistently “focused on content discovery and using algorithms to help people” --- a theme of her ensuing work. Her role grew as the company did. “The scale of my portfolio got bigger. I began to manage more products and services and built a team.” One of the key products that Jeanine managed is Comcast’s Voice Remote, which represents “more than 9 billion voice commands in 2019, alone and tens of millions of units in customers’ homes.” According to Jeanine. “It is the most loved” of Comcast products, today and “it has become synonymous with our brand.”
Shifting into team leadership, of over 70 employees, has been “a little bit bittersweet for me,” Jeanine admitted. There are circumstances in which she still itches to “dive in, control everything and do it myself.” However, she has enjoyed the experience of mentoring team members, sharing experience, leading and learning from “the brilliant people” on her teams, as well as from Comcast University, which has offered many opportunities for internal education in leadership. She has placed great emphasis on the diversity of her team, from a gender, color/ethnic, age, sexual orientation perspective, as well as creating an atmosphere of collaborative inclusivity in which team members can flourish. “You have to engineer that into your team” to achieve levels of innovation, according to Jeanine.
Jeanine’s immediate Comcast goals include “developing products that people become attached to” like the successful Voice Remote. She is on a quest to find “the next big product that will take us to the next level of love from our customers.” She has tasked her team to discover “brilliant products” to bring to market. “Talking to customers” in that quest is vital, to “marry the results of data” to insight, and couple it with “engineering intuition.” The biggest impact that Jeanine sees in AI developments has been in productivity, and quality. “It (AI) helps you do things more efficiently, which makes room for us to carve out time for the more important things in life.”
Jeanine assesses her success-oriented characteristics as:
Optimism: “I always think I can make the best of any situation.”
Collaborative inclination: “Relationships are the most important thing in your career. When you prioritize relationships, and build trust with people, you can do big things.” Jeanine’s philosophy is that “life is all about connections with other people. You have to make time for those connections.”
Urgency married to agility: “One of my philosophies is ‘no day but today.’ If we have an idea, I am constantly thinking about how we get that out to customers, sooner rather than later.”
Jeanine has spent introspection time thinking about the evolution of women in business. “I have a really strong self-critic. In retrospect, I would be kinder to myself.” Personally, she has inculcated wisdom from Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, and has worked on improving her self-confidence, and being taken seriously as an executive. “I had to flex those muscles,” she said. She has also stayed open to feedback in her personal evolution, going so far as to assess her vocal presence and presentation skills to achieve “external gravitas” as a leader. In her quest for personal happiness, Jeanine has also become a devotee of author/speaker Brene Brown. “I think she has the right idea. She talks about being a wholehearted person: being comfortable, taking risks and being vulnerable. I think you must take chances, on a regular basis, to be happy. And stay close to the people, important to you.” To achieve family balance, she works on putting down her phone, and assiduously listening to her kids. “I try to make time to listen to them, to connect with them, no matter what we are doing.”
In her community life, Jeanine works with two different high schools to encourage young people to consider technology as part of their life paths. “One is the high schools I went to,” she said. “It is an inner-city high school, (St. Hubert’s). The girls don’t always have the vision of how big the opportunity is, in front of them.” Jeanine visits to speak with many of them and present a role model. She also works with Lower Merion High School (“they have an amazing, cutting edge computer science program”) and mentors high schoolers there, too. “The fulfilling part for me is that you help to open up their minds that there is a lot to do in engineering, and they may not have thought about it, that way, before. You show them: you can do this, too, and it opens their minds to the possibilities.”
Jeanine’s pragmatic advice to women aspiring to lead is three-fold.
Have a plan. “Ensure that you are ‘in the driver’s seat.’ Particularly in the beginning of your career, you need to realize that it is up to you what you do. Think about what you would like and a path to get there.”
Don’t be shy about stating what you want/need. “Ask for things. Speak up for the things you want, and someone will help you find it.”
Cultivate personal resilience. “You can always make lemonade. There’s always a way out of a negative situation. “
Jeanine Heck can be reached on Twitter at @j9heck.
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