Jenny Wood

Penguin Random House

Author of "Wild Courage: Go After What You Want and Get It", a business non-fiction book about how to chase what you want. And achieve it!

Author

Harvard Business Review

Write leadership, teamwork, and career pieces for Harvard Business Review.

Writer

Google

Lead large team across North and South America that helps F500 companies implement, optimize, and troubleshoot media campaigns.

Director, Americas Media Operations, Technical Service Managers

Founder of one of Google's largest and fastest-growing Career Development initiative in 25 years. We have 97% positive feedback with tens of thousands of people participating in the program. 

Our goal is to help Googlers increase their influence and impact in their current role and/or land their next role at Google. Be bold, be curious, be you.

Founder, Google's Own Your Career Program

Lead team of 25 full-time Googlers across 14 global cities to provide outstanding customer service on mobile apps troubleshooting issues. Influence stakeholders to make products easier to sell and improve sales teams' ability to sell them. Achieve metrics like turnaround time and customer satisfaction scores. Build awesome team culture and mentor women and other underrepresented groups. Also accountable for 18 offshore vendors.

Head of Global Customer Care, Mobile Apps

Head of Regional Customer Care, US West Coast

Lead 8-person business analyst team for Telecom industry in Google's sales & marketing organization. Advise senior executives at Fortune 500 companies on consumer and market data, insights, marketing strategy, and digital measurement & attribution. Responsibilities across brand and performance marketing, including omni-channel impact, customer segmentation, and brand-building.

Focus on D&I initiatives including equity, promotion diversity, and community inclusion.

Head of Analytics & Insights, Telecom Industry

Strategy and Operations Manager

Senior Analytical Lead

Account Strategist

Lambda Educational Technologies

Quality Assurance Manager

Harvard Business School

Research Associate

Author. Speaker. Founder, Google’s Own Your Career Program. Google Executive, America's Media Operations.

Order my NYT bestselling book: itsjennywood.com/book. WILD COURAGE: Go After What You Want and Get It will help you get seen, get heard, and get ahead.

Join 70K+ others who read my newsletter at itsjennywood.com/newsletter. It’s full of free tips to get what you really want in life.

18 years ago, I was an anxious, entry-level employee at Google. 

Then I chased my future-husband off the subway and gave him my number.

That moment made me realize the life I want won’t just happen to me. 

I have to chase it. And so do you! 

That mentality led me to become an executive at Google running a large operations team that helps drive tens of billions in revenue a year. I also founded Own Your Career, a large career development initiative at Google with tens of thousands of people benefitting.

After climbing the ranks from entry-level to executive, I realize something. What if the traits you need to get ahead are the exact opposite of what you’ve been told? To be successful you need to be:

Weird
Selfish
Shameless
Obsessed
Nosy
Manipulative
Brutal
Reckless
Bossy

And that takes courage. Wild amounts of it.

So I wrote a book! It’s called, WILD COURAGE: Go After What You Want and Get It, and it became an instant New York Times bestseller. 😮

I’m so excited for you to order it at itsjennywood.com/book and be more bold, persuasive, and successful. 

Follow me for advice to achieve your goals and get what you want. Unapologetically. 

The opinions I state on LinkedIn and other public forums are my own, not those of any past or present company.

Netflix

Senior Technical Writer

Working closely with product teams, I independently plan, architect, and author documentation sets of various sizes for technically complex products and features. For example, I was responsible for the complete documentation set for a new version of committed use discounts (CUD), helping drive millions in annual recurring revenue (ARR).

Focus on empathizing with the customer through all stages of the development and writing process, identifying what readers need and providing it when they need it. This is done while embracing the technical aspects of documenting software: digging into the code, interviewing subject matter experts, writing code snippets, and gaining the knowledge to explain it to customers.

Proactively observe how things work, learning ways to improve internal processes and the readers experience, and planning and implementing those changes collaboratively with stakeholders.

Active advocate and participant in writing and internal communities. I have hosted and mentored interns, successfully shepherded technical writer candidates through the hiring process to employment offers, and am a recognized strong contributor to several employee resource (ERG) and working groups.

Awards:
  * Leads with Respect award - Nominated & approved by committee of peers for community leadership.
  * 50+ peer bonuses & official kudos - Given by peers for a variety of reasons, including outstanding performance and community service.

Technologies used: Markdown, Python, Bash, GoogleSQL, Visual Studio Code, Google Issue Tracker, proprietary code review tool, proprietary version & source control systems

Technical Writer

I worked closely with the software (SWE/SDE) and operations (SRE) engineers to develop troubleshooting procedures and investigative guidelines to mitigate live-site issues on the HBO GO and HBO NOW video streaming services. This required a high-level understanding of how the service works and the ability to describe complicated processes in a succinct, clear manner. 

Designed and implemented a distributed build and publishing system to pull together markdown documents from multiple GitHub repositories and convert them into static HTML pages to be published to a single site. This put the documents next to the code, making it easier for engineers to participate in writing efforts. 

Technologies used: Markdown, Git, GitHub, Bash, Python, AWS, Ubuntu, Jenkins, Splunk, Jira, YouTrack

Microsoft

Owned testing the infrastructure and platform components for Excel Online, dealing with the complexities of running an online service available worldwide. This included administration, configuration, deployment, upgrade, geo-distribution, authentication, permissions, and anything pertaining to the service's infrastructure.

Worked closely with partner teams to document and implement the processes for Excel engineers to handle on-call escalations 24 hours a day. This included initial triage of alerts, investigation techniques, mitigation procedures, and escalation processes.

I worked with the following Excel products:
 - Excel Online via OneDrive (formerly known as SkyDrive) 
 - Excel Services in Office Web Apps (WAC) Server with Office 2013
 - Excel Services in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) with Office 2010

Technologies used: C#, PowerShell, SQL, T-SQL, Splunk, Visual Studio, Source Depot (proprietary version & source control), Product Studio (proprietary bug tracking)

Software Development Engineer in Test [SDET I & II] / Software Engineer II, Excel

Designed and developed a web application to report security vulnerabilities to internal partners. Using AGILE methodology, we continuously iterated on the design and development, frequently releasing improvements based on user feedback and triaged bugs. This automated the process of notifying service owners of security vulnerabilities, shortening the time to mitigate and improving MSN/Windows Live online security.

In order to move from a systems engineer to an SDE (prove I could do the work), I took on an extra project to design, develop, test, and support a database driven web application used for internal reporting and points-of-contact. Implementing the web-based tool allowed the program management team to communicate more efficiently with internal partners.

Technologies used: C#, ASP.NET, SQL, T-SQL, Visual Studio, HTML, CSS, XML, XLS, OOP, Source Depot (proprietary version & source control), Product Studio (proprietary bug tracking)

Software Development Engineer [SDE I], Windows Live Security

Supported the security team's servers spread across many data center environments. I triaged and resolved problems in the area of operating system, IIS, SQL, DNS, Active Directory, among others. Once discovered, I automated incident resolutions with CMD batch and VB scripts. Increased the efficiency of the team by automating multiple manual tasks with CMD, VB and T-SQL scripts, improving time-to-completion.

Initiated additional development projects in order to help the team, as well as learn C# and VB.NET web applications that used SQL backends for data storage/retrieval.

Systems Engineer, Windows Live Security

Lead Systems Administrator

Systems Administrator

Fohn, Spink & Company, CPA's

This is where I cut my teeth on technology; designing, setting up and supporting a small network environment. After supporting the firm of 20 people on Novell Netware 3.0 for a year, I migrated them to Windows NT 4.0 on a custom spec'd server with RAID 5 for data redundancy, offsite tape backup storage plan, and Windows clients.

System Administrator

Staff accountant focused on Federal Income Taxes, Payroll accounting, and bookkeeping for small businesses.

Staff Accountant

Hewlett-Packard

I was part of an operations team that provided 24-hour monitoring and troubleshooting support for the data center servers running Microsoft and MSN internet sites. We were the initial triage point for all server issues, including, but not limited to NT4.0, Windows 2000 Server, IIS, WINS, DNS, SQL, and network connectivity. I consistently resolved live-site problems efficiently and effectively, proving my adaptability in the ever-changing data center environment.

Within a few months, I was promoted to shift lead; responsible for senior-level troubleshooting, managing the system engineers on duty, high-priority incidents, and relationships with partner teams. 

Due to my success as a shift lead, I was asked to manage the 10-person SQL team during the last six months of my tenure. We provided tier three level monitoring and support for 425+ servers running SQL Server 6.5, 7.0 and 2000 in multiple domain environments. 

Microsoft vendor through Compaq (now HP).

Systems Engineer

I started in technology while I was a staff accountant for a small firm, being the one in the office who could "get things to work"​ and translate tech-babble to my fellow accountants.​ In short order, I became the systems administrator for the firm and discovered that my passion for technology translated into a career I could really enjoy. Time has proven that to be a wise decision.

During my years in the software industry I've encountered many different opportunities; each one provided unique experiences and helped me learn a diverse skillset. While I relish the technological aspects of my work—there's nothing quite like your first "Hello World" site/app/program in any given language—I find the most joy when helping people succeed. 

Writing allows me to help others on a broad scale.

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Note, I typically only accept connection requests from people I know in real life (IRL). If we haven't met IRL, please include a message saying a little about why you'd like to connect. If you don't, it's likely that I'll ignore or decline it. An observation: After having this request listed for several years, it's interesting how many people don't follow it. 

Final note: I used the em dash long before Chat GPT or LLMs were a thing. ;-)

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Jenny Wood

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