Paige Ponzeka

I joined Yext as an engineer back in 2013. I went to a Yext party on a rooftop and it was just a group of fun, welcoming people. I met the CEO Howard (back when he had long hair) and he sold me. I interviewed the next week. I've been able to stay at Yext for so long because I've been given the freedom to take on new roles and try out new things. Even when I was on the engineering team, I shifted to different groups to work on different parts of the product. Now on the marketing team, I'm using and exploring our own product to build our very own marketing website! I've enjoyed using our product like a customer would and pushing it to its limits. The best part is we provide valuable feedback to our product team to help drive the direction of our product!

I adopted a rescue dog named Nova during the pandemic and she's turned into my hiking/adventure buddy. I love the outdoors and hiking. In 2020, I hiked 56 trails - that's over 1 trail a week.

Every morning, I wake up early to take my dog for a very long walk or hike. At the start of the workweek, I go through our task list to see if anything urgent came up, like a bug on our website or in our Search experience. I add urgent things to my to-do list for the day and anything less pressing I'll add to our backlog. Then I have a morning standup with some of the team consultants to wrap up finished projects or discuss upcoming ones. I spend my afternoons working on Search configurations, doing Hitchhikers training, or attending kickoff meetings.

It's hard to pick just one! One of my favorite early projects was implementing something we called "Template Builder" which I took on to make our marketing team more self-sufficient. Since the marketing web team has always been rather lean, it's hard to implement brand new pages at the speed the team needs, so I broke our website into reusable modules on Wordpress. That way even non-technical users could get a web page up in minutes instead of waiting days and sometimes even weeks for a developer to become available.

It's important to advocate for yourself, your priorities, and your reports!

Get to know as many people as you can! One of the things I have learned about being at Yext for so long is that there is a huge benefit to being able to reach out to people with questions or comments and already have a personal relationship. It's something I've always struggled with as an introvert but a big part of developing a community.