Eisar Lipkovitz will share the value of being direct as well as other insights on leadership. You’ll hear how to practice the art of direct communication, how to prepare for difficult conversations, and overcome the fear of being direct, as well as Eisar’s insights on where engineering leaders get stuck in their career and how to help them grow. Joining Eisar is Ritu Bhargava, sharing her take on being direct through experience in software engineering leadership roles, specifically building, scaling and integrating enterprise SaaS and on-premise applications.
Eisar is Executive Vice President of Engineering at Lyft. Prior to Lyft, Eisar spent 15 years at Google in various leadership roles, overseeing the tremendous growth of that business while streamlining operations and reducing product complexity. Since 2014, his team of several thousand engineers built Google’s Display, Video, and Apps Advertising products. Previously, Eisar worked on the infrastructure behind Google Search, driving many innovations during a tremendous increase in scale and a transition from web to structured data. Prior to that, he worked for four years at Akamai during the explosive growth of the Internet. Eisar began his career at Israeli Air Force after graduating from Tel Aviv University with B.Sc and MBA.
Ritu Bhargava is the Chief Product Officer of SAP Customer Experience (CX). In her role, she heads product, engineering, user experience, strategy, and operations for the entire CX portfolio and recently has been appointed to the Qualtrics Board of Directors. Before joining SAP at the end of 2021, Ritu held various technology leadership positions and most recently came from Salesforce as the Senior Vice President of Engineering for Sales Cloud, Salesforce’s flagship product suite. Having started her career as an SAP developer, Ritu went on to work at Oracle for ten years and was responsible for financial applications in various roles. With extensive experience in enterprise applications and the CX space, Ritu brings a strong market focus, both from a business and engineering perspective. Ritu holds a bachelor’s degree in Economics and Psychology from Lady Shri Ram College, Delhi University, and an M.B.A. in Finance and IT from the University of Lincolnshire, U.K. She recently joined the Qualtrics Board of Directors and co-chairs the West Coast Advisory Board for Asian University for Women. AUW is a Bangladesh-based nonprofit dedicated to women’s education and leadership development. She also enjoys supporting cricketing initiatives in America, having played on the U.S.A. Women’s Cricket team.