Women in Tech - Q&A with Bree Benesh, Product Experience Manager

I spoke with Bree Benesh, Product Experience Manager at amazee.io, for our third Women in Tech series interview.

Outside of work, Bree is a huge bookworm and a stationery nerd. She has a favorite kind of paper and loves fountain pens. Living in Washington, D.C., Bree likes taking walks through neighborhoods with her puppy Bramble, an Australian Shepherd, and visiting a good coffee shop. She adores music, mostly rock and alternative, and has had an on-and-off hyperfixation with David Bowie. Growing up, she listened to all the 90s rock, like Nirvana, Bush, and Green Day. Her favorite band is Coheed and Cambria.

Bree has been working in tech for roughly 13 years. Her background is primarily in development and PHP applications, namely Drupal. She also has extensive experience in leadership.

💬 How do you feel about being a female employee at amazee.io? / Do you feel like you can thrive in an equal-opportunity work environment?

amazee.io has the most equitable culture I’ve experienced in tech. Our core values here are Trust, Collaboration, and Transparency, and I see those values lived every day in how our company operates, from bottom to top. amazee.io is a place where different perspectives aren’t just tolerated, they are actively valued. It took me a while to trust that these values were more than just words, but now I know from lived experience that I can speak up in meetings and know that my voice will be taken seriously. 

That’s not to say we don’t face the same industry-wide challenges. Specifically, if we are talking about women in tech, I think tech still has issues with gender imbalance that need to be solved. If I look around, I still see developer and engineering teams remaining predominantly male, and I see that leadership is often predominantly male. I see women frequently asked to do the invisible work of carrying a lot of emotional labor to support their teams and teammates. These patterns also exist at amazee.io, despite our inclusive culture, which just goes to show how powerful these systemic forces are throughout the industry and how deeply entrenched these structural inequities remain.

I think we're making real progress, but I'm also realistic that creating true equity is ongoing work. We need to keep paying attention to how gender intersects with other aspects of identity - race, disability status, age, economic background - all those layers matter when we talk about creating truly inclusive spaces.

💬 How and why did you decide to study in the tech industry?

I first dabbled in tech when I was a teenager. I taught myself to build websites using a book from the library. I would share them with my friends and use them to keep in touch. I wanted to learn more, but I didn’t know how to take it much farther on my own. The adults in my life told me that I should pursue graphic design if I liked websites; that didn't feel like the right fit to me, but I didn’t know what the right fit was. I didn’t know that “programming” was what I was looking for and that computer science was the path I should take to pursue it. I felt like I was hitting a dead end.

I ended up going down more of an arts and humanities route. In college, I majored in art history and minored in museum studies, which I genuinely loved. However, I wish I’d been exposed to computer science as a teenager, as I think I would have continued studying it and entered the tech industry much sooner.

After college, I found my way back to tech unexpectedly. I was working in an art museum in DC, and interestingly, my role was becoming more and more technology-focused: I was responsible for maintaining an online database of women artists, an internal wiki, and ultimately for updating and maintaining the museum’s public-facing website. This completely rekindled my childhood interest, and luckily, this time, I had a better idea of how to continue down this path. I decided to go back to school and learn about web application development. Fortunately, web development was becoming more accessible, and I found and enrolled in a great program through Boston University.

The program was challenging, especially since I was still working full-time and battling a lot of self-doubt. There were many times in the beginning when I wanted to quit or thought I wasn’t good enough. Luckily, at around that time, I came across an article about how boys and girls are cultured differently with regard to talent and failure: girls, it said, are taught that they have fixed talents and should, therefore, stick to what they are already good at; whereas boys are taught that the way you become good at something is through repeated effort. This resulted in boys being more perseverant when working through difficulties. Whenever I felt like I sucked at something, I’d think about that article and decide to stick it out a little longer. It was a big learning experience for me and helped me internalize that struggling is not failure—it’s a sign of growth. 

After a few months in the program, things started to get easier, and I started to perform really well. Coming back to tech felt like coming full circle, like rediscovering a part of myself I’d somehow lost touch with along the way. It was fun! Like solving a puzzle and also building something cool at the same time. I felt so engaged – I was hooked. 

💬 How would you best explain your job to others?

Until recently, I was a Solutions Architect - basically a technical problem-solution matchmaker. I'd talk with customers about their pain points, technical requirements, and what they were trying to achieve, then match them up with our solutions and help craft a package that worked for them. I'd also help set up sandboxes for them to test our platform or help them get their applications up and running on our platform while teaching them how to use our systems. It’s a great blend of analytical problem-solving and creative thinking that I find super engaging.

I'm now transitioning into a dual role as a Product Experience Manager while keeping some of my Solutions Architect responsibilities. This lets me use my firsthand customer insights to spot friction points in the user journey and help make improvements to the overall experience. As Product Experience Manager, it's my job to empathize with our users, to stand in their shoes, and to understand where there is friction in our platform, as well as how we can better serve and empower them. It's something I'm excited and passionate about, and I hope to make some seriously positive impacts in this sphere.

💬 What does a typical workday look like for you?

In terms of the actual work I do, Solutions Architecture involves a lot of customer-facing work: meetings to discuss pain points, working with the team to propose technical solutions, putting together pricing calculations, and collaborating with the Sales team to help wrap everything up. I also set up demos and sandboxes and help onboard customers and their applications. 

For my new role in Product, I am digging into our onboarding process and exploring what works and what needs improvement, both within our teams and in terms of the customer experience. This involves conducting lots of interviews, analyzing them for common themes, identifying difficulties, inefficiencies, or gaps in process or between teams, mapping out journeys, and more. I’ve really only started scratching the surface here, so I know there’s a lot more to come. 

I'm still figuring out how to best manage this dual role. It can be hard to split myself between two different roles and two different teams. I've developed an organizational system that helps to keep me on track. I use an app that helps structure my day, and my tasks and that integrates with our other tools. I'm also a big analog person, so I have a physical planner where I do weekly planning and write down everything because, somehow, writing puts things in my brain differently than typing does. I'll write down my top priorities for both Product and Sales work to keep myself focused.

The most important part of my day is probably the regular check-ins with colleagues. We have daily standups for Sales that help keep me aligned, and I touch base with Lauren, our Product Lead, pretty frequently. These touchpoints are crucial because it's so easy to get cocooned in your own little world when working remotely, and you can start missing the forest for the trees without those connections.

I've learned to build in little breaks throughout my day - taking my dog out, having a proper lunch break - because otherwise, I'll just work straight through. I also have a strict finishing time because I'm the kind of person who, if I don't force myself to have a hard stop and physically walk away from the computer, will just keep working. This is especially tempting in our global company because my evening is when colleagues in APAC come online, and they're all such great people to talk with! So I have to be disciplined about saying, "this is the cut-off time," leaving my office, and not coming back until morning.

This balance of structure with flexibility helps me be effective across my different responsibilities while protecting my well-being. I've found that sustainable performance over time is much more valuable than being perpetually available but burned out.

💬 What would you say is the best part about being a woman in the tech industry?

I really appreciate the community I've found in the tech industry. It might just be the corner of Open Source tech that I've spent most of my career in, but I've encountered a wonderful, diverse, supportive community full of people who freely contribute their time, expertise, and effort to give back both code and community support. It's not a perfect place, but it is a place that holds on to an idealism and openness that feels lost and jaded in other corners of the world.

I feel like in some regards the tech industry is leading the way in terms of progress for women and other underrepresented groups. During my career, I've witnessed a growing appreciation for attributes some women engineers bring to the table that may otherwise be lacking within a team, such as empathy, communication, and other "soft skills". These are slowly transforming from invisible and undervalued qualities to traits that are a necessity for healthy teams.

I love that the makeup of tech is incredibly diverse. On a daily basis I find myself interacting with every kind of person you could imagine, and I wouldn't want it any other way.

I am especially grateful for other women in tech, who have provided me with safe spaces, encouragement, and support when I really needed it. Sometimes, there can be an instant feeling of community with other women that is really special and, at times, essential. 

💬 What roadblocks have you encountered as a woman in tech, and how do you work through them?

The most serious roadblocks I’ve encountered are low self-esteem, self-doubt, impostor syndrome (which all feel somewhat linked to me), and a toxic work culture that led to burnout. I was vulnerable to the toxic work culture because of this impostor syndrome and self-doubt. I believed in some ways that I couldn’t do better or that I needed to go the extra mile to make sure I was worthy. I was in a toxic culture that fed off, keeping me insecure and overworked, and a boss who was vocal about not praising people too much for fear it might go to their heads and lead to them doing something like (gasp!) thinking they deserve a raise. I believed the lie inherent to the culture that I should be able to produce, produce, produce, without rest or space for learning, and that if I couldn’t, then something was wrong with me, not the system. I felt scared to advocate for myself, and when I did so, I always came away feeling like I’d done something wrong, even if I had succeeded in getting a raise. My responsible nature worked against me, as I kept trying to own things and fix things, which just kept dragging me more and more underwater. 

Sometimes, things are beyond your ability to fix, and the only thing you can do is let them go and remove yourself from the situation. 

So, how did I work through these roadblocks? By painfully removing myself from that toxic culture, seeking therapy, gaining hard-earned wisdom, practicing self-love, resting, and finding a healthy work culture where I could heal. I’m still working through some of these things, but I have come so far from where I was.

💬 Looking back, did you ever see yourself ending up in a role like this?

As a kid, I had no idea what I wanted to do because I wanted to do so many things. I wanted to be an archaeologist, an artist, a writer, and I wanted to speak a million languages and travel. I wanted to read books for a living. I wanted to work in a museum. I wanted to build things, and I wanted to help people. I don't think I had a frame of reference for this kind of work. I didn't have any examples of what this actually was, how it worked, that you could find this awesome combination of creativity and analytical problem solving, that you could have all the exhilaration of discovery and of building something real, that you could connect people across space and time, just by typing into these strange boxy contraptions that were the computers of my childhood.

Nobody in my periphery was doing this kind of work. There was no one to show me how to set up a server or build a simple computer program. I was on my own in my exploration of building websites, and I could only get as far as I could take myself on an hour of computer time a day, using a computer I shared with three siblings, with no one in my immediate sphere to help me take my learning further. So, no, I didn’t really know this was an option for me.

Outside of technology, I feel like maybe it was inevitable that I would gravitate towards leadership of some kind, being the eldest of four kids in a military household. I had a lot of responsibility as a kid; my dad was deployed often, my mom worked full time, and I ended up helping to take care of my younger siblings a lot. Through that, I became accustomed to getting people together and getting things done. Getting a team to build a website together is arguably less difficult than convincing a 4-year-old, 6-year-old, and 9-year-old that we all need to work together to clean the bathroom before mom gets home – oh, and you have to do your homework, and yes, you do have to take a bath, but if we do it all in time, we can watch [insert your cartoon of choice here]. I feel like these childhood experiences baked a certain level of natural responsibility into me. It feels like it's part of my nature now to own things, to feel responsible for them, to take initiative, and to work with others towards a common goal.

I also learned some hard lessons as an older sister about the right way to lead (by example, through empathy, through trust, through collaboration, and through teamwork) and the wrong way to lead (by yelling and otherwise trying to brute-force people to listen to you "because you're in charge").

💬 Do you think there are enough opportunities for women in the tech field?

I think there's a big difference between jobs technically being 'available' and people actually having a fair shot at them. Right now, the tech job market is brutal. I'm seeing friends caught in layoffs, companies with hiring freezes, and so many talented people struggling to find work. When things get this competitive, all those barriers that women and other underrepresented folks already face just become that much harder to overcome.

The pipeline challenges start way earlier than job applications. If we're seeing significantly fewer women graduating from computer science and engineering programs to begin with, then the competition for the limited positions available becomes even more uneven. We need to look at what's happening at each stage - from early education through to college, entry-level positions, and advancement to leadership.

The current political climate makes this especially concerning. We're seeing all these efforts to dismantle DEI programs across industries, mischaracterizing them as some kind of unfair advantage rather than what they really are, which are attempts to level playing fields that have historically been, and still are, uneven. This backsliding threatens the progress we've made toward creating more equitable access.

I think it's important to recognize that systems naturally favor the people who built them and who they were built for. This isn't about people being intentionally exclusionary - many well-meaning folks just don't see how seemingly neutral practices can perpetuate existing disparities. Like when companies rely heavily on employee referrals for hiring, they're often just replicating their current demographic patterns.

Creating real equality of opportunity takes a proactive effort to identify and address these structural barriers. It means rethinking how we recruit, the cultures we create, how we evaluate performance, and how we develop leaders—making sure none of these processes inadvertently disadvantage certain groups. It also means recognizing that different groups face different barriers and understanding how gender intersects with race, class, disability status, neurodivergence, and other aspects of identity.

💬 It’s no secret that few women are in the tech industry. What do you think—how can we and other companies in the tech vertical try to attract more women to the field?

Attracting more women and keeping them in tech really requires a comprehensive approach that tackles barriers at every career stage.

First, we have to make it possible for women not just to land jobs but to keep them throughout their careers. That means providing healthcare benefits that address women's needs, supporting them through various life transitions, and especially helping with the caregiving responsibilities that still disproportionately fall to women. Things like robust parental leave, flexible work options, and "returnship" programs for people coming back after career breaks aren't special accommodations - they should be standard practices that benefit everyone and improve retention across the board.

Second, companies need to get honest about how they're evaluating talent and promoting people. Women and other underrepresented groups often get judged by different yardsticks. We're often expected to prove ourselves over and over in ways our colleagues don't have to. 

Creating cultures where diverse leadership and communication styles are valued is super important, too. Women are often socialized to be collaborative, detail-oriented, and less self-promoting - qualities that can be huge assets in technology development but might be undervalued in environments that prioritize traditionally masculine traits like assertiveness and risk-taking. When we recognize and value different approaches to problem-solving and leadership, it makes the entire organization stronger.

Beyond attracting women to the field and supporting them to stay in the field, these things will also make our organizations stronger and our work better because diverse teams just build better stuff. When you have people with different backgrounds and experiences at the table, you catch issues earlier and find solutions that work for more people, ultimately making what we build in tech actually work better for everyone.

💬 How do you stay up-to-date with the latest trends in technology?

That's honestly hard! There's just so much happening and everything moves so fast that it can be overwhelming.

I try to keep up in a few different ways. I prioritize the technical articles and resources shared in our Slack channels - they're a great filter for what's relevant to our work. I go to conferences. I watch videos and read articles when I can.

But what I find most valuable is just talking to people. For example, I've been chatting with Lauren, our Product Lead, about this AI co-pilot she set up. Holy moly - she's my current fangirl brain-crush! She's making AI technology work for her in ways that are completely amping up her productivity. That kind of real-world example is way more compelling than any article I could read. After seeing it in action, I thought, "I'm a fool not to be doing this!" It was an immediate call to action.

These peer learning moments often kickstart my adoption of new technologies. I love surrounding myself with smart, nice people and being genuinely curious about what they're working on. I don't want to waste their time, but sometimes they're kind enough to show me some cool stuff that I can benefit from. That's probably the most fun and rewarding way to keep up - making friends with interesting people and being curious about what they do and how they do it.

💬 What tech trends or innovations are you most excited about right now, and how do you see them shaping the future?

I'm really excited about these AI systems as a sort of co-pilot to help aid us in our work. Seeing what Lauren set up helped me understand how to leverage AI as a hands-on practical tool that can enhance my daily work in significant ways.

What fascinates me is how they can function like cognitive extensions - these personalized knowledge repositories that you can query, challenge, and engage with as thinking partners. They allow us to offload some of our mental burdens, freeing up brain space for more creative and strategic thinking. The ability to curate a personal knowledge base that's instantly accessible is pretty mind-blowing.

The professional applications are obvious - these tools can help us synthesize complex information, draft communications faster, and analyze data more comprehensively. But I'm equally intrigued by the educational possibilities, like how these tools might transform learning across all age groups.

I do think it's important to maintain some healthy skepticism. There's a risk of getting stuck in information bubbles if we rely too heavily on systems that are trained on our own input. We might also see subtle shifts in human connection if person-to-person engagement is increasingly replaced by digital interactions. As with any powerful technology, questions of access and equity are crucial—who gets to benefit from these tools, and how do we ensure they don't widen existing gaps?

But I'm choosing optimism while acknowledging those concerns. I envision a future where these technologies enhance human capability rather than replace it - handling routine cognitive tasks while elevating our capacity for creativity, judgment, and empathy. The most exciting applications will probably emerge at that intersection of human and machine intelligence.

💬 Any advice for women considering a future in the tech industry?

There’s a whole world of advice we could delve into, but I’ll stick to some things that have been really helpful for me.

Find your people. One of the most important things I have had in my career is the support of trusted people. A support network is something you build over time, and each person might play a different role. Some may help you with tech - showing you clever ways to do something or helping you when you are stuck. Some may be confidantes who can be trusted to keep things to themselves when you need to vent. Others may be able to give you a reality check. This is especially helpful if you are undervaluing yourself or if you need a compassionate reality check because you are in the wrong. It’s always valuable to have a community that can validate your experience (no one knows the struggles of being a woman in tech like another woman in tech).

Find the right place. This can also take time. And sometimes, a place can be right for a while and then not fit anymore. Be discerning about where you work, who you work for, and who you work with. What’s the culture? What are the values? What are the benefits? What’s the work/life balance? Do these things align with where you are in your life and who you are as a person? If not, it might be time to search for a better fit (acknowledging that it’s rarely quick or easy to change jobs and that it seems even more daunting than usual in our current climate).

Take care of yourself. Your self is all you have, and if you don’t take care of you, you can’t take care of anyone or anything else. It’s easy to overextend, especially when you care so much about your work, your team, your cause, and your customer. Be so, so, so careful of burnout – it’s immensely difficult to recover from. Advocate for yourself. You may be lucky enough to have someone who will advocate on your behalf occasionally, but you can’t always count on it. You need to advocate for yourself – no one knows what you need, what you want, and who you are better than you do. 

💬 Looking back, what would you tell your younger self, especially regarding your career path or personal growth?

If I’m being honest, I think I’d just give her a hug. I’d tell her she’s good enough the way she is and that she should pay attention to the voices and feelings inside herself, to what she likes, what she thinks, and what she values, instead of paying so much attention to what other people want her to do, be, or say. I’d encourage her to keep creating, to keep pushing forward, and to keep chasing her interests, even when the systems around her fail to provide her with resources or recognize her potential. Sometimes, we are our best and only champions, and in order to properly champion ourselves, we have to believe that we are deserving; that we deserve to learn, to pursue, to try and fail, and then have another opportunity to try again. Honestly, I think I’d need a lot of time with my younger self to counteract the way she was cultured by family and society to be “good” in ways that did not always serve her best interest and often served the interests of others – things like being quiet, obedient, pleasant, and conflict-avoidant. 

Also, I’d help her approach choosing colleges entirely differently. She had no idea what she was doing. 

💬 Did you have any role models or mentors who guided you along the way? If so, how did they impact your career?

I’ve always wanted a mentor, but I haven’t really found one. I’ve had peers, colleagues, and allies who have helped me along the way, but no one person has truly taken me under their wing and made my success their personal interest.

In terms of role models, I’m afraid I’m a little short on those as well. If I had to name any, I’d honestly name my parents. From my dad, I learned the importance of serving a higher calling, I learned about courage, I learned about leadership – true, noble leadership where you put others first – and I learned to hold passionately to what is right and stand up for it. From my mother, I learned… honestly, the things I learned from her are innumerable. A smarter, harder working, more capable person than my mother, I do not know. She excels at everything she does, from the creative to the analytical. This is the woman who single-parented four kids while her husband was in a war zone; who at the same time put herself through college with a flawless 4.0 GPA, who somehow still had time to make Halloween costumes, put together science fair projects, make dinner, clean the house, fold all the laundry perfectly, and wrap Christmas presents with flawless precision and endless attention to detail. To me, she’s superhuman. If I could one day even approach what my parents are at their best, then I’ve succeeded as a person.

Thank you for sharing your time and thoughts with me, Bree!

Want more? Meet Deeksha Kini, Systems Support Engineer at amazee.io, and Brittany Mitchell, Platform Engineer at amazee.io, and stay tuned for further interviews in this series!