Amplifying Voices From The Inside Out
BY HOLLY MIRAU

It may look like Emi Lyman ’02 took an unexpected turn when she became a software engineer, but by the time she landed that role, her experiences and interests naturally coalesced.

Emi joined Marshall in 7th grade, after attending Congdon and Nettleton Magnet schools, and it was not the easiest adjustment. “I have to say it felt like my childhood hit a brick wall,” Emi remembered. “I wasn’t used to that level of academic rigor and it took me 7th and 8th grades to get used to that level of homework workload. I think that was both a positive and negative in my life. I am still incredibly good at time management and I’m very efficient at getting things done. However, I think that there wasn’t a ton of space for reflection about who I was becoming as a person while I was at Marshall.”

Post-high school, Emi studied Spanish and art for her undergraduate degree and went on to Cranbrook Academy of Art for a Master of Fine Art degree. Her first big job following grad school was installing art at the Walker Art Center. “I got to touch and move and install all the big fancy artworks like Chuck Close’s self portrait and Yves Clein’s giant blue rectangles. I loved that job. It was always different and challenging and I learned contemporary art history in a very different and deep way,” she said. “But I saw it perhaps wasn’t a career that I wanted to be in for 40 years, so I went to night school for computer programming.”

Emi discovered it was instantly easier to get hired with her Associate of Applied Science degree in Interactive Media. Starting out, she worked as a consultant, going from company to company and learning about front-end web development. In 2016, she joined Target full time and now works as the Lead Software Engineer on the Enterprise User Interface team, which happens to be a job and team that she had a significant part in creating. It did not take long before Emi began to make her mark on Target’s internal system.

“Most companies I had worked for prior to Target had their own in-housebuilt User Interface (UI) systems. These are also known as UI frameworks or Design Systems. Having a good UI system is like having a rubber stamp or clone tool. Users can copy and paste code, which results in the entire application looking more uniform and also speeds up the engineering process. The team is able to kick out more software features faster because they aren’t starting from nothing,” Emi explained. “Well, lo and behold, when I was first hired, Target didn’t have one of these UI systems. I saw this as a huge opportunity for both the company and for my career, so I made one.”

At first, she said, it was just her team using the system, but before long, with the support of a great manager, they worked to market it to other teams. “We made it into an ‘inner-source’ offering at Target, meaning that any engineer at Target could contribute code and make the system better,” Emi said. “I realized very quickly that if engineers contributed to the project, they became advocates for it. So, I continued to reach out to teams that had components that I thought would benefit engineering as a whole. We got huge amounts of contribution from all over the company, from both Minneapolis and our offshore location, Bangalore, India. I managed it and made sure we had great code and consistency. I was kind of like the librarian: Authors give you books, but you get to curate which ones you offer as well as how they are organized.”

As she curated the contributed code and managed her team, it became clear that the value of this project was greater than the sum of its parts. According to Emi, “This is where [Paul] Wellstone’s philosophy of, ‘when we all do better, we all do better’ is perfectly embodied. Because the UI system was dynamic and users saw they could contribute to it and own parts of it, it was quickly adopted by other teams. It was also an easy sell to leadership because it made teams faster. We reached out to our accessibility team and got them to audit it for screen readers, and baked in accessibility features into the components.

"MY GOAL FOR MY CAREER IS TO PULL OTHERS UP WITH ME"

We reached out to User Experience and they modified the designs of the components to be beautiful and consistent. This is where so many parts of my background come together that it feels almost uncanny: Science, art, work efficiency, and diversity are all coming together to make this UI system awesome.”

Reflecting on her experience as a woman in the tech industry, Emi has realized that representation is even more important than she thought prior to jumping into a tech role. “As girl growing up in the 80s and 90s, we were told, ‘you can do and be anything.’ When I actually got into the industry, it was apparent that that was never the truth,” she shared. “I couldn’t visualize where my career would go, because I rarely saw women in technical leadership, and I never saw queer women. It was really difficult on my mental health at times. I was often the only female engineer; I often experienced microaggressions or plain old aggression. It was apparent that I was not welcome. I got lucky and had some amazing men as mentors, and I’m stubborn, so I just kept going. My goal for my career is to pull others up with me and to do everything that I can to change the environment for the next group of people coming into tech. They must feel welcome in tech because we need them to help us solve the problems of the future.”

Even as the general population grows increasingly diverse, the tech industry remains relatively homogeneous, and that is not something Emi overlooks. “Last I looked, women in tech made up around 25% of all engineers, and Hispanic and Black engineers of any gender made up around 5% combined,” she explained. “We know that the American population is 50% women, our Black population is around 14% and our Hispanic population is around 18%. We all use tech. It is so incredibly important that the spectrum of people who are using tech are the ones making tech. Otherwise, we will miss entire demographics that deserve to be well-served by the tech we create.”

Seeking diversity and representation is no small task, but Emi sees opportunities for anybody to engage in this work. “The rad thing is, most of us who have marginalized identities also have non-marginalized identities. So, see if you can use your non-marginalized identities to make change,” she said. “For example, I’m a queer woman, but I’m also white, so I can be a person who amplifies the voices of people of color. I’m able-bodied, so I can also advocate for better accessibility. Where our non-marginalization lies, is where our power to influence change is.”