Kristin Acker: Linkedin Profile
Meet Kristin Acker. Kristin is the Vice President of Product Development at Zillow. Zillow is an extremely successful website that is about real estate and the buying, selling and rental of properties. The company is now 10 years old and Kristin joined the company as the third member of the team.
When Kristin was young she loved to make things. She loved projects that required a hot glue gun, knitting, and cooking and she loved to read books. She participated in lots of sports and activities in school. She was good at lots of subjects but particularly liked reading and languages. When she went to college she was attracted to languages and had the idea she wanted to be a translator. She went to Stanford University. She took language and world affair classes and graduated with a Political Science and Economics degree, which she jokingly says only qualified her for the job of reading the newspaper.
Her first job was in the bay area. She worked in a typical office environment that required her to dress for the office and wear heels and nylons everyday - this didn't make her happy. A friend of hers was working at Microsoft in Redmond, and suggested Kristin come work for Microsoft. When Kristin first started at Microsoft she worked in User Education, which is a job function that writes help text to explain how to use the features. She did this for a while but became more interested in designing the features and products. She moved into the role of program manager. In this role she got to make decisions about what features to build, what they should look like, and managed the coordination of the team to get it all done on time. She also learned she was good at managing people and so moved to being a lead, managing a couple of people, and then became a manager who managed many people and today she's a Vice President and responsible for about 80 people who have variety job functions.
Between Microsoft and Zillow she worked at several other tech companies. Before Zillow launched they worked extremely hard to get the website launched because being the first website available to offer the ability to price your home was super important if the company was going to be successful. When they launched their website they had over 3 million users in 2 days as the site had gone viral! She mentioned another company was working on a similar site but launched a month or so later and didn't get the attention because they were second to the public.
Today Zillow is one of most used web services in real estate, and the mobile app is used a lot. Kristin loves working in technology and the creative challenge of figuring out what to build next and how to build it on new platforms and devices. Some of her time is spent recruiting people to work at Zillow. She mentioned that there are nearly half a million jobs that are unfilled in the US in the technology sector and that these are great jobs. Tech jobs are not only available anywhere in the US, but anywhere in the world.
She really wants to encourage everyone to get involved in technology in someway at school as there are so many opportunities for employment if you have some technology knowledge. She mentioned ways to get involved at school through the computer science club (Wednesday's lunch in Mr. Allen's Room M305 - all grades and experiences and FREE LUNCH!), taking AP computer science (which doesn't require previous experience) or by going to tech camps in the area. She mentioned the Digigirlz tech camp offered at Microsoft in the summer (Link August 1-5 2016).
Kristin sees programming as a creative superpower - because you get to invent new stuff that is used by millions of people around the world, and technology can be used for fun purposes, practical purposes, and for solving meaningful problems. Creating software means you get to work on creative teams and work in collaborative ways - it’s a great career choice!
Meet Kristin Acker. Kristin is the Vice President of Product Development at Zillow. Zillow is an extremely successful website that is about real estate and the buying, selling and rental of properties. The company is now 10 years old and Kristin joined the company as the third member of the team.
When Kristin was young she loved to make things. She loved projects that required a hot glue gun, knitting, and cooking and she loved to read books. She participated in lots of sports and activities in school. She was good at lots of subjects but particularly liked reading and languages. When she went to college she was attracted to languages and had the idea she wanted to be a translator. She went to Stanford University. She took language and world affair classes and graduated with a Political Science and Economics degree, which she jokingly says only qualified her for the job of reading the newspaper.
Her first job was in the bay area. She worked in a typical office environment that required her to dress for the office and wear heels and nylons everyday - this didn't make her happy. A friend of hers was working at Microsoft in Redmond, and suggested Kristin come work for Microsoft. When Kristin first started at Microsoft she worked in User Education, which is a job function that writes help text to explain how to use the features. She did this for a while but became more interested in designing the features and products. She moved into the role of program manager. In this role she got to make decisions about what features to build, what they should look like, and managed the coordination of the team to get it all done on time. She also learned she was good at managing people and so moved to being a lead, managing a couple of people, and then became a manager who managed many people and today she's a Vice President and responsible for about 80 people who have variety job functions.
Between Microsoft and Zillow she worked at several other tech companies. Before Zillow launched they worked extremely hard to get the website launched because being the first website available to offer the ability to price your home was super important if the company was going to be successful. When they launched their website they had over 3 million users in 2 days as the site had gone viral! She mentioned another company was working on a similar site but launched a month or so later and didn't get the attention because they were second to the public.
Today Zillow is one of most used web services in real estate, and the mobile app is used a lot. Kristin loves working in technology and the creative challenge of figuring out what to build next and how to build it on new platforms and devices. Some of her time is spent recruiting people to work at Zillow. She mentioned that there are nearly half a million jobs that are unfilled in the US in the technology sector and that these are great jobs. Tech jobs are not only available anywhere in the US, but anywhere in the world.
She really wants to encourage everyone to get involved in technology in someway at school as there are so many opportunities for employment if you have some technology knowledge. She mentioned ways to get involved at school through the computer science club (Wednesday's lunch in Mr. Allen's Room M305 - all grades and experiences and FREE LUNCH!), taking AP computer science (which doesn't require previous experience) or by going to tech camps in the area. She mentioned the Digigirlz tech camp offered at Microsoft in the summer (Link August 1-5 2016).
Kristin sees programming as a creative superpower - because you get to invent new stuff that is used by millions of people around the world, and technology can be used for fun purposes, practical purposes, and for solving meaningful problems. Creating software means you get to work on creative teams and work in collaborative ways - it’s a great career choice!