Tusiime Ndyajunwoha
Credit: Tusiime Ndyajunwoha
Name: Tusiime Ndyajunwoha
Current Job: Solution Owner, Hyland
Favorite restaurant in town? Vero Bistro. They have the best, most authentic Napolitano-style pizza in town!
Favorite thing about Cleveland? The natural amenities here are great, including the Metroparks and county parks. Lots of options for walking, hiking, running, bike riding, etc. Cost of living is nice as well.
Q: Since the pandemic started, how have you adjusted to quarantine? There is a secret about quarantine that some people don’t know. When you kids are older — as in old enough to feed and take care of themselves — quarantine life isn’t so bad. We are talking when your kids are teenagers here. Without quarantine, they’d likely be away at school, or out playing with friends most of the time. However, since everyone’s at home now, we get to see each other more, have dinner together, etc. So, while it’s unfortunate to see some people becoming ill or worse, there are small silver linings to the quarantine part.
To be fair, I was already working remotely at times, and I also used to travel to fair amount for work. So, those things may have made the transition a little easier.
Q: So your title at Hyland is solutions owner, can you tell us more about the role and what Hyland does? Of course! I’ll start with what Hyland does. Hyland is a software company, and we are coming up on our 30th anniversary in business. I joined 15 years ago, and it has been a great experience for me. We are a provider of Content Services, which is a term most people aren’t familiar with. Basically, we manage all of the stuff that doesn’t neatly fit into a database. So, data like provider name or balance due — those are data elements that are easily stored in a database. However, customer letters, invoices received, transcripts, council meeting notes, clinical orders — these things are typically documents, or other non-simple structures. These need to be stored and managed as well, but traditional systems don’t do a great job with them, especially when you get into compliance or periodic needs like data/document destruction or retention.
Regarding my specific role, I have been a customer-facing consultant/engineer/team lead/manager most of my career at Hyland. If you remember the IT consultants who would come to your business in the 90s, with shirts that said IBM on them, I was the Hyland equivalent of that. Always in the field with customers. I became a Solution Owner in 2019. This role is a bridge between end users of a solution, and the teams that create the solutions. A Solution Owner is like a Product Owner, except most of the work relates to creating reusable configurations of the software, rather than creating the software itself. I like the role, because it leverages the experiences I have gained working with customers, but still offers opportunities to learn new skills. I don’t code much, but recently needed to refamiliarize myself with our APIs, to finish an integration with a partner. So, there are always opportunities for learning.
Something that many people don’t realize about tech companies, is that working for one doesn’t mean you have to be a coder. Although I was classically trained as a developer, I knew even before my career started that I preferred to use technology to solve problems, rather than to create the technology itself. Even in technical roles, there are different levels of coding expectation. I mention it because some people avoid — or are intimidated by — the industry. They think everyone is a coder, which is far from the truth. So, I like to talk about the various roles within a software company, and help people understand there is a wide variety. It basically comes down to whether you prefer working with technology or with people. Once you know what your preference is (hint: you should expect a little of each), you can find the role that’s best for you. As a couple of examples, if you really enjoying coding, a developer role is typically 75% tech work, 25% people work. If you really enjoy organizing things, a Project Management role is often 80% people, 20% tech. And if you like a little of each, some consulting roles are a 50/50 blend.
Q: Many people go from job to job after a year or two, but you've spent over 10 years at Hyland and before that 10 years at Avery Dennison. What are some of the common signs that people should look for when finding a company with the great work culture that you found at both Avery Dennison and Hyland? Great question. I think I must be lazy when it comes to job searches :) Actually, it was really important for me to know I worked for my first employer for 10 years. My first employment was during the birth of mainstream Internet access, and tech professionals were changing jobs every few years. I am a loyal person at heart, and wanted something different.
To answer your actual question (what to look for in an employer), there are some things that will be specific to each person, and some things that are universal. For me, when I was changing jobs I had a young family. I knew I wanted our kids to grow up in Northeast Ohio (my employer at the time hinted at relocating to Southern California). So I wanted to work for a company headquartered in Northeast Ohio. We have lots of amenities here, like you’d find in other top-tier cities, and also a great cost-of-living, which you don’t always find in other top-tier cities.
As far as universal things to look for, I recommend the Northcoast 99. Both of my employers were on this list of the 99 best places to work in the region. I also recommend reading as much as you can about a prospective employer. Don’t simply make a decision after reading a few reviews on Glassdoor, but find objective sources of information as well. I was kinda lucky that Hyland was considering an IPO while I was job hunting. So, they had articles in the newspaper. If it weren’t for that, I might not have even known who Hyland was. What a shame that would have been.
Q: Casey McCullough introduced us. Casey is the regional manager of TEALS in Northeast Ohio which you volunteer for. Can you tell us more about their work and why you are involved in the organization? TEALS is a Microsoft-sponsored initiative to get Computer Science curriculum installed in more high schools across the country. As a TEALS volunteer, I partner with a classroom teacher, to teach a CS class during the school year. Typically, there are either two or four volunteers per teacher, depending on the format of the class.
Teachers bring the childhood education background, but may not be comfortable with the tech stuff — or maybe they used to teach a tech class, haven’t done so for a while, and want to get back into it, in a way that offers them support. The opposite is true for the volunteers. They bring the tech background, but likely have not taught high school kids before. Together, we are able to deliver CS classes for a year or two, until the teacher is comfortable delivering the class on their own.
So, why spend time doing this? For me, it fills a larger purpose. There is a lot of economic inequity in the world. Everyone knows jobs in the technology field pay well, but there still aren’t enough interested or trained workers. There are also some populations who maybe feel tech is not for them, for one reason or another. I’d like to change this perception, and TEALS is one way to do this. I was planning do this on my own, but that has proven to be quite a lofty goal!
Q: You also got an MBA in 2004 from Case Western Reserve. It's very rare to find a software developer with an MBA. What motivated you to get that degree and how has it helped your career? Honestly, I’m not sure you need an MBA to be successful in technology. When I was considering going back to school, it was primarily because I always knew I would. My father was a Math professor, and came to the United States on a scholarship to go to University (he is also a Case grad!). Education was always important in our household, and so I imagined I would return to school, when the time was right.
Some people might pursue a Masters in Computer Science, but I felt that there was already so much ongoing learning as part of my job, that a Masters in a technology field didn’t make sense. I wasn’t sure what the future would hold, so I wanted an education that would help me understand who I was, what type of leader I could be, what my weaknesses were, and stuff like that. So, I obtained an MBA, and it did all of those things. It also introduced me to Operations Research, one of my favorite disciplines at the time. Operations Research is a way to solve complex problems like flight scheduling. I think of it as an earlier version of the machine learning and AI-problem solving that is the hot topic today. So, it was great that way.
If you are thinking of furthering your education or training, my advice is to make sure you know what you want, and why you are doing it. If you can figure that out, it should make for a couple of enjoyable years.