We’re excited to announce that Heidi Williams has joined Murmuration as our Chief Technology Officer.
Most recently, Heidi served as the Head of Engineering for Grammarly Business at Grammarly. She previously served in various leadership roles at tEquitable, Box, and Adobe. She is also the founder of WEST Diversity and Inclusion, a learning community designed by and for women in technology with a mission to help more women enter and flourish in technical roles through mentorships and community development.
At Murmuration, she will lead and develop our technology division and guide our technology and product roadmaps. Based in San Francisco, California, she lives with her husband and two daughters and enjoys hiking, biking, soccer, skiing, gardening, reading, and word games.
We sat down with Heidi to learn more about her role and how she approaches building products for impact.
Murmuration: What excited you most about stepping into the role of CTO at Murmuration?
HW: I was really excited by Murmuration’s mission and the opportunity to have a positive impact by empowering local organizations with tools and data so they can improve their communities. Strengthening communities is so needed right now and it feels like technology can be a real force multiplier for local organizers to drive positive change in their communities.
I strongly believe in customer-centric product development, focusing deeply on putting ourselves in the shoes of local organizers to understand how we can help them achieve their goals and overcome challenges and obstacles along the way.
Murmuration: What perspectives do you hope to bring to the way we approach technology in the civic engagement space?
HW: I strongly believe in customer-centric product development, focusing deeply on putting ourselves in the shoes of local organizers to understand how we can help them achieve their goals and overcome challenges and obstacles along the way. Technology that is built based on understanding not just the context of an organization but also the community in which they work can help individual organizations have more impact with limited resources and can help a network of organizations to achieve a shared goal and ultimately amplify their collective impact. I’d like to flip the approach of making organizers understand and adapt to technology and instead build technology that understands organizers, their relationships, and their communities.
Murmuration: What should every person working to make change at the local, community level read, watch, or listen to?
HW: I’m a systems thinker and appreciate any history or context that helps me understand how or why something works the way it does. I enjoy podcasts in particular and am drawn to ones like 99% Invisible, Freakonomics, Throughline, and The Great Battlefield.