The Impact of Inclusivity: Redefining the Tech World

On this episode of The Shift Code, PMI CEO Pierre Le Manh talks with founder of Stemeria, Julissa Mateo Abad, about her innovative approach to digital transformation. Learn how Julissa breaks cultural barriers, measures impact and takes a pragmatic approach to AI implementation. Plus, explore how she's revolutionizing tech across Latin America through inclusive, sustainable innovation.  

Transcript

Julissa Mateo Abad 

When you sit a lot of people at a table to discuss, they will tell you the happy part. That is not always true. There is always this sentiment of, “I know what I’m doing.” But we only know what we are doing once someone else shows you what you are doing.   

Pierre Le Manh 

That’s the voice of Julissa Mateo Abad. She is the founder of transformation consultancy Stemería, serving leaders across government, private industry and nonprofits. Juli is also the innovator behind Mujeres TICs. It’s a community of women in tech with over 2,000 active members across Latin America, including the Dominican Republic, Guatemala and Bolivia. 

I’m Pierre Le Manh, CEO of the Project Management Institute (PMI). Welcome to The Shift Code, a podcast dedicated to the intersection of leadership, change management and real-world impact.  

I wanted to talk with Juli because she is in the trenches with organizational leaders, and she is also making change at the grassroots level. She talks about going undercover at companies to find out what’s really required for successful transformation. And she also shares her personal journey to help women and girls across Latin America break into tech, opening up opportunities from Amazon, Google, Microsoft and more.   

So, let’s get to it. This is The Shift Code.   

MUSICAL TRANSITION  

Pierre Le Manh 

I am Pierre Le Manh, CEO of PMI, and today we’re diving into real and impactful transformation. My guest today is Julissa Mateo Abad. Juli is an amazing leader. She’s really reshaping how we think about change in organizations, but also in communities. She is the founder of a company called Stemería, it’s a consultancy that digs deep into how businesses operate, and also the founder of an organization called Mujeres TICs — it’s a women in tech movement that’s creating opportunities for women in tech across Latin America. Juli, thanks for being here.  

Julissa Mateo Abad  

Thank you for having me. I’m so happy to be here.  

Pierre Le Manh  

Juli, you’ve worked with governments, with startups, with multinationals — you’ve seen transformation from every possible angle. So, when you look at an organization, how do you figure out what actually needs to change, and maybe also as importantly, what doesn’t need to change?  

Julissa Mateo Abad 

I don’t go there and try to solve everything at once. The culture of the company matters a lot before moving forward to any transformation. I try to look at their processes. I try to understand what kind of technology they already have. And instead of trying to bring new things, I’m trying to transform the people. It’s not a transformation just for the owner, but it’s for everyone. We understand where they are, where they’re going, and how we are going to be delivering the result at the end.  

Pierre Le Manh  

Yeah, because in the end, transformation is always great in theory, but what the real test is, is execution, right?  

Julissa Mateo Abad 

Exactly.  

Pierre Le Manh  

A lot of organizations struggle to move from plans or ideas to actual results. So, what do you see as being the biggest obstacle to action? 

Julissa Mateo Abad 

Normally the challenge is working with top managers, like C-levels. So, they have this idea, “We want to implement this software.” And when we try to present the plan, they say, “No, I don’t think that will work in this organization or in this company.” And they tend to be the blockers for the transformation. They want to change, but they don’t want to change. It’s like going to the gym. You want to build up, but you don’t want to feel the pain of building your muscles, right?  

Pierre Le Manh 

Something that I found interesting is that you don’t just analyze from the outside, but you go in and you embed yourself, almost like in this show Undercover Boss.  

Julissa Mateo Abad  

Yes, that’s exactly what I do.  

Pierre Le Manh  

Yeah, so when you take this approach, what are you actually trying to accomplish here?  

Julissa Mateo Abad  

When you sit a lot of people at a table to discuss the processes, they will tell you how they imagine the processes inside the organization is working. They will tell you the happy part. That is not always true. Observing is better. If they are working in the software that we implemented, or maybe they are taking notes manually, or maybe they are just, I don’t know, moving the files personally to one person to another, there is always this sentiment of, “I know what I’m doing.” But we only know what we are doing once someone else shows you what you are doing. I do the Undercover Boss because that’s the only way I can really see for myself what they do every day.   

Pierre Le Manh 

You mentioned before that companies often operate as an archipelago, right? With multiple islands and teams holding onto tools and resources that others could benefit from, but they don’t want to share. 

Julissa Mateo Abad 

Yes. 

Pierre Le Manh 

So, why do you think silos are so hard to break? 

Julissa Mateo Abad  

I will tell you something that I notice. The managers can congratulate every team based on their results, right? So, this is why people are working just for their own department, because the only way I’m having my bonus at the end of the year, having more money in my pocket, is because of the results of my own department and my people. Accounting and sales have nothing to do with each other. They are two different islands. And that is not true. That is completely false. Every single department depends on information from another one. 

Pierre Le Manh  

And that’s about the bonus system or other ways? 

Julissa Mateo Abad 

Yes. Bonus system, recognition, because it doesn’t have to be money all the time.   

Pierre Le Manh  

So, Juli, let’s shift gears a little bit to your work outside of consulting — Mujeres TICs. You’ve created this community that’s gone beyond what most people would imagine, right? A network of over 2,000 women with connections across Latin America. Can you tell us what inspired you to start with this in the first place?  

Julissa Mateo Abad 

I was a single girl going into events, and there was a place in the Dominican Republic where they were hosting technical events for JavaScript. I used to be a developer, so I used to go to different events by myself, but I was a shy girl. I couldn’t even talk.  

One day, I raised my hand, and I said, “I’m not sure this is the right way, because I was learning this, and I think the way you have to do this is this way, this way and this way.” Everyone in the room was looking at me. They thought I was the girlfriend of one of the guys there, and I was going there to that event just because I was a companion of someone else. And at the end of that specific meeting, one of the leaders said, “Hey, why don’t you go and do a talk for the girls, so they understand how you love this field. If you love it, maybe they will love it because they will see you as a role model.”   

And I called my friends, a few colleagues from my university, two teachers that I had, and I say, “Let’s do this.” And I decided to do a small flyer called Mujeres TICs, and I decided to post this on Facebook. Microsoft saw this ad, and they said, “Why don’t you come and do the event here in our office, because we can provide food, and we can provide everything that you need because we can see that more than 100 girls signed up for attending this event.” So, we had this amazing event, and at the end, we decided to do a WhatsApp group with all the girls involved. So that was the beginning, and from that specific moment, we’ve been working, teaching, mentoring, helping girls to get into technology. Now we have Mujeres TICs Dominican Republic, Guatemala and also Bolivia, and we are now trying to get into other countries. But we have connections all over Latin America. Talking about security, artificial intelligence, project management.   

Since that moment, we’ve been helping girls to get into tech. This is something that I do for fun, because I was the only girl in one room. At least in my country, everything has changed. We can see more girls in technical fields. We can see them programming. This is one of my biggest achievements in life.  

Pierre Le Manh 

Yeah, it’s clear that you’ve had a lot of impact on these women. Some of them work for companies like Google and Amazon now.  

Julissa Mateo Abad  

Yes.  

Pierre Le Manh  

From the standpoint of these companies, what do you think is the long-term significance of building your community? What is the impact it has for these companies?   

Julissa Mateo Abad  

For companies like Google, Amazon, in my country that now has a girl working with them, [they] can see things from a different perspective. We need to be able to see different customers, because if I don’t take into consideration how every single part of society will take this software, that will be biased.   

For example, when Apple was building their health app, they never took into account the period space for health. If we are building any kind of application, we need to be able to understand, “Okay, maybe this will be for a mom with their kid in their arm, with just one hand.” So, we have to add accessibility to this application, too. It’s not that men cannot understand how we think. It’s that having different conversations can portray everything that society is in one place. 

Pierre Le Manh  

Do you think that it’s even harder to accomplish something like this in a country like Dominican Republic?   

Julissa Mateo Abad  

It’s definitely a challenge in my country. The society can be your worst enemy. One of the major enemies for a girl in tech is that you upload your resume, and if the person that is reviewing all these resumes says, “I don’t see girls in the technical department, so I will eliminate one by one all the resumes from girls because I don’t think they will like working with guys all the time.”  

Pierre Le Manh  

How do you change that perception?   

Julissa Mateo Abad  

Visibility. I’ve been working with the government for around six years now, making sure every single event they have around technology, we are involved. I also work with companies, helping them to increase diversity in their teams and helping them to welcome girls to their team and how to manage this. 

We are helping other girls and guys to understand that it’s normal to have girls inside a technical field. When you’re thinking about a flight attendant, you always think it’s just the girls. And when you are speaking about pilots, in your brains, the words like, “It’s just men.” Now, with this shift, helping the girls, if you say programmer in the DR [Dominican Republic], that can mean a girl or a boy.  

MUSICAL TRANSITION  

Pierre Le Manh 

Juli’s work to open up tech opportunities for women and girls is so inspiring. It is transformation on a societal level. So how does she measure her success? What metrics does she follow to gauge impact? We’ll talk about that after the break. Stay with us.  

I am Pierre Le Manh, and this is The Shift Code. Before the break, we heard consultant Juli Mateo talk about her undercover efforts to help organizations transform, and how she built a major network of women in tech in Latin America. Now she outlines the metrics she uses to gauge success, and we talk about the central hot-button technology of the moment: AI. Let’s get back to it.   

MUSICAL TRANSITION  

Pierre Le Manh 

So, measuring your impact is always difficult when you’re in the world of nonprofit in particular. Are there any ways for you to quantify the impact you’re having on society?  

Julissa Mateo Abad  

Measuring based on the number of girls selecting technology as a career. We have our baseline — we have just 1 out of 10 is a girl. Now, we can say we have 3 out of 10, 4 out of 10. We also measure how many girls are being trained, and how many girls are now inside every single organization. We know we have HR reaching [out] to us, we have managers reaching [out] to us, and we are taking into account how many girls we have right now in the working space. So those are the measurements that we use to understand that we are moving forward with our cause, that is helping more girls to get into tech.  

Pierre Le Manh 

Everybody’s talking about, when it comes to transformation these days, AI. You’ve already worked, of course, on integration of AI into transformation projects.  

Julissa Mateo Abad  

Yes.  

Pierre Le Manh 

There’s a lot of fear, a lot of hype. Tell me, what is your experience right now?  

Julissa Mateo Abad  

At the beginning when the calculator was invented, any mathematician will say, “This is the end of people thinking, right? Because now that people use their fingers, and put two plus two into the calculator, no one will be thinking anymore in this company.” And at the end of the day, having the calculator led us to having computers and having all this technology, and it’s just allowing us to have more time. The things that used to take, I don’t know, eight hours to be completed, now we can do it in one hour. So, it’s just a tool that will allow us to really move faster.  

What people don’t understand is, if I’m looking at what is coming — AI or any other technology — I need to transform myself. It’s not like it used to be. Like I’m a doctor. I learn once, and now I will be a doctor forever. No. I need to continuously see what is coming next and start learning new things and upgrading my skills, so I can be up to what is coming next.  

Pierre Le Manh 

And what do you think is going to be distinctively human?  

Julissa Mateo Abad 

I think [what’s] human is the creativity. We have so many things that are distracting us. Now that we have these tools, we can put our brains into developing new things. This is what we are doing the best as humans. We are capable of inventing and renovating and creating new things, but when we are just using the technology, not creating what’s coming next, we become replaceable.  

Pierre Le Manh  

Someone told me one day, “If you can explain what your job is about, then it’ll be automated.”  

Julissa Mateo Abad  

Yeah, that’s for sure. If you’re lifting boxes, if you are just, I don’t know, stamping checks, or if you’re counting money with your hands, those kinds of jobs, of course will be replaced. I think it’s best to have a machine doing this kind of job. AI cannot replace our singular experience, like the experience that a teacher can provide for their students for the real-life challenges that they will face. Even for us, as project managers, sometimes we are facing things that no one has seen ever before, so there is no way an AI will have the answer. As humans, we take decisions, risky decisions, in how we can handle different scenarios. So that’s when we say, “Hey, this is really nice to be a human. It’s really nice to be a person. It’s really nice to be able to live this specific moment.”   

Pierre Le Manh  

Thank you, Juli. Thank you for sharing your perspective, your stories today. It is very clear that transformation is way more than systems and tools. It’s about people as well, and empowering people at every level. So, thank you for what you’re doing, and thanks for joining us on this podcast.  

Julissa Mateo Abad  

Thank you so much for having me.   

MUSICAL TRANSITION 

Pierre Le Manh  

Listening to Juli, she is as pragmatic about AI as she is about supporting women in tech. What strikes me most is her emphasis on the human factor, the people. Even though she is steeped in implementing digitization, she focuses on emotional motivations. Even though the context of her community building is around tech skills, she knows that cultural impulses are her biggest challenges. Whether a transformation is organizational or societal, it is essential to build our action plans around motivating stakeholders. That’s how we turn ideas into action.   

I am Pierre Le Manh. Thanks for listening.