Rona & Iryna, The BCGDV Architects Transforming the Future of Digital

November 25, 2019

Rona Li is the Lead Venture Architect at BCG Digital Ventures and is passionate about inventing and innovating businesses for the world's most influential companies. Starting out her career in investment banking, she switched to an early-stage start up to drive their business strategy internationally, while under the age of 25.

Iryna Papalamava is the Lead Architect and Venture GM at BCG Digital Ventures with a long and successful history in digital marketing. Throughout her career, Iryna has positioned herself as the "marketing guru", leading to multiple notable accolades, including DMN 40 under 40 (2014), Mobile Women to Watch (2014), and Brand Innovators 40 under 40 West (2013).

In this feature, Rona & Iryna shares with us their passion for innovating and transforming the future of digital at BCGDV, and the steps they took to get to where they are. Read along to soak up their incredible career advice for ambitious women, such as yourself.

Early career

Rona

You began your career in investment banking. What were the most important skills you learned during the first few years of your career?

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger! Just kidding. In all seriousness though, I feel lucky to have started out in investment banking to transition from academic thinking to strategic problem solving. The caliber of everyone around me not only resulted in high standards to be met but a network of amazing colleagues to learn from in a very competitive & stressful environment. The role was a place to sharpen technical skills (financial modeling, deal structuring, company valuation, etc.) but also to build a solid professional foundation with some qualitative skills that are often downplayed, but actually only get more critical as you progress in your career - executive presence, communication & storytelling, attention to detail, pride & accountability in your work.

After banking, you went to work at an early-stage startup. What played into the decision to shift from corporate to startup, and what surprised you most about your career switch?

A few years into my banking, I realized that while I was gaining valuable experience understanding the strategic and technical components involved with deal structuring & company valuation, I was missing the experience that connects the story told in a model to the execution of that story in operational reality and, not to mention a sustainable work-life balance! After matching with the company through Impact Engine, a social impact investor & incubator, I was inspired by the founder’s dedication to build her vision from scratch. When she was able to take an Excel spreadsheet documenting her cold calls to doctors in Latin America to an actual prototype being tested in real ERs over the span of several months, I felt that it would be a rare opportunity to be a part of the company’s journey to go from prototype to product and from product to business. I knew that it would be a risk going from corporate to startup, so the type-A personality in me did my best to de-risk the financial & career development side of things through independent consulting projects (a topic for another time!), but I was definitely not prepared for the extent of how “Jane of all trades” I needed to be in order to succeed, especially since language was a barrier for a non-Spanish speaker trying to build a business in Latin America. While my role began with tasks I was familiar with - building investor presentations and financial models - I soon realized that “COO” really just meant “do what needs to get done”, whether that meant interviewing contract UX/UI designers, scraping lists of conference attendees for relevant partners/investors, structuring pilot programs, or setting up a new employee handbook. I was also not prepared for the level of discomfort I would experience as one of two young females under 25 years old driving the strategy of a business that would impact lives in a foreign country. In various settings, including partnership discussions, investor meetings, and an incubator program we participated in Mexico City, I found myself feeling way out of my depth for the audience at hand. However, accumulating incremental “little wins” day-by-day and drawing confidence from what I knew helped these curve balls become opportunities to develop two new skill-sets that have been instrumental in my role at Digital Ventures.

Iryna

How did you initially decide to pursue marketing after college, and what made you stay in that field for 10 years?

Marketing within tech companies in Silicon Valley even 10+ years ago was very quantitative and optimization-driven. It was a natural fit for somebody analytical and performance-driven, which was perfect for me. Also, I love solving difficult puzzles, so when it came to figuring out how to maximize conversions and minimize cost per acquisition, it gave me the adrenaline rush of figuring out something hard and satisfied my competitive edge.

After 10 years in marketing, you left the industry and went to Harvard Business School. Why did you decide to go back to school, and what advice do you have for those contemplating getting an MBA?

I went to HBS after a 10-year career in growth-marketing, because I wanted to round up my knowledge of how to run the whole business, not just one department. In many areas I already had practical experience of executing, but HBS allowed me to put my practical pattern recognition into intellectual frameworks and see the bigger picture. It also expanded my horizons in terms of understanding different types of businesses: coming from Silicon Valley I viewed the world through the lens of tech companies and VCs, b-school gives you an ability to navigate any business, from airlines to oil & gas.

For those contemplating getting an MBA, I would say - absolutely go for it! Going later in your career with more work experience will make the learning even richer and career acceleration even more palpable. One other amazing benefit is being able to spend time with your Professors, who are the most prominent scholars and thinkers in their areas of expertise. For example, at HBS, I had the honor of meeting Clayton Christensen, author of disruptive innovation theory and “Innovator’s Solution,” and learned a lot from him and his team during Building and Sustaining Successful Enterprise (BSSE) course.

BCGDV

Rona

Your role at BCGDV is a “Lead Venture Architect.” What does that role entail, and how are you able to use your past banking and startup experience to advise your current clients?

📍Berlin

236 Likes, 3 Comments - BCG Digital Ventures (@bcgdv) on Instagram: "📍Berlin"

In general, a Lead Venture Architect takes an entrepreneurial and strategy lens to define, launch, and scale business ventures for our corporate partners within a multidisciplinary team. The role can vary depending on the type & phase of the project - for example, in innovation phase, it may require more industry & market research, business modeling, and go-to-market strategy whereas incubations may involve operational blueprints, partnership & sales negotiations, and anything else involved in bringing innovation plans on paper to life.

Most of us have a blend of professional services and start-up work experience, and personally, I see how that is critical for our role. Previous experience in banking helped provide a logical and analytical approach to the challenging and often abstract problems we need to solve as well as a level of familiarity & comfort with partner, client, and work-stream management under pressure. Additionally, the start-up experience really helped to set the right mindset & attitude to be scrappy, creative, and humble.

You’ve been at BCGDV for nearly 3 years. How has your role changed since you joined, and what did you do to advocate for yourself for a promotion?

As I’ve progressed at BCGDV, my role has evolved to become more and more “T-shaped” where in addition to being able to go deep & excel at the Venture Architect competencies, I now also need to manage across cohorts and understand how to leverage each person’s unique strengths to deliver against our innovation or incubation goals as one team. There is also a more significant portion of business development as a part of my role to represent DV, understand our value proposition & offerings, and how to translate these elements in client proposals to help partners launch new venture work. Advocating for my promotion from Senior to Lead was a combination of having the right attitude & approach to my role as well as documenting the corresponding efforts & results. For once in my career, I stopped thinking about my job description and started thinking about how I can add value, and over time, I think leadership recognized & rewarded me for this approach. However, I still made sure to understand what was expected of me and also made a conscious decision to track & document my venture work, accomplishments, and how this proved meeting/exceeding those expectations. This definitely took a lot of time, but hey - if you don’t put in the effort to advocate for yourself, you can’t expect someone else to!

Iryna

What are the most important skills to have as a “Lead Architect & Venture GM”, and how did you go about developing them?

#Throwback to Tech Open Air Berlin earlier this summer || Our Berlin Director of Growth, Amaryllis Liampoti, spoke on "The Neuroscience Behind #Personalisation" - check out her talk here >> https://bit.ly/2Ox7vvV

71 Likes, 2 Comments - BCG Digital Ventures (@bcgdv) on Instagram: "#Throwback to Tech Open Air Berlin earlier this summer || Our Berlin Director of Growth, Amaryllis..."

The most important skill is to develop a strategic mind-set while being analytical and technical. Lean test-and-learn methodology requires sound hypotheses that also anticipate what could happen in 6 months or 6 years. Strategic mindset will allow you to create an architecture that will scale in a sustainable way. At the same time, the details of every experiment are key, both in terms of technical execution and measuring the results.

To develop these skills, I would recommend asking the “so what/why?” question before jumping into execution. Metrics help us measure speed and distance, but they don’t indicate the end of the game. So understanding the big picture and then using data thoughtfully to support/reject your initial hypothesis will help you become a strategic entrepreneur with great attention to detail.

What does your day-to-day look like at BCGDV, and how does your past marketing experience play into your current role?

#startupgrind is getting started at the bee-YOU-tee-full historic Fox Theatre in RWC. Even better BCG Digital Ventures is in the House! Stop by our table and say Howdy!

55 Likes, 0 Comments - BCG Digital Ventures (@bcgdv) on Instagram: "#startupgrind is getting started at the bee-YOU-tee-full historic Fox Theatre in RWC. Even better..."

Part of our secret sauce at BCG Digital Ventures is multi-disciplinary teams working together on launching new companies, identifying unmet customer needs or accelerating existing businesses. We have engineering, product, experience design, strategic design, growth and venture architects cohorts working together to collectively hit these targets. So on a daily basis you can find me collaborating with my teammates on project plans, discussing analysis of an experiment or co-creating a story-line for an upcoming presentation. You can also find me working with our clients to help them develop new digital skills and capabilities, which they can take back to the rest of their organizations. I also enjoy helping our partners pitch to prospective corporate partners; we have an offering that allows many companies to unlock growth, and it’s exciting to keep scaling our footprint. I helped build and now lead our growth cohort in NYC and one of my favorite things to do is to coach Growth Architects on my team and help them progress on their career paths. Together, we work on evolving our methodology and are there to support each other across projects with recommendations and expertise.

Advice

What do you wish you knew when you were first starting your career?

Rona: You should always have an opinion. It may not always be voiced or acted upon (and definitely not always right), but it’s important to exercise forming your own perspective.

Iryna: You never really stop learning. In fact, the more senior you become, the faster your speed of learning needs to be.

What’s one thing you’d advice young women looking to get into the business innovation space?

Rona: Be passionate about your purpose, but structured about your approach. While innovation projects can range in risk, you can actively calibrate this by taking a very scientific approach to testing, learning, and adjusting your thesis: what assumptions does the success of this idea depend on, what do you need to confirm these assumptions, and how does your plan change based on these outcomes? Uncertainty in innovation is okay! Just remember, knowing what you don’t know is half the battle.

Iryna: I recommend approaching every task from the perspective of an entrepreneurial CEO/founder if you want to thrive in the business innovation space. That includes thinking big and taking risks, taking responsibility for successes and failures and being laser-focused on creating value for customers. You also should work on developing teaming skills and operating in a model where you only succeed when every person on your team succeeds, while helping others around you develop and grow.

***Thanks to Rona and Iryna, Aspire to Her is partnering with BCGDV for a mini TED talk-style panel, Q&A, and break out session focused on candid career conversations! In our two-hour event, you'll hear from seven BCGDV women who will cover various topics related to your early career. Topics include: (1) Networking & Informal Interviewing, (2) Presence & Confidence in the Workplace, (3) Switching Career Paths etc.*** Get your tickets here!