22 Jan Tech Forward: The Technologist
Robin Ducot, SurveyMonkey’s CTO, on not thinking twice about being the only woman in the room
By Pat Olson
Running the engineering division of a technology company requires the ability to define a product vision and the expertise to lead a team. Robin Ducot, chief technology officer of SurveyMonkey, excels in these skills. Working closely with her company’s product, design, and data teams, she’s recognized for handling these responsibilities—and more—with savvy, passion, and empathy.
Prior to this role, Ducot served as senior vice president of product engineering at DocuSign and, before that, as vice president of engineering at Eventbrite. In 2017, she joined SurveyMonkey, a company that designs online surveys and forms and measures the resulting data to deliver market insights.
In 2018, Ducot was named one of the top 15 technical executives in companies going public by Business Insider, and in 2024, she appeared on the San Francisco Business Times’ list of the most influential women in Bay Area business. In 2023, the website Girl Geek X honored her as one of 60 female CTOs to watch.
Executive Woman: What inspired you to pursue a career in IT?
Robin Ducot: I was fortunate in that I didn’t know anything different. My grandfather was a technology leader in the San Francisco Bay Area, my dad was an engineer, and my mother ran a large research team at MIT. My high school also offered programming long before it was common, so I started programming young and had an influential female technical role model in my mother. It truly never occurred to me that women weren’t “supposed” to be engineers.
My personality also meshes well with this career. I was always comfortable not following the norm and never thought too much about being the only woman in the room. I just wanted to do the work.
EW: What was the best advice you received early in your career?
RD: A whole constellation of experiences along the way have brought me to where I am today. One early—and important!—piece of advice I can share is that as a woman in tech, remember to focus on your strengths and be empowered to hire or delegate for your weaknesses. It’s far more efficient as a leader. Men don’t particularly waste time beating themselves up over their shortcomings.
The value of being resilient is also something that has shaped my journey. You don’t have to have a street fight over every little thing, and sometimes being right isn’t enough. What you do need to do is commit to showing up even when things don’t go your way.
EW: What are some barriers you encountered along the way, and how did you overcome them?
RD: In my experience, you learn much more from failure than from success, so taking risks is imperative. You’re inevitably going to fail throughout your lifetime and in your career.
An example, using my experience, is that I am a systems thinker, and it’s sometimes difficult to linearize my thoughts in a way that is easy for others to understand. It took me years of mistakes presenting my ideas, but through experience I’ve learned to start at the beginning, provide context that’s appropriate for the audience or situation, and persuade—especially nontechnical people—the value of an idea. It took a lot of bad presentations and meetings on my part and doing post-event analysis before learning to influence people at all levels became second nature to me.
Also from my experience, the most important piece of it all is, when you fail or run into a roadblock, how you get back up or devise a plan to get past the hurdle so you can continue a forward journey.
EW: How is SurveyMonkey helping women advance in STEM careers within the company?
RD: We support many different employee resource groups [ERGs]. Relevant to this question is our Women’s International Network ERG. This group’s mission is to empower and support anyone who experiences the challenges of being a woman at work or of being “read” as a woman at work.
The group is focused on promoting gender diversity, providing resources for career development, and creating a supportive network that encourages mentorship, leadership, and personal growth. Through advocacy, education, and collaboration, we aim to break down barriers and drive positive change within SurveyMonkey and the broader tech community.
EW: SurveyMonkey is very focused on AI. How do you see it being applied five years from now?
RD: When I was in university, my area of focus and interest was AI, so in many ways, I’ve always been on this path. Back then, the technology was dead simple: program a chatbot to respond to existing or known questions. It’s been fascinating to see AI evolve, especially recently.
SurveyMonkey has one of the world’s biggest survey datasets. For 25 years—2024 marks our silver jubilee!—the company has been gathering data on survey structure, question content, and respondent behavior. With 84 billion-plus questions answered with SurveyMonkey, 2 million-plus daily survey responses, and 2.4 million-plus daily AI predictions, the depth and breadth of our proprietary dataset is vast.
The AI and machine learning we use in our products are specifically designed to empower our customers to get fast and accurate answers to their critical questions—taking the guesswork out of survey creation and analysis. Our SurveyMonkey Genius offering, a lineup of AI-enabled features available within the product, guides users throughout the survey creation, fielding, and analysis steps.
While I can’t definitively say how AI will be applied in five years, I do anticipate the thoughtful and ethical use of data will remain at its core. At SurveyMonkey, we know that AI is constantly evolving, and we strive to help our customers keep up and get ahead with the help of both our products and research.
EW: What advice do you give young women interested in a career in tech?
RD: One of the things I learned early on is the importance of moving around and trying everything as an engineer. The most successful technical leaders I know have a deep understanding of the whole tech stack—technologies used to develop an application, including programming languages, frameworks, databases, front-end and back-end tools, and APIs—and know how the technology intersects with the business they’re in.
In addition, rather than framing things in technical terms, frame them from the perspective of what is best for your business. As engineers, it’s easy to be isolated in a singular obsession for technology. However, the ability to translate technology objectives into business objectives helps elicit buy-in for the technology initiatives you’re working on.
Another suggestion is to prioritize relationships. As an engineering leader, I always align myself with the head of the customer support team. Ensuring that this person understands I am there to help him or her, and vice versa, fosters a mutual relationship that I’ve found beneficial over the years.
Finally—and it might sound strange!—cultivate a sense of entitlement. As a third-generation technology leader, I didn’t grow up thinking women weren’t supposed to have a voice in technology. However, I’ve noticed that women technologists often fail to advocate for themselves. Speak up! You belong in the room. EW
The Résumé
Name: Robin Ducot
Company: SurveyMonkey
Job title: Chief Technology Officer
City: San Mateo, CA
College: BS, Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts
Favorite quote: “‘If you’re going through hell, keep going.” —attributed to Winston Churchill
