People-Powered: Deirdre Leid, VP, Hardware
When one of your leaders gets recognized for their leadership, it’s a no brainer to share their story. Deirdre Leid, Hudl’s VP of Hardware, was recently named one of the top 50 women leaders of Massachusetts for 2022. When we asked her about it, she explained why the award itself was the thing to celebrate.
“You'll read a lot of statistics about girls and women dropping out of STEM fields and you know, only taking technical careers so far,” said Leid. “And you see the same thing in sports. [...] So I think having awards like this are really special and that people can see that there's opportunity in fields that they may not have considered.”
Hudl has given Leid a place to bring that passion for mentorship and gender equality, and combine it with her passions for technology and sports.
“The fact that I get to come here and I love sports and we're building new technology and I'm working with amazing people, I can't think of a better combination.”
Watch our full interview with Leid below.
Even when I came here for my first interview, I could tell that this was a really special place.
Leid wasn’t always in the sports industry. In fact, she was in audio hardware for years, working and gaining experience at different companies like Bose and Sonos. But Hudl’s work in video capture and automated cameras caught her eye—not to mention our BreakThrough Summit.
“We put our money where our mouth is, and we actually are doing things to help women be more successful and reach leadership positions in sports.”
That was when she knew she had to be a part of it.
So what does a VP of Hardware do? She spends her days with a team of engineers, product managers, quality assurance engineers and others, all working to understand the problems and challenges our customers face and develop technological solutions to those problems.
“That’s what we do all day, every day. And it’s a lot of fun.”
There’s a lot of reasons Hudl’s hardware team is different from others. There’s the opportunity to impact users in a very real way, to help athletes become better and better. And of course working on new technologies is very exciting for her and her team. Then there’s the professional development opportunities, the mentoring, the apprenticeships that Leid hasn’t seen a lot of at other companies. And on top of all that, it’s the people.
“Really love the culture here. There's such a culture of teamwork. It's a culture of really pushing the limits of innovation and teamwork and collaboration.”
Hudl’s hardware team isn’t just located at our headquarters in Lincoln. This team is made up of people all over the globe—a huge benefit according to Leid.
“And one of the things that I think is exciting about having that kind of geographical diversity on the team is that the cultures and the norms in other parts of the world are a little bit different than what you might find here in Boston or in Lincoln. And so I think it really kind of helps make a more robust team because we have those differences and perspectives.”
Need another reason to be interested in Hudl’s hardware team? How about the hardware itself? Hudl’s products all have the same purpose: to make customers’ lives easier. But that doesn’t mean they’re not varied, challenging and exciting.
“You're going to be working on some of the most technically challenging hardware design problems. The things that we're doing with our machine learning algorithms, with our video processing and capability are just so, so exciting.
“I feel like anybody who's interested in any of those spaces should just come take a look at what we're doing and start talking to some of the people that are actually doing it every day. And I think you'll be inspired.”
