By Meira Gebel    

In the summer of 2020, Elaine Zhou decided to make a career change.  Founded in 2007, nonprofit Change.org raises awareness of social, environmental, and geopolitical issues. To help the company grow, CTO Elaine Zhou is aiming to modernize the organization’s internal tools.

Inspired by racial-justice movements across the country and a momentous presidential election, she wanted to harness her tech leadership skills to make a difference. That’s when she landed the job as the chief technology officer of Change.org, one of the largest global petition websites dedicated to rallying communities around social, geopolitical, and environmental issues.

Zhou found Change.org’s user base to be vast — the nonprofit boasts over 700 million users across 196 different countries — so she wanted the company’s team and tech strategies to reflect that.

“I used to have engineers in only three countries: the US, Canada, and France. And now I have engineers in 10 different countries, in South America, Africa, India,” she told Insider. “I think that diverse teams bring in different perspectives. Our users come from more countries than 10. We need to at least have our engineers, the builders, represent them.”

After spending over 15 years in the fast-paced startup economy, Zhou shared insights into how companies can incentivize organizational growth while working on consumer-facing products with purpose.

Think like a tech company, even if you’re not one

When Zhou started at Change.org, her goal was to help the organization scale and meet demand. But to do that required a company-wide mindset adjustment.

“I think nowadays, every organization needs to think about themselves as a technology company,” Zhou said. Technology is a powerful tool for growth, she added. Without taking full advantage of tech, companies might not be able to adapt their offerings to meet the market. And while Change.org is a values-driven organization, Zhou instructed her team to think like a tech company: solutions-driven and fast on their feet.

Change.org’s user base is located all across the globe. For example, an activist in the Middle East might have very different requirements for privacy and security than an organizer in Canada. Taking each user’s safety requirements into account requires a localized, and adaptable, technological approach, Zhou said.

“Without technology, I don’t think any organization can make that happen,” she added. “If a team plans to utilize technology to make an impact, then they need to fundamentally position themselves as a technology company.”

Don’t be afraid of AI

Artificial intelligence has an intimidating reputation, especially for teams that have never used it. But Zhou said companies shouldn’t be afraid to use AI in areas of the organization where there’s limited manual bandwidth.

“What model to build is based on our understanding of the problems,” she said, adding to first identify the problem that could be solved using AI and the one that will have the biggest impact on consumers. “Over time, we’re able to build a model our users gain confidence working in.”

Zhou recommends implementing the “human in the loop” strategy. Machine learning is not perfect, so to build a model that will be disseminated across a considerable user base, it’s best to have people verify the results.

It also helps to include the people who will be using the tools. When using AI to build a new function, Zhou and her team connect with Change.org’s users and watch in real time how they’re interacting with the software.

“We work closely with our internal users, our campaigners, so we build our features with them,” Zhou said. “The campaigners share with the engineers their challenges, and we observe how they do the work. Then we collect enough data to start to build the right models. This helps them to automate the work and get it done faster.”

Move to modernize infrastructure

While Change.org’s user base is large, its engineering team is small. And like many businesses across the country, Change.org is also facing economic and investment constraints. Zhou believes this is when it’s time to take stock and modernize.

“For a smaller team to do more, we need to modernize and simplify things,” she said. “This means cutting down on things we don’t need, consolidating, and trying to leap far rather than catch up on everything.”

It’s imperative for leaders like Zhou to keep up with tech and all of its advancements. But sometimes, leaders don’t have the bandwidth and have to turn the operational constraints — like dollars and resources — into incentive and motivation.

“If we are able to position ourselves as a technology company, and change the engineers’ mindset to think about, ‘If we were doing this right now, what would we do?’ versus ‘What is good enough to just get by?,’ that’s important,” she said. 

• This article is part of “Tech Leadership Playbook,” a series that shares advice from the most innovative tech execs.