Every unique and talented Avantee is a co-creator of the Avant culture we love. We hope the @Avant series helps you get to know who we are, how we do what we do, and what it looks like to build your career at Avant.
Patricia Li
Senior Manager (as of 2023, formerly Product Manager) on the Account Opening team
Joined Avant in 2018
What’s it like to work @Avant? We asked Patricia for her take on our culture, and here’s what she said:
1. How would you describe Avant’s culture?
Avant’s culture is really collaborative, it’s fast paced, and it’s dynamic. By collaborative, I mean that people across many teams are working on projects together, so you’re not in a silo doing just your own work. It’s face-paced because there are a lot of different pieces that everyone is working on and a lot of different factors we’re responding to, whether it’s macroeconomic or something on your team or even something personal. And it’s dynamic because it’s always changing and evolving. We’re always looking at new products, new ways to reach our customers, new initiatives that we want to tackle.
2. Why are you happy/successful here?
I’ve been lucky to have worked with some really great managers who have been invested in helping me learn and achieve things in my career. I also really feel a sense of camaraderie, because everyone’s willing to pitch in. And then personally, I just love working on a variety of projects and being in this fast-paced and dynamic world that we’re in. I really like that I’m never stagnant. I’m always learning something new, rather than doing the same thing over and over. I get to learn new skills and interact with different parts of the business, all the way from Operations and Operations Strategy to Product Strategy and the life cycle of our products.
3. If you had to describe who you are and not mention your work at all, what would you say?
I have a lot of different hobbies, some on the crafty side. I like to knit and cross-stitch. I also like to watch TV and read books, and play board games—I play a lot of board games, both at Avant and in my personal life. I have an eclectic collection of interests and hobbies. And I love stationery. There’s something so nice about fresh paper and a new pen! It’s the little things.
4. What’s something Avant is really good at? What’s something you’d like to see us get better at?
It’s really nice how invested leadership is in making sure that everyone’s opinions are heard. When I think about our all-company and organization-specific Town Halls, the Glint surveys we do—it’s really valuable that leadership cares about every Avantee’s opinion, and that we have the ability to voice it. Leadership looks at trends and tries to do things to help when there’s a specific topic of interest. Obviously not every person feels exactly the same way, so you can’t make everyone happy, but just the fact that leadership is actively listening is pretty valuable.
And then I think that as a company, we still need to work on the balance between being realistic and being optimistic about what we can achieve. It can be hard to hit all the ambitious goals we make at the beginning of the year when we have to respond to something new that comes up or a project bleeds over its timing. I think we need to find that balance between realism and optimism.
5. If you could go back and talk to yourself as you were going through the Avant hiring process, what do you know now that you would want to tell yourself then?
When I was going through the hiring process, I didn’t realize how many different people I would get to talk to. And how many different opinions would be solicited throughout the hiring process. Now, having been on both sides, I really like how we try to get a diverse interview panel—not just people that you’re going to work with directly, but people on teams upstream or downstream from you, or who you’ll collaborate with often. It’s cool to know that about the panel, because a lot of your time here is actually spent working cross-functionally! The team that you’re actually on may not be the people that you spend the most time working with.
6. What’s a superpower that you get to apply at your job?
I love organizing things. I love putting things in a very logical fashion. Even just color-coding and creating project plans. I love that I get to do that as part of my job. It’s a lot of fun to think of new ways to present information slightly differently, learn ways to present it more intuitively, reorganize it. I really enjoy that.
7. When you were little, what did you want to be when you grew up?
I wanted to be a nuclear physicist. That sounded really cool and scientific. I did not know anything about what that entailed, but it just sounded like a really cool job where I’d get to learn so much about different things. And I did really liked science. Secondary was astronaut—that was my fallback.
