How Analiza Romero leans into internal mobility

Analiza Romero is an Associate Program Manager on Uber’s Community Operations team based in Phoenix. Her advice for anyone looking to join Uber? “Do it. The impact we have on the world is incredible and you get to see it in the work that you do.” 

Analiza started playing softball at seven, living and breathing the sport through high school. Her passion and desire to help others led her to pursue coaching, and that’s where she started to develop many of the skills she uses today. Giving and receiving constructive feedback. Teaching new concepts in easy-to-understand ways. Motivating and supporting. 

Her journey at Uber started in 2015 when she landed a role as an Incident Response representative in Community Operations, working overnight assisting customers with safety-related incidents. What stood out to Analiza about Uber was the culture, which drew parallels to the continuous pursuit of improvement in sports.

“Uber is open and accepting of who you are and what you bring to the table. It’s about being open to challenging yourself. If you see things in the work you do that don’t make sense or could be better, you’re encouraged to pursue them.”

Analiza has never been a stranger to new ideas and she saw first-hand opportunities to innovate. “Thankfully I work at a place that’s open to teaching and suggestions. The best idea wins.”

Making the switch from individual contributor to people manager 

By mid-2017, she was one of the first leads to help stand up the Trust & Safety Investigations team, managing a program that allows community specialists to drive continuous improvement in their operations and leading analytic and insight-focused projects. 

In her very first experience as a people manager, she felt it most important to help her team grow and develop, just like a softball coach. “I dedicated a lot of time encouraging people to go after their goals and sharing my experience for them to use. They saw how hard I was working and it was natural for them to ask me things,” she said.

The role brought another opportunity for Analiza to learn something new. This time, it was how to use data to drive a strategy, shaping the way she approaches projects today. “Any platform we work on or anything we do, the first thing I do now is learn what the backend looks like and how we pull data to get insights.” 

Later, she applied for a Special Projects Operations manager position focused on compliance positions and got it. It had new expectations and challenges. “We were able to build KPI tracking for the team who were working on 200+ projects. We created career development programs to help develop community specialists into people and project managers. All while working remotely through the pandemic.”

Combining skills in her role today

In 2020, she became a Compliance Program Manager focused on Screenings. “The biggest thing that helped me decide to accept a lateral position was the fact that when I first started at Uber, I was in awe of the work a program manager for Safety was doing and my end goal was to always do that. This opened that door for me regardless if it was a promotion or not. I knew I still had a lot to learn and I felt that in the interview alone. Now I’m in the program management space with even more goals for myself now.”

In this new role, she’s a process-design and industry expert, managing and optimizing compliance-related customer support areas for background check programs. Her focus is on ensuring all background check-related content is accurate and helpful for community specialists supporting customers. She also uses data to improve our processes and user experience.

“I was very lucky in the leadership I have had at Uber. I worked with very strong and motivating leaders and I would not be where I am today if they hadn’t continued to challenge me.”

Her advice for anyone looking to join Uber

“Do it,” she says. “I’ve been at Uber for 5 years and haven’t lost the excitement about being here. The impact we have on the world is incredible and you get to see it in the work that you do.” 

She encourages everyone not to be afraid to share their ideas and opinions. To be open to learning new things from new people. No matter where you are, what your experience is, or what your background may be. “I don’t have a college degree and I’m incredibly proud of how far I’ve been able to go at Uber without it.”