Female Disruptors: Autodesk’s Diana Colella On The Three Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry

As a part of our series about women who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Diana Colella, SVP Media & Entertainment of Autodesk.

As senior vice president of Autodesk’s Media & Entertainment (M&E) vertical solutions group, Diana plays a key role in growing and expanding the software company’s presence in film & television production and video game development. She leads a over 375-person team on both the strategy and execution of Autodesk’s award-winning media & entertainment products, including Maya, Shotgrid, and 3ds Max. She believes the future of the film & TV industry will be through enabling production in the cloud and is leading her team to achieve that vision by keeping a customer-centric mindset, advancing their best-in-class products, and creating a strong industry ecosystem of partners.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?

I started working at Discreet Logic almost 25 years ago, before they were acquired by Autodesk. They were a small Canadian company at the forefront of revolutionizing the media and entertainment industry with digital visual effects. As a recent CPA, my first day on the job was on the finance team, but I quickly fell in love with the industry. I hadn’t a considered career in technology before, but working with the product manager of Flame, one of our top products, got me thinking, “I would love to do that.”

When you’re in a product management role, you have a broad range of responsibilities. You’re almost like a mini-CEO for your product line, and that really intrigued me. From then on, I tried to get as broad an experience as I could to become a product manager. I worked in sales, customer service, and operations, all to get closer to the customer and closer to the products so I could understand them better. It took about 10 years, but I eventually got the product management role that I wanted.

Fast forward to today, and I now lead the strategy, product management, and engineering teams for Autodesk’s Media & Entertainment products.

Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?

One thing you realize working in media and entertainment technology is that there is constant disruption. We are in a highly creative industry that is all about pushing boundaries. When I first joined Discreet Logic, we were using computers to disrupt traditional film processes such as optical compositing and animatronics. Soon after, the industry shifted from specialized hardware to off-the-shelf PCs — causing another disruption both in the industry and to our own business models. We went from selling bespoke, turnkey hardware and software solutions to becoming a pure software provider.

Now we are facing a new disruption — the cloud. Cloud technology is causing fundamental shifts in the industry both in the way we consume content — think streaming — and the way content is produced. Five or six years ago, when we first asked our customers about their plans for cloud-based production, we were met with a lot of skepticism. But we really felt that the cloud would change everything. Then COVID hit and — it did. Our customers needed to get their work done and they couldn’t do it the way they used to, in an office on local networks. The pandemic accelerated the need to move to the cloud for many customers, just so they could get work done during lockdown and still meet their deadlines.

At Autodesk, we are focused on bringing cloud-based tools and workflows to content creators. This is why I’m excited about disruptive technologies such as Moxion, a cloud-based platform we acquired last year that takes the data captured on set and enables anyone anywhere to access and track it securely. By integrating this with our post-production tools and workflows, we can help our customers through this current disruption and drive the future of production in the cloud.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

I am not sure if this is a funny story, but it was definitely a lesson learned. Early in my career, I realized that I was not a fit for a role I had just landed. I love learning new things and as I mentioned, I wanted to build a broad skill set to help me become a product manager. One of the jobs I took along that journey was an operations role in manufacturing where I had to manage the teams building the hardware configurations for our software. Soon after I took that role, I realized… I am not good at this. Despite wanting to learn and giving it my best effort, I knew I was totally mismatched for it. I ended up going to my boss and saying, ‘I suck at this! We need to find somebody who can do this much better than me.’ So, we did, and I moved on to a different role.

That experience taught me that you have to be honest with yourself and acknowledge what you don’t know and can’t do.

We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?

Rather than a formal mentor, I’ve always taken a more situational approach to mentorship when I’ve I needed advice or guidance throughout my career. I can share one example of someone I spoke to who had a massive impact on my journey. There was a woman who worked in HR at Autodesk and gave me some great advice early on in my career. When I was in my late twenties, I was quite ambitious. I felt like I needed to fix everything right away. She helped me pause and prioritize. She said to me, “Diana, every situation is not a priority. You should focus your energy. Only then will people understand what’s truly important versus what’s not. But if you fire on all cylinders, in every single situation, people will not know or understand what it is you’re really fighting for.” I used to try and run at 120% on every little thing, but she helped me realize that I could better focus my energy. To this day, when facing a given situation, I pause to ask myself, ‘is this really that important?’ Or, ‘do I really need to worry about that right now?’ What she said to me had a big impact on my career. I know now that understanding how to prioritize is essential to running a successful organization.

In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?

Whether disruption is good or bad depends on context. Disrupting a meeting to tell a bad joke is not good but disrupting it to tell everyone the building is on fire is. Disruption can be good if it generates economic value — whether by unlocking new revenue streams, dramatically changing ROI, or having significant environmental or societal impact. It is bad if it generates no economic value. In fact, bad disruptions often lead to losses.

Cloud technology has the potential to be highly disruptive. Whether it will be good or bad will depend on what we do with it. This is a problem we take quite seriously at Autodesk. If we end up disrupting ourselves while generating the same results, that’s not a positive outcome. Which is why we aren’t planning on just taking our existing products and rebuilding them on the cloud. That wouldn’t add any new value to our customers. Instead, we are strategizing on enabling access to our tools with new connection points in the cloud and improving integrations across the production pipeline. That would be a positive disruption, helping customers work smarter and more efficiently.

Can you share 3 of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey? Please give a story or example for each.

Don’t be complacent. The better you are doing, the less you can turn a blind eye to others — especially the competition. If customers love your product, that’s great. But that still means you’ve got to continue making it better. I think about how we can improve our products all the time.

Know where to collaborate and where to differentiate. Keep an eye out for what’s going on around you. Stay informed of what is happening with your customers and competitors. Companies can be much stronger if they work together rather than strictly compete with one another. We see this with the increasing number of open standard and open source initiatives in the software industry. Rather than focusing on competing on every little detail, think of areas where partnering might make things better for the customer and for you!

Always keep the customer in mind. This is easy to say but not always easy to do. If you can look at a problem from a customer lens, you will tend to make the right decisions. If you are just looking at how to make money, you may not end up making the right decision, especially for the long-term. I always try to look at things from our customers’ perspective, and it really helps me when I need to make hard decisions.

We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?

I’ve been in the industry for over 25 years. The entire time, things have not stopped changing for a minute — and I think there is so much more to come. On top of that, I’ve only been in my current role for 18 months. I am very excited about where we are going; I feel like we’re thinking outside the box when it comes to the future of the media and entertainment industry. We are having so many exciting conversations with partners and customers about cloud production, AI and automation, the metaverse, industry standards, and more.

One of my key goals is to help guide the industry to more and better standards. For example, Autodesk recently joined the Metaverse Standards Forum. I feel if we can align on standards as various companies are building their metaverses, we can truly unlock the collaborative potential of the cloud. Its vast scalability can be harnessed to create new worlds of entertainment or business. It’s very exciting to be in the middle of that change, and to be able to contribute and have the opportunity to rethink what technology will look like in the future.

In your opinion, what are the biggest challenges faced by ‘women disruptors’ that aren’t typically faced by their male counterparts?

On the tech side of the media and entertainment business there still aren’t that many female leaders, so role models for young women coming up in their careers have often been men. And while there’s nothing wrong with that, I think it’s hard for women, for anyone really, to envision themselves in leadership positions when there isn’t anyone who looks like them to look up to. Men typically haven’t had that problem.

The good news is this is already shifting. I see more women in high positions at M&E companies now than ever before, and more men advocating for strong women leaders. I am hoping that this means more women will feel confident entering what has traditionally been a male-dominated industry and pursing leadership positions. I was very fortunate throughout my career to have worked with amazing men and women who paved the way for me to get to where I am today, and I am excited to see that support increase for new generations of leaders.

Do you have a book/podcast/talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us?

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson is a book that talks about American history and slavery and the Black Lives Matter movement, and it really impacted me. It’s very well written, and really makes you think and reflect on where we’ve come from as a society and where we need to go.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

Similar to what I mentioned earlier, I would want to bring more women into technical careers. This is an area I’m extremely passionate about. I sponsor Autodesk’s Women’s Network, so most recently I’ve been working to get more women into leadership roles — but I also think it is important to have more women in technical roles in media & entertainment, period. It doesn’t matter at which level, or at which organization, as long as we get more diversity and inclusion inside of this field. If I could inspire more women to take technical roles, develop skills and earn leadership roles, therefore bringing more female voices to the table, it would be amazing.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

Don’t be afraid to move. A lot of my career opportunities emerged from moving horizontally, not vertically through Autodesk. I took on roles across the company, in every area I thought would help me grow my skillset and make me a better product manager (my goal for a long time). From there I realized how much I love learning new things, and it’s led to a unique and fulfilling career. You can’t be afraid of change, or you won’t be able to grow.

How can our readers follow you online?

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/diana-colella/

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!