Work Diaries: Priscilla Lau, Strategic Partner Manager on the Top Creator Team also leads the AAPI Taskforce

Inside YouTube

Work Diaries: Priscilla Lau, Strategic Partner Manager on the Top Creator Team also leads the AAPI Taskforce

• By Priscilla Lau
• Strategic Partner Manager, YouTube
• May.16.2022

We're peeling back the curtains with our series, Work Diaries, where you can experience the inner workings of YouTube. How do decisions get made? What goes into a product, feature or policy? We're asking YouTube employees to give us the low-down during a five-day period.

My fourth day at Google, at our Large Customer Sales Conference.

Monday

7:00 a.m.: I wake up to my 4-and-a-half-year-old daughter coming to my bedside. It's either her or my 3-year-old son waking me up every morning between 2 and 4 a.m. (#momlife). I get breakfast, drop the kids off at school and head to my office shed.

9:00 a.m.: May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month (APAHM)! I am working with our Marketing, Communication and Shorts Teams to put together an event in New York for our Asian Creators. Supporting the community has always been an important value of mine.

9:30 a.m.: I lead Creator Advocacy for our ERG, Asians@YouTube; part of my work includes coming up with better ways to connect and strengthen our community. One of those ideas is a series of AAPI Creator Talks we're kicking off with creative director Karen X Cheng, who is widely known for videos like "Donut Selfie," "Resignation Letter To Microsoft (Bye, Bye Excel and I)" and "Girl Learns to Dance in a Year (TIME LAPSE)."I'm meeting with two colleagues to discuss logistics and planning.

10:00 a.m.: I send a few notes out about a talk I am organizing with Dave Lu who created an organization called Stand with Asian Americans. The topic of our upcoming talk is "Silent No More: Speaking Up for the Asian Community." It's important for me to use my privilege as a Googler to encourage corporate social responsibility and speak up for underrepresented communities and my own.

11:00 a.m.: Several creators I work with are interested in creating a second channel to reach more non-English speaking audiences. I open up analytics to do some research, review best practices and watch their videos to provide recommendations for my creators.

2:30 p.m.: Hop on my Peloton for a quick bike ride with my go-to instructor, Tunde, while thinking about how to activate an AAPI partnership I'm pursuing with WongFuProductions. So many Asian Americans look up to Wong Fu and our hope is to inspire the next generation of creators. As authors Jeff Yang, Phil Yu and Philip Wang mention in their book "Rise: A Pop History of Asian America from the Nineties to Now," we are passionate about our community and in supporting "the ones who come next."

Today's Highlight: Even after 15 years at Google, I'm still motivated by our mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful to others. The main reason is because of the people I get to work with - they're incredibly smart, fun, down to earth and easy to get along with. I'd choose to be "stuck at an airport" with them any day.

Find friends like Diny who will swing through anything in life with you.

Tuesday

11:00 a.m.: I attend a Women@Google workshop called #IamRemarkable. It's a workshop aimed at encouraging everyone - particularly women and underrepresented groups - to speak openly about their accomplishments and promote themselves in the workplace and beyond. We are asked to share something that makes us remarkable; I share that I am remarkable because I care about others and build strong lasting relationships. My superpower is motivating others to come together for a cause and do social good.

2:00 p.m.: It's important to always evolve and experiment with new content and formats, so I pull up analytics to help a creator family investigate how short-form content is impacting their business and audience metrics. It turns out Shorts is helping them attract new audiences and views are increasing in the first 24 hours.

4:00 p.m.: I volunteer as a board member for Kara, a nonprofit that provides grief counseling for adults and children. I send a quick note to our president, updating her on the Partnerships Committee I lead and our upcoming fundraiser.

5:00 p.m.: After two years of being out of the office, Google invited Bay Area Googlers to a Lizzo Concert! I am beyond excited. Google did not disappoint and definitely hosted an event with all the bells and whistles: swag, yummy food and drinks! It was amazing and, best of all, I got to spend it with my AAPI Taskforce Leads. Watch a Short of my day here.

Today's highlight: Feeling accepted, loved and seen by friends. Meeting these passionate and talented colleagues through a united desire to uplift the AAPI community really inspired me both personally and professionally. These friendships are a true gift - I literally met my husband from an ERG connection many years ago.

Nicholas running off with the bunny cutout.

Wednesday

9:00 a.m.: Catching up on emails - I scan my creators' videos to spot anything notable for a monthly newsletter that goes out to spotlight our creators.

2:00 p.m.: I regroup with my planning team to discuss comms, invitations, logistics and Google Meet guidelines for our Karen X Cheng Creator Talk. It takes a mini village to put a talk together; what may seem simple on the surface requires a lot of coordination. Shout out to Jessica and Melissa who volunteered to help me with the talk!

4:00 p.m.: My son's school is hosting a belated Easter Egg Hunt so I leave a little early and make the drive over. He has the time of his life and knows exactly how to hunt for as many eggs as possible. He exuberantly takes a photo with the "rabbit sign" and starts walking with it. A three-year-old is both cute and requires a lot of energy!

Today's highlight: Being able to spend some quality time with my son.

Bathroom renovation!

Thursday

11:00 a.m.: I get a text from Phil Wang from Wong Fu Productions, an OG Asian American creator. During our conversation, we discuss possible ways to collaborate with him on a blog post and / or event. For so many Asians, his book is a nostalgic read because of how it documents the journey of Asian Americans in the media the last 30 years.

12:30 p.m.: Everything is moving really fast as APAHM plans come together. Our internal planning committee meets to discuss YouTube Music programming, a special guest at an upcoming company meeting, a Social at our headquarters and a few other events - all of them organized by volunteers who are community builders. My kind of people!

3:00 p.m.: I prepare to chat with my manager about my performance review and how to align in the future. This past year has given me the opportunity to manage and mentor many new colleagues, which has been fun and rewarding. I started 2021 with a desire to find my voice among all the hate against Asian Americans, particularly those targeted towards the elderly. Since then, I've not only found my voice but also moderated multiple conversations with creators like Eugene Lee Yang from the Try Guys, Jason Y. Lee from Jubilee and Joel Relampagos - who was the showrunner for the Emmy-nominated YouTube Original "Recipe for Change."

My advocacy work also inspired new projects - collaborating with top creators is highly rewarding when you're able to influence who is invited to be a part of a documentary or what guests can speak on important issues on a podcast. On a personal level, this type of impact is highly fulfilling and deeply fills my cup.

Today's highlight: Amidst all this important work, I'm making progress with my bathroom renovation. The contractor put up the tile for my children's bathroom today!

Reminiscing on past YouTube memories: Me, emceeing a 100 person YouTube Summit in LA while 6 months pregnant.

Friday

2:00 a.m.: I fell asleep at 9:30 p.m. and ended up waking up at 2 a.m. because that's what happens when you have toddlers. I was completely wired and stayed up until 4 a.m.thinking about my performance review, Creator Talks and other emails.

I've done a lot of self-reflection around work and career recently. And through a leadership program geared for Asians, B-Spoke, I'm learning a lot about leadership styles, work tendencies and a need to know myself to lead myself.

12:00 p.m.: During my performance review with my boss, it's nice to reflect on all that I've accomplished and read my peer reviews. As an Asian female in tech, I am very aware of both the glass ceiling and bamboo ceiling, and it's my personal goal to bust through both.

2:00 p.m.: I prepare for an upcoming meeting with a creator who is blind. I review the creator's channel performance, specifically around content, audience and revenue. Every meeting is tailored towards the creator's goals but there are fundamentals around channel metrics we always assess.

3:00 p.m.: One of the hardest things I've done is emcee a 100 person summit while I was six months pregnant. I've come to realize that the best talks are the ones I've prepared the most for, so to prep for the session with Karen X Cheng, I carve out plenty of time to do my homework - research the interviewee, watch any past interviews, find out what interests them, pull out soundbites from our pre-calls and dive into anything that can be useful to the audience.

Today's highlight: Finishing this Work Diary. It has been a fun journey. I'm honored to share a snippet of my life with you. Thank you for reading it.