2018 YHCA Award Ceremony Celebration.
Brissa Solis Aguilar
Senior Hardware Program Manager
Roku
It was during her last year of high school when a school representative from
one of the top schools in the area was promoting an Industrial Engineering
Symposium that she was drawn to engineering.
“During the symposium I became intrigued with
Industrial Engineering, for me the idea of being able to see
and dissect a process came so naturally, after that
Symposium, I made the decision to become an Industrial
Engineer.”
Born and raised in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico,
Solis is a Senior Hardware Manager for Roku, a TV
streaming platform in the U.S. Solis’ role is a hybrid role as
a New Product Introduction (NPI) Hardware Program
Manager for new product development and sustaining
projects. The first part of her role consists of leading and
managing projects that insure product continuation and
support once they have been launched. The second part is
managing a program from ideation to mass production.
“I get to work with multiple teams, driving schedule,
Brissa Solis Aguilar.
quality and cost decisions when launching a new program to the market,”
she shares. “This is the area I enjoy the most, being able to solve complex
problems in order to launch a product.”
For Solis, being a highly cross-functional role, she works to improve
multiple areas of the business by removing roadblocks from the beginning
of a product development cycle to the mass production sustainability.
One of her greatest accomplishments in this role is the development of
a new Sustaining Process in which the company can review and identify
projects to work on based on cost, time and resources.
She developed a process that identifies, measures, tracks and reports clearly
all the sustaining projects in place and brings them up via dashboards that are both
trackable and actionable.
“I was able to establish a repeatable process for not only identifying but also
tracking all the testing necessary and being able to provide close
estimates for planning and cost reduction purposes,” she states. “This process
helped saved $400k by streamlining the qualification process and documentation
systems we had in place.”
A graduate with honors with a B.S. in Industrial Engineering from the
University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), Solis was part of Women
in Science and Engineering (WiSE) Chapter. In 2005 she
graduated college, got married and moved to Washington State
with her family to pursue a dream for better opportunities. Here,
she was hired as an Industrial Engineer at an Aerospace
company in Seattle. She was their first H1-B status employee
and first Latina engineer.
In 2011 she graduated with an Executive MBA from
the University of Washington. She believes this gave her the
confidence to pivot to Microsoft and into the technology and
consumer electronics space.
“Ever since, I’ve had the opportunity to work in great
products such as Xbox One, Surface, Hololens and Roku,” she
states. “I enjoy learning and processes and creating new ways
of working that are efficient and effective.”
A mother of two children, a six-year-old and a four-year-old, Solis encourages
everyone to invest by continuing education, by working out and being kind to our
bodies.
“Being from a different culture, growing up speaking a different language
and having different business approaches will continue to be part of the Latino
experience in Corporate America,” she shares. “But it is our strength and ability to
adapt that support us all through our professional journeys.” LS
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