Lifting Others is a Top Priority for Cox’s Megan Dover
The annual Women in Technology Award, presented jointly by The WICT Network, SCTE and Cablefax, is given to a woman whose professional achievements have extended beyond her company to impact and advance the cable telecommunications industry as a whole. This year’s recipient, Megan Dover of Cox Communications, has consistently risen to the challenge over the course of her 25-year career.
Megan Dover joined Cox after graduating from the University of Georgia, starting as a Marketing Assistant and climbing to her current role of VP, Product Development and Management for Cox Business. She’s now responsible for ensuring customers have the best experience throughout the course of their relationship with the company. Her achievements range from spearheading the reinvention of Cox’s self-install experience for its video services, to leading the execution of the launch of products, features and other innovations that impact customers. But above those achievements is what Dover values greatly: the people she does it with.
We spoke with Dover about her journey through Cox and the field of technology, how she stays ahead of the curve in a rapidly evolving space and the importance of simply lending a hand to others. Edited excerpts of the conversation follow.
What was your reaction when you first learned that you won this award?
Very surprised. I did not expect to win. There are so many amazing women in this industry that I’ve gotten to know over the years and so many just brilliant and talented women who’ve won the award in the past that I was beyond honored that I get to join their ranks. So pure surprise.
When you graduated from college with a degree in journalism and public relations, what did you envision your career looking like at that time?
I really thought I would end up with a role in a corporation, so similar to what I’ve ended up doing, but had thought it would be more as a part of a public relations or communications team. I’ll say I was pretty active in politics in college especially. I had a good friend who envisioned making it all the way to the White House, and I had this dream of being his spokesperson. So other than that slight dream there, I really thought I was going to end up in corporate life. What I didn’t anticipate was that I would have the opportunity right out of college to start with a company like Cox Communications and to be able to stay here for over 25 years.
Since the beginning of your career at Cox, you’ve held several roles in product management and marketing. How have those two fields evolved, and what do you do to stay ahead of the curve?
Marketing has become incredibly scientific, and we’ve gotten much more sophisticated. When I first started with Cox in Macon, Georgia, in a marketing role, we were doing all of our own creative at the system level. So if you think about Cox having over 20 different markets even today, each market was doing their own advertising. I was personally writing scripts and then sitting side-by-side with a local TV production person and creating TV spots. And a lot of my marketing leaders at the time were making decisions based off of gut, which is not something you would ever hear happening today. There’s so much access now to advanced analytics and technology for marketing teams to really target and personalize advertising. I never could have imagined that it would be that disciplined when I first started out, and I think AI is a place that we’re really going to see another renaissance in the marketing space.
For product management, I think we’ve become significantly more disciplined as well. We’re really savvy at analyzing our product portfolios, understanding where our gaps are. As we’re thinking about how we develop products we are doing so starting from the very beginning thinking about what the right customer and employee experience should be as they interact with the product. We’ve embraced a lot of the newer development processes.
Not many people can say that they have spent over 25 years at the same company. What is it about Cox that keeps you there?
Several years ago, we had done a trip with my family and we had visited a couple of national parks. I was gone for about two weeks. It was an amazing trip. I didn’t miss being in the office at all, but after being gone for a couple of weeks, driving back in and badging in, I realized I was incredibly excited to be back to work. I realized I had this stupid grin on my face—I was so happy to be walking back in the door. It just struck me differently than it ever had before. I knew I was lucky to be at a company like Cox, but that particular morning and having that realization that I was very happy to be away, but I wasn’t dreading going back to work. How many people get to say that, right? That they are genuinely happy to walk back in the door of their office building when they come back from time away. And it’s the people. I work with fantastic people. It really does feel like family in a lot of ways to me, and getting to work with them on a daily basis is just incredibly special.
What were some of the challenges that you encountered as a woman rising through the ranks in the field of technology?
Growing up, I had teachers reinforce this belief that I wasn’t good at math. I think you hear that from a lot of women and girls, and I think there’s a lot of focus now on making sure that girls are really supported in math and science. That wasn’t a thing when I was going through school. So I can look back and see that there were really critical points in my education where someone could have encouraged me, and I would have likely ended up—I don’t know if on a completely different path, but it would have made a difference for me. Part of the journalism and public relations degree that I pursued was in part because it had very, very little math. I was actively trying to avoid it. But part of it was that belief in myself and nobody tried to encourage me otherwise. I would just encourage everybody to think about the influence that you have on other people, especially kids, and go out of your way to encourage their strengths and if they do have areas of weakness work with them to overcome it rather than reinforcing those kinds of things.
You’ve been active in community-related activities. Why is important to give back?
Most recently, I had the opportunity to represent Cox at the Boys and Girls Club. I helped them with their Southeast Youth of the Year selections. I’m also really active in our church with the youth group and in Boy Scouts of America. Boy Scouts and something that’s really close for our family. My son just got Eagle Scout and my daughter helped start an all-female Boy Scout troop a couple of years ago when Boy Scouts changed their rules to allow female scouts. So she’s on her way to Eagle too.
My participation as an adult volunteer in any of these different organizations is really about enabling kids to participate. If you don’t have adults volunteering, then kids aren’t going to have an organization to be a part of, and I think that kids benefit by being around a lot of different kinds of people and having different kinds of experiences. Whether it’s Boys and Girls Club or Boy Scouts or church events, they just deliver different experiences than they may have in their day-to-day lives. It’s really important for kids to learn how to speak to and interact with adults and to have those kinds of positive interactions. Kids that are participating in these kinds of organizations and having great conversations and positive conversations with adults are really preparing to advocate for themselves in their education with teachers and professors. They’re preparing for interviews.
Is there a moment in your career that you are particularly proud of?
Very early in my career, I was hiring someone and my leader at the time questioned the candidate choice that I brought him. So when he questioned me about it, it was an uncomfortable situation. But he was concerned not about her qualifications, and he wasn’t concerned about her ability to do the job, he was concerned that her husband’s career would require her to move and that we would not have her on our team for very long. Candidly, I was speechless. But I quickly recovered and I put together a really strong argument for why he was wrong and we ultimately made the right hire. But the easiest thing for me would have been, especially at that point in my career, to go along with the direction that I was getting from a leader. I don’t think anybody would say today that it would have been a right thing to make a decision about whether to hire her not based off of anything that was going on with her husband’s career. So as I look back, I’m really proud of me at that point in time in my career and my willingness to stand up for someone for something that I thought was the right thing to do. The best part of the decision is that I’ve been proven right over and over again. She’s actually still with Cox Communications. She’s been here for over 20 years now.
Are there any tech trends, initiatives or innovations that you’re paying close attention to?
In this day and age, we would be remiss if we didn’t talk about AI. We’re definitely paying close attention to how we would potentially use it at Cox and then across the industry. But I also think it’s incredibly important that we’re mindful of how we’re leveraging it to make sure that we’re getting to really good outcomes and better outcomes by using it. I would say the other pieces, I have spent a chunk of my career at Cox in the video space, and it’s continuing to adjust rapidly. So certainly keeping a really close eye on the changes that are happening in that space.
What advice do you have for young women first starting a career in cable or technology?
I always start career conversations by asking people to think about what’s important to them in a career, I think we get so caught up sometimes on promotions and titles and trying to get to particular levels that you lose sight of what is really important in your day-to-day life, about the job you do. And so I ask people to step back and think about what that list looks like. It’s fine if a particular title or salary requirements are at the top of your list, but what I find is so often it really is about people working for a leader that they like and respect, or it’s doing the kind of work that they enjoy on a daily basis and being a part of a team that they like being a part of. I do believe that if you are doing work and are a part of a group that you enjoy, then you’re going to be producing results that are phenomenal.
The other piece is asking people to make sure they’ve got a really strong personal and professional support system. I think people think about that more in their personal life versus professional, but even in our professional space, we need people who are going to tell us what it is that we need to hear and not just what we want to hear—and this is back to just the importance of getting really candid feedback from leaders. I also think it’s important that we’re finding those people to kind of champion and look out for us. That’s not always about championing us in talent conversations, it’s people coming back and sharing with you what’s going on in the organization so that you are better set to prepare for what the next opportunity is.
