For our 2022 Rising Stars, Fierce Wireless focused on the top U.S. operators. We’ve compiled a slate of impressive up-and-coming executives in the wireless industry from AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon and Dish. Interestingly, four of our Rising Stars this year started their careers through internal leadership development programs. We’re featuring the profiles of these executives, aged 35 or younger, this week, and we hope you enjoy reading them. These are all folks to keep an eye on as they make a mark in wireless.
Kadie Gavan knew she loved leadership even before she finished college. As president of the society of women engineers at Arizona State University, she decided that after college she would try to work for a company that offered a leadership rotational program.
Verizon clearly fit the bill with its Network Leadership Development Program (NLDP). Gavan rotated through all field engineering groups for the company's southwest region, which included Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada when she joined the company in 2009. She was involved in the Alltel integration as well as some of the early LTE launches, but she gravitated most toward in-building deployments, especially distributed antenna systems (DAS).
Gavan’s DAS experience has served her well in her current role as a Southern California director of network performance. Her team was involved in the SoFi stadium DAS constructed ahead of the 2022 Super Bowl. Gavan described the system as the nation’s densest DAS, with more RF per square foot than any other. Verizon built the DAS in partnership with JMA Wireless, Ericsson and DGP Group. And AT&T and T-Mobile joined the system before the Super Bowl.
The SoFi stadium DAS may be Gavan’s highest profile project, but her proudest moments at Verizon came before she became a director, when she was working on open RAN in the Southwest.
“We were working with Nokia and Ericsson to mix and match radios on the cell site,” Gavan remembers. “I really felt like if I didn’t step up and do some of the things I did, we would have been in a much worse spot.” Gavan’s contributions included reaching out to engineers in many of the impacted markets. She led whiteboarding sessions to gather details about their equipment and understand how the teams could integrate radios and base stations from different vendors.
In 2018, Gavan decided to return to school while working at Verizon. She earned a masters of global management and international business from the Thunderbird School of Global Management at Arizona State, and she was promoted to director the same year she earned her degree.
Gavan’s most humbling experience at Verizon came a few months after her promotion, when the Derecho Storm hit Iowa. She remembers her team being in action 24/7 for a full week to bring the network back. Since then, Gavan says she’s paid more attention to the world beyond Verizon. “I always start my day with the news,” she said. “It really does impact the network.”
Solving technical problems with her teammates is Gavan’s favorite part of her job. She considered a career in academia when she was younger but has found that Verizon satisfies her need to learn and share knowledge.
“I have a tendency to enjoy and feed off relationships,” she said. “I like to teach through the unknown or gray areas and help the team get to a spot-on answer.”
Gavan hopes her next challenge at Verizon will involve something even more technical than her current role, such as working with devices. But she said she’s also interested in learning about real estate and contracts. Most of all, she wants to continue to be a leader. “I have a passion and respect for leading teams in Verizon,” she said. “We have such strong engineers.”