Building Many of Herself: Chioma Aso on Engineering Management, Space, Gaming, and STEAM Divas

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+---
+title: 'Building Many of Herself: Chioma Aso on Engineering Management, Space, Gaming,
+  and STEAMDivas'
+description: Chioma Aso went from fixing her mom's radio in Nigeria to managing engineers
+  at EA. Her secret? Time is the one thing you can't make back.
+pubDate: 2026-06-26
+interviewDate: 2024-11-15
+guest: Chioma Aso
+guestBio: Former Engineering Manager at Cliffhanger Games (EA), published author, founder and president of
+  STEAMDivas nonprofit, and mom of two teenagers. Chioma has led engineering teams
+  across aerospace, manufacturing, and gaming.
+videoId: kfmN0FKgsto
+videoUrl: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfmN0FKgsto
+tags:
+- engineering-management
+- women-in-stem
+- gaming
+- nonprofit
+- diaspora
+- career
+heroClip:
+  mp4: /clips/building-many-of-herself-chioma-asor-on-engineering-management-space-gaming-and.mp4
+  webm: /clips/building-many-of-herself-chioma-asor-on-engineering-management-space-gaming-and.webm
+  poster: /clips/building-many-of-herself-chioma-asor-on-engineering-management-space-gaming-and.jpg
+  alt: Chioma Aso speaking about time being the most valuable thing she has
+draft: true
+---
+
+# Building Many of Herself: Chioma Aso on Engineering Management, Space, Gaming, and STEAMDivas
+
+> *"I can lose money and I will make it back. I can't make time back."*
+
+That line lands quietly, but it carries the full weight of how Chioma Aso operates. She was an engineering manager at Cliffhanger Games (part of Electronic Arts), the founder and president of a nonprofit called STEAMDivas, and a mom of two teenagers. On paper, that reads like too much for one person. In conversation, it turns out she has a very deliberate reason why it works: she treats a packed calendar not as a badge of honour, but as a warning sign.
+
+Chioma is the kind of profile that doesn't show up on tech podcasts very often. She is not a software engineer, not a startup founder in the conventional sense, but someone who has quietly moved through electrical engineering, aerospace, contract manufacturing, and now AAA game development, accumulating a rare kind of range along the way. For readers who have ever wondered what an engineering manager actually *does* all day, or who are quietly asking themselves whether management is a path they want to walk, her story is a useful, and genuinely energising, place to start.
+
+---
+
+## From Nigeria to Lockheed: How Chioma Got Here
+
+The origin story begins, as the best ones often do, with a child who wouldn't leave the repairman alone.
+
+Growing up in Nigeria with a mother she describes as "very liberal, strong-minded," Chioma always wanted to be an engineer, even when that ambition raised eyebrows. Whenever someone came to fix something in the house, she would hover until they left, then immediately try to replicate what she'd watched. "Once he leaves, I know how to fix everything. I'm fixing the thing right away. After him. And destroying things in the process." The reputation stuck: *go call Chioma, come and fix this.*
+
+She started college in Nigeria studying electrical engineering, then moved to the United States to finish her degree at the University of Texas at Dallas. The timing was fortuitous in an unexpected way. UTD was growing, its computer engineering department was merging with electrical engineering, and suddenly students were being introduced to C++ alongside circuit theory. Chioma didn't switch majors, but she started teaching herself to code on the side simply because she enjoyed it. That quiet, self-directed habit would pay dividends for the next two decades.
+
+Her first real engineering job was in test automation, building the systems that verify electronics work before they ship. The role sat at the intersection of hardware and software, which turned out to be exactly the kind of hybrid space her skills were built for. She worked at a contract manufacturer, building test systems for products ranging from Whirlpool appliances to Cisco networking boards to Sharp electronics. "There was quick change, quick knowledge, you're picking up, you're learning new things on the fly all the time." She also learned, the hard way, to document everything, because the moment she moved between projects, undocumented work became a fresh start from zero.
+
+From contract manufacturing she moved to an OEM building electronic billboards (the giant LED displays you'd recognise from Times Square), then made the leap to Lockheed Martin, working as a principal engineer on the avionics team for space vehicles. "I wanted to get a vehicular experience," she says, and apparently her definition of *vehicle* was expansive enough to include rockets.
+
+It was at Lockheed that the idea of management first took hold. She had a great manager there, and she noticed what that felt like from the inside. "If you have a good manager, you can thrive as an engineer." The thought that followed was characteristically ambitious: *what if I could build many of me?* Rather than being one good engineer, she could shape a team of them.
+
+---
+
+## What an Engineering Manager Actually Does
+
+For anyone outside the discipline, and plenty of people inside it, the title "engineering manager" can feel vague. Chioma's explanation cuts through that quickly.
+
+An engineering manager, she explains, typically comes from an engineering background and moves into a role where the primary output is *people*, not code or circuits. "I hire engineers, I help them with their careers. I see myself as the person that brings out the best within them." The job is about identifying where someone is stuck, understanding what strengths different team members have, and assembling those strengths so the whole team functions better than the sum of its parts: "like a machine, like a robot," in her words.
+
+The scope of that responsibility varies by organisation. At Lockheed she managed the entire avionics team. At EA's Frostbite engine team she oversaw migration and integration. Now at Cliffhanger Games she focuses on the gameplay engineering area. The shape changes; the core work of people, process, and communication stays consistent.
+
+One of the most clarifying things she shares is what an engineering manager should *not* do. Early in her management career, Chioma made the mistake of staying in the technical trenches alongside her team. She thought she was being helpful. The 360-degree review feedback told a different story. "The fact that I was in the trenches with my team, I was making them not feel valuable." Stepping in to do the engineers' work is, counterintuitively, a signal that something has gone wrong, either in hiring or in coaching. "My job is to make sure my team is able to do the job that they were hired for."
+
+She frames her role as managing in four directions simultaneously: up toward stakeholders and senior leadership, down toward the engineers she supports, inward within the team's processes, and outward toward external partners. Each direction demands a different kind of communication. Stakeholders, she notes, often won't tell you directly why they're dissatisfied: "sometimes stakeholders will not tell you exactly why they're upset about the experiences they're getting from your team." Hearing what isn't being said is its own skill.
+
+To build those skills deliberately, Chioma has pursued a Green Belt certification in process facilitation, a project management certification, and a coaching certificate, among others. Management, she is clear, is not a promotion from engineering. It's a different career path that requires its own continuous learning. "Most people just use it like a promotion too, but it's not."
+
+---
+
+## The Busy Calendar Is a Warning Sign
+
+Perhaps the most counterintuitive thing Chioma says, and the thing that lingers longest, is her relationship with busyness.
+
+Most people treat a full calendar as evidence of importance. Chioma treats it as a red flag. "Being busy is an indicator that something is wrong and I have to take the time off and manage it efficiently." When she notices her schedule filling up beyond what feels right, she doesn't push through; she pauses and asks *why*. Is she trying to prove something? Does she not trust her team? Is there something psychological driving the need to be visible in every meeting?
+
+She applies the same diagnostic lens to her engineers. "If I feel like you're getting overwhelmed, you've become too busy, I need to start digging into why you too busy. Why do you feel the need to be in every meeting? Why don't you trust your team?" The question underneath the calendar, she suggests, is almost always about confidence or control.
+
+This is where her nonprofit work and her day job quietly reinforce each other. Running STEAMDivas means motivating volunteers who aren't getting paid, which means finding ways to make the work meaningful beyond a salary. The same muscle she uses to motivate engineers at EA, she uses to keep a nonprofit running on goodwill and purpose.
+
+---
+
+## The Case for Electrical Engineering (From Someone Who Has Worked Everywhere)
+
+Readers who come from software backgrounds may find Chioma's perspective on electrical engineering a useful corrective. She is, by her own admission, a little biased, but the bias is well-earned.
+
+"Electrical engineering is the base," she says flatly. "I don't care how much software you write, you need somewhere to put it." Every hospital device, every chip shortage headline, every AI model that needs a GPU to run: all of it traces back to hardware. She describes the relationship between software and hardware with an analogy that stays with you: "Software is like the spirit and hardware is like the physical body. Like you need the body to exist on Earth, but the spirit is great because then it helps you exist on Earth."
+
+The breadth of what electrical engineering covers is part of why it doesn't always get the attention it deserves in conversations about tech careers. RF and wireless, telecommunications, semiconductor design, medical devices, manufacturing automation, aerospace avionics: Chioma has personally touched most of these areas, and she's still in her career. The challenge, she acknowledges, is that the field is genuinely hard to enter without formal training. There's significant mathematics, safety considerations, and a depth of foundational knowledge that doesn't lend itself to the kind of self-taught, portfolio-driven entry that has opened software engineering to so many people. "Maybe what we should be thinking about is how can we remove some of the roadblocks for people to get into there."
+
+---
+
+## STEAMDivas: Tricking Girls Into Loving STEM
+
+That question (how do you remove the roadblocks?) is also the animating question behind STEAMDivas, the nonprofit Chioma founded.
+
+The origin is personal. She has spent her career being the only woman in the room, and she got tired of it. "I got tired of seeing that. I was like, maybe I can do something about that by putting things in front of young girls so that they too, they can realize that they can do this."
+
+What makes STEAMDivas different from similar organisations, she explains, is the target audience. Most STEM outreach programs attract girls who are already curious about science and engineering. STEAMDivas deliberately goes after the girls who have already decided it isn't for them. "We are looking for girls who think like STEM is not for me. This is not our thing. And I'll be like, all right, let's see how we can trick you into liking STEM by finding something you like and then put STEM into it."
+
+The "A" in STEAM is the key. By weaving arts into the curriculum, the organisation finds entry points that feel familiar and exciting before the engineering concepts arrive. A recent workshop called SciTech Trees had participants styling hair, and then using servo motors and Arduino to make the hair rotate. The STEM is real; the gateway is something the girls already care about.
+
+The confidence-building is intentional and central. "Once they get that experience building hands-on stuff, it builds their confidence, which is the number one thing you need anyway in STEM." The organisation is deliberately kept small enough to maintain quality, running roughly three in-person workshops alongside virtual events that anyone worldwide can attend. The long-term vision is to grow a volunteer network that can run STEAMDivas curriculum in multiple locations simultaneously, all connected online.
+
+STEAMDivas is open to girls and women worldwide, as well as non-binary individuals, and parents of any child can register to access resources. The website is **[https://steamdivas.org/**.
+
+---
+
+## A Few Things Worth Sitting With
+
+Chioma's story resists easy summarising, which is probably the point. She is someone who has moved through enough industries and roles that her career looks, from the outside, like restlessness, but from the inside, it reads as a consistent pursuit of the same thing: environments where she can build, fix, and grow people alongside systems.
+
+The management insight about stepping back from the technical work is worth returning to for anyone considering that transition. The time philosophy, treating a full calendar as a symptom rather than a status symbol, is worth printing out and sticking somewhere visible. And the STEAMDivas model of meeting girls where they are, rather than where you wish they were, is a quietly radical approach to a problem the industry has been failing to solve for decades.
+
+The world, as it turns out, is lucky to have someone like her thinking about all of it at once.
+
+---
+
+*You can connect with Chioma Aso on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/chiomasteamdiva/), and learn more about [STEAMDivas](https://steamdivas.org/). The full conversation is available on the Tech Peeps Diaspora YouTube channel, well worth watching in its entirety.*