From Poetry to Product: How Lory Manrique Is Re-engineering Tech Leadership at Quest Software

By WITI Editorial Team

When Lory Manrique talks about crafting a transformation plan, she draws on the same instincts she once used to shape a short story. "The discipline of writing-choosing the right structure, finding the thread, editing ruthlessly-maps almost one-to-one to leading large-scale change," she says.

It’s an unexpected confession from the Global Director of Finance & Operations at Quest Software, the 37-year-old enterprise-software player that now counts 130,000 customers across more than 100 countries.

A Literary Launchpad

Manrique’s origin story reads more like that of a novelist than a technologist. Armed with undergraduate and graduate degrees in languages and writing, she left a New York literary agency to run operations for an interactive technology center"an early mash-up of museum, makerspace, and think tank," she recalls. The experience demystified tech and planted the idea that creativity could thrive inside an engineering culture.

A quarter-century ago, she moved to Ireland, diving head-first into the country’s scrappy start-up scene. "Small companies force you to wear every hat," she says. Consulting, training, project management, product design-each role sharpened her ability to see an organization end-to-end. That 360-degree view still guides her today as she steers multimillion-dollar change programs for Quest’s finance and sales-operations engine.

The Three Inflection Points

Manrique credits pivotal encounters-many with women in power-for bending her career arc.

• Graduate-school gamble: A nonprofit director hired her, sight-unseen, to manage IT systems despite her minimal technical know-how. She taught herself network administration, hardware repair, and vendor management, then parlayed the skills into her first software post.


• Dell’s “key-talent” fast track: At Dell Technologies she was hand-picked for an elite leadership cohort run by women, for women. The assignment dropped her into high-stakes, global P&L roles and funded certifications in Lean Six Sigma and project management.


• A cold email that stuck: Reaching out to the CEO of the Learning & Development Institute of Ireland led to a seven-year board relationship and a byline covering trends in corporate learning-proof that outreach plus original thinking can swing boardroom doors open.

Building Belonging-One ERG at a Time

The daughter of a Cuban immigrant, Manrique has long linked business performance to social equity. At Dell she sourced the vendor that designed the company’s global D&I curriculum and led a schools-to-STEM pipeline for girls. Now at Quest she chairs Ireland-based Equity & Inclusion efforts and oversees five employee-resource groups-WOMEN, PRIDE, MINDS, COLOURS, and PARENTS-while serving as executive sponsor of the last.
"When people bring their whole selves to work, it’s not soft; it’s an unlock for 100 percent discretionary effort," she says.

The Playbook for Change

Her methodology is deceptively simple:

• Listen first. "The solution lives in the team’s lived experience," she notes.


• Make the remedy a shared project. Co-creation builds ownership.


• Over-communicate. She starts with leaders-"top-down for alignment"-then drip-feeds updates so ambiguity never has time to metastasize.

Leading on Inclusion in the Age of AI

Ask what keeps her up at night and she’ll cite the dual-use nature of artificial intelligence.

"Technology can divide-think internet trolls-but it can be a great unifier," Manrique says. At Quest, where newly installed CEO Tim Page has signaled an aggressive push into security-driven innovation, she’s already probing how large-language models might widen access for neurodiverse employees or suggest more equitable project staffing.

Her litmus test for any new tool: "What does the model recommend we do to be more inclusive? If it can’t answer, the team iterates until it can."

Lessons for the Next Generation

• Embrace the nonlinear path. Humanities majors bring critical pattern-recognition skills to tech.


• Mine every role for its transferable verbs. Teaching becomes enablement; storytelling becomes stakeholder alignment.


• Network with intent. "My cold outreach wasn’t random-it was anchored in curiosity and a genuine offer to help," she says.


• Anchor inclusion in execution. Diversity programs without P&L impact are-her words-"performative theater."

The Rewrite Continues

Even with a corporate remit that spans multimillion-dollar transformations, Manrique still files articles for university leadership textbooks and Ireland’s learning-and-development magazine.

"Creative writing is my lab," she laughs."If I can distill a complex idea into 800 words, I can distill a change program into a page leaders will read."

That fusion of art and analytics is exactly what Quest Software-indeed, the tech industry at large-needs right now. As Manrique sees it, the next chapter of inclusive leadership will be authored by people who can code empathy as rigorously as they code software. And she’s already drafting the outline.

Opinions expressed by the author are not necessarily those of WITI.