Women In Product

You're the founder of the nonprofit group Women in Product. What is the group's mission and why do you feel it's important to bring together women heads of product?

So we actually started Women in Product because at Facebook there were so few women leaders. And so a few women product leaders that we, I think at the time when we started having these dinners and I think there might have been six of us in the organization. And we said, why don't we invite other women who are, that we know in the industry and just have dinner once a quarter and just get to know other women product leaders so we can learn from them. The company was pretty small at the time. You know, at that point we said, we should just create our own conference. I know how crazy that sounds a bunch of strangers at dinner, creating a conference. But we said, you know, there's so few women and a lot of women were in organizations where they're one or two or three women. And so we said, what if we created our own conference? And I know it sounds crazy, but we did it. And we had 300 seats. We booked a room and we let's just see who wants to come. And 4,000 people applied and we were like…

Oh my gosh, yeah. Were you just blown away by that?

We didn't even know how many women there were in the industry. So we said, let's just see what happens. And just seeing it all come together and seeing just the number of excited people who said, hey, we would like to be a part of this. Today Women in Product, the group on Facebook has over 20,000 members. We have chapters in 20 something cities. And what's incredible is we've connected women with jobs, with opportunities, with mentors. And it's created so much community level energy to help women be successful in their careers, mentor each other, but also become great leaders as well.