Think Equal, Build Smart, Innovate For Change

Advancing Women in Product

Today marks International Women’s Day, and in honor of this day, we at AWIP want celebrate the accomplishments of our members. Some have recently taken up new leadership roles in product and others have joined our Ambassador program to pay it forward. We also want to highlight our call-to-action as we do our bit to further equality for women and other minorities in the workplace.

Celebrating the past

Since AWIP was established in 2017, we have experienced tremendous growth owing to the community of women in tech and a need for an organization whose goal is to help get more women into leadership positions in tech.

In the past year, we have established five new chapters (Paris, London, Seattle, South Bay and Boston) and expanded our reach. With our “Masters in Product” podcast, we’re furthering our mission to empower women leaders with education. Masters in Product “will showcase the career journey of women and other underrepresented groups in the tech industry, and serve as a resource for career development.”

We have also received overwhelming support from women leadership in the tech community. Many have signed on to be ambassadors and team members to further our mission. Here are a couple of them that we are honored to highlight:

Bindu Tuli (Director of Product Management — Dell EMC)

With over 24 years of experience in technology, Bindu has deep expertise in leading Product Management and Software Engineering organizations. She’s currently leads a team of Product Managers at Dell EMC’s Enterprise offerings for Storage Analytics, Availability, Protection and Management. Bindu is the lead of our Boston chapter.(Sign up for the first event)

Bridget Frey (Chief Technology Officer at Redfin) As Redfin’s Chief Technology Officer, Bridget leads the software engineering team, which she has grown to more than 150 engineers in Seattle and San Francisco. With over twenty years of experience, she is a thought leader on engineering culture and issues facing women in technology. Nearly 32% of Redfin’s technology team are women. Prior to Redfin, Frey was the director of analytics and business applications at Lithium Technologies. Bridget is part of our growing Ambassador community.

We’ve successfully hosted our first AWIP Summit, geared towards the next generation of women product leaders. With stellar panels and keynotes from Ron Hirson, CPO of DocuSign and Tatyana Mamut, former GM of AWS and VP of Product at Salesforce, we engaged in conversations about innovation, products in global markets and strategic partnerships. We also had many corporate partners sign on — Fitbit, Mode, and Adobe to name a few.

Planning for the future

Given the rapid growth of our sphere of influence, we want to reiterate our approach to offer skills-based workshops in all of our chapters globally, as grow our comprehensive Ambassadors program to introduce high-achieving PMs to executive mentors who can open the door to their next leadership opportunity.

This year, we are launching our Future of women in tech report. As an organization that has access to leadership in top technology companies, one way we can have long term impact is to showcase issues women are having and work with them to help create concrete steps. Part of this mission is to gather data from our amazing group of product managers (Today is the last day to fill out our survey).

We would like to thank every member of the AWIP community for our rapid growth and success. With the support of the community, we inch closer to our goal of having women and other minorities equally represented in boards and leadership teams.

“This is the right organization at exactly the right time,” said Dan Scheinman, former senior vice president at Cisco, board director at Zoom, SentinelOne and Arista Networks, and AWIP ambassador.

“The future is being built by tech firms in Silicon Valley and beyond. Women — who make up over 50 percent of the human population and 60 percent of graduates with advanced degrees — must be in powerful product roles where decisions are made,” said Tatyana Mamut, former general manager of AWS, Vice President of Product at Salesforce, senior director at IDEO, and AWIP ambassador. “Our future depends on advancing women in product and in power. We cannot delay.”