Women in product management you should be following
Latest studies note that women and minorities remain underrepresented on executive teams. And that’s to the detriment of organizations that are looking to outperform their competitors.
When gender diversity at the executive level is brought to parity, organizations are 15 percent more likely to gain more profit, improve customer experience, and attract and retain expensive talent, according to McKinsey. Furthermore, those that don’t achieve gender diversity across all roles were “29% less likely to achieve above-average profitability.” But despite this result, gender representation has not increased significantly. In fact, from 2015 to 2018, gender representation had only increased by 2 percent.
So to close out women’s history month, we’ve compiled a list of women who are active on social media (primarily Twitter or LinkedIn) across the product management career stack, including past examples, future leaders, and those already occupying the elusive C-Suite.
In compiling this list, we’ve relied heavily on resources from Advancing Women In Product (AWIP), an organization dedicated to providing its members with “the right skill sets and executive mentorship” that women need to accelerate their careers in product management. (The organization also has a number of chapters across the world, and we recommend following them on Twitter and Facebook.) Meanwhile, if you’re looking to start or advance your career in product management, check out AWIP’s job board.
Let’s dive in.
SC Moatti
Want to add users? Build a mobile app. Want to know what you should consider when going mobile? Rely on SC Moatti, the author of Mobilized, a book that details the convergence of business objectives and mobile products through case studies from major tech corporations (Facebook) to outsized startups (Uber). Her work experience includes prominent product roles at Facebook, Trulia, Nokia, and Electronic Arts.
With that experience, she is now investing in startups as a managing partner at Mighty Capital; has founded Products That Count, the most influential global network of product managers in the world; and is a board member at Opera, the browser software company.
You can find SC Moatti on Twitter, LinkedIn, and her personal website.
Inga Chen
Spotify’s mission is to give millions of artists a platform that reaches billions of fans. And with a market capitalization of $22 billion and 248 million active users, that mission is working pretty well. It’s relied heavily on personalization—recommending playlists, podcasts, and songs—to help fans and artists get to know each other.
Inga Chen, a Senior Product Manager of Personalization at Spotify, plays a large part in making that happen. She leads the teams that have created the machine learning algorithms behind such popular playlists as Discover Weekly, Release Radar, and the Daily Remix. She also runs the NYC Chapter of Women In Product.
Her previous experience includes roles at Squarespace and Automatic Labs. Chen also maintains a curated tea spreadsheet that I greatly appreciate and will be relying on heavily in the future.
You can find Inga Chen on Twitter, LinkedIn, and her personal website.
Kasey Cuppoletti
As the coronavirus continues to cause global turmoil, nonprofits are more crucial than ever to the well-being of our communities. DonorDrive is at the forefront of making sure non-profit employees are able to “raise money and do good” via an app that easily creates events, automates donor communications, reports business analytics, and integrates with multiple online platforms. And Kasey Cuppoletti, the Head of Product at DonorDrive, is responsible for making sure all those pieces fit together.
Over her tenure at DonorDrive, she has been responsible for building out the organization’s product marketing and quality assurance teams, creating solutions for medium and enterprise non-profit clients, and building out the strategy for connecting DonorDrive to Salesforce’s CRM.
Jenny Wolochow
In work environments that are constantly changing, it’s imperative that people looking to boost their careers have access to quality, affordable learning opportunities that fit their schedule.
Coursera, which has raised over $300 million in startup funding and has over 20 million users, is at the forefront of education tech. It works with Duke, Google, Stanford, and many other prestigious organizations to develop its courses in business, data science, AI, and many other fields of study.
Jennifer Wolochow, who has been at the startup for over six years, is a senior product manager who helps university partners adapt to online education, leads communications and initiatives touting Coursera’s benefits to a global market, and plays an integral role in helping end user feedback be integrated into the platform.
Hope Gurion
Formerly the Chief Product Officer at Career Builder, Hope Gurion has over a decade of experience in product development, leading more than 40 product teams over the course of her career. She’s now taking that experience on the road through her consulting agency, Fearless Product.
Gurion helps product leaders and teams achieve “growth through customer-centric, evidence-based strategies.” She also shares her product expertise through her podcast “Fearless Product Leadership” and has candidly talked about her experience as a woman in product leadership.
You can find Hope Gurion on Twitter, LinkedIn, and her personal website.
Rebecca Cooper
Based in Australia, SafetyCulture ensures that companies in healthcare, construction, manufacturing, and other industries are conducting safety inspections. It has done over 3 million inspections through its iAuditor product, which enables workers and those out in the field to track their safety measures from their mobile devices.
After ten years in the hotel industry, Cooper took a product manager role at SafetyCulture, working her way up to senior product manager in less than a year. She is now SafetyCulture’s Group Product Manager and an organizer for Australia’s Women in Product chapter.