Deb Liu: evaluation

Transcript context

…Women in Product was born when I was at Facebook. We actually had less than 10% women product managers, but I started out my career at PayPal. The head of product was woman, the head of product at eBay was a woman. A lot of the directors at one point, Amy Klement, who was the VP of product at PayPal, 100% of her direct staff who were product managers. All the product directors were women around her table. And when I went to Facebook, I was really confused, what happened to all the women? And in fact, I'm going to actually enter through product marketing and some of the most successful PMs at the company. Naomi and Fiji also came in through product marketing. We could not be product managers at a company where we eventually we not only ran our own product teams, but also engineering. We were just wondering what happened. One of the things that we did was because we wanted to recruit more women product managers and we wanted to network with more women product managers, we started doing these dinners, and we hosted these dinners for years. Our first dinner was years before we started Women in Product in 2016. The dinners started maybe in 2012. And for years, we would host quarterly dinners. We'd invite everyone we knew, we'd invite other people to invite other people, and we would just get together and talk and connect and get to know each other and so many friendships were born of that. And then one night we were thinking, were talking about who was going to Grace Hopper. We said, "Why don't we have a PM conference of our own?" And suddenly a group of strangers at a dinner said, "We're going to start our own conference." I don't know, it's pretty crazy to do that. But we got a group together and a lot of those women are still on the board. And we started a conference. I remember when we were putting together this conference, a lot of the event planners that were helping us from Facebook were like, "You shouldn't do a conference. You're not going to have anyone who wants to come. Maybe you should just do an evening event or something." But at that point, we had announced it, so we were committed. So when we opened up registration, almost 4,000 people applied for 300 slots and we thought, and I remember Ami Vora saying, "That's what product market fit looks like, and what do we do now?" One of the things that we needed to do was to first put on a conference, we had no idea how to do it. We had no organization, we had nothing. And I just remember thinking, this is amazing. There's so much hunger for this. So we started a Facebook group and we just saw women just starting the communities form around it. We didn't do that much, but people would find each other jobs, they would coach each other for interviews and they would help each other and network. And that's really incredible about these communities is they're organic? , but people would find each other jobs, they would coach each other for interviews and they would help each other and network. And that's really incredible about these communities is they're organic? Very little that we did and we continue to put on events and now we have chapters in two dozen cities, which you talked about partnering with. These are women who volunteer, really put together a community in their local area to support each other, and it's just been an incredible journey. We started it because we wanted women to be able to connect and build community, but the ultimate goal is to have more women in product management, because what happens was the reason that companies like Facebook and a lot of other tech companies didn't have a lot of women and that we lost so many women was that a decision was made 2004 to require a computer science degree to become a product manager. And only 20% of computer science degrees are actually earned by women in America. And so a lot of women, including myself and a lot of the people I mentioned, couldn't get the next job because we didn't have a computer science degree. And so we went into other organizations and other roles. And so you could be swept out a generation of women who were already pretty senior unless they were rising their own organization. And then with the next generation of women, product managers didn't start. We went from a field that was almost 50/50 to one that was drastically different, and now we're climbing our way back. I started the community because of that. I think that part of that work is to continue to bring more diverse voices to the table that we went from diversity, a lack of diversity and progress shouldn't be taken for granted. We're making our way back. We have worked with companies to drop the computer science requirement. We have encouraged companies to drop the technical interview. We encourage companies to create rotational programs or APM programs that people with very, very different backgrounds can enter. But you think about where product managers go, they eventually become the investors and founders. They become advisors, they become board members. And so if your pipeline for one group of people is much worse, you're just never going to equalize what products are built into the world because we don't have the diversity starting at the very beginning. And so that's the work that we've been working on over the last now six years it's been, and we have a lot of work ahead of us. I had no idea that that requirement was such a big component of the lack of diversity in product, wow. What can companies do if they're finding it tough to have a diverse PM team? I imagine step one has dropped that requirement, don't expect your PMs to be technical. Is there something else that you'd recommend?…

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