Building Women in Product DC
On April 4th, my colleague and pal, Julie Meloni, and I successfully kicked off the first step to building a Women in Product community in the Washington, DC area by hosting our first event. I say “successful” because Julie and I definitely set our success metrics low — if 10 people had showed, we would have been very happy. That said, by 6:45pm on Game Night, out of the 92 RSVPs, over 50 actually showed — suffice it to say, we were ecstatic. Obviously Julie & I weren’t the only ones anxiously awaiting a Women in Product community to form here in DC!
This all got started a couple of months ago when my friend (and new founder of the Women in Product Boston chapter), Kathy Pham, told me about Women in Product and — excited by their mission to empower, educate and create a global community of women product managers to build impactful products at scale — I began feverishly looking for events near me...and found a whole lotta nothin’. I was shocked! Washington DC has been topping lists as the best city for women in tech for a few years now — there had to be other women in product looking for community here. So I reached out the Women in Product HQ team in Silicon Valley to politely complain…and they turned it right back around and challenged me to start building one! Which brings us back to our event on April 4th.
For the first event, we had three goals:
- Get to know each other.
- Get to know what we as a community want from each other.
- Have fun.
To address the third, we bought tons of pizza, wine, veggie platters, soda, and La Croix (pro tip: The La Croix will always run out first, no matter how much you buy). To facilitate the first two items, we designed an event where everyone could actually connect and share what challenges and opportunities they’re experiencing as women in product. In a roundtable-style format, we facilitated conversation around what types of interaction and topics we’d derive the most value from. We grabbed a whiteboard and started tracking — we heard interest in exploring topics like:
- How is product defined at different companies
- What are personal security best practices (think yubikey, not mace)
- How to transition into product from other disciplines
- How to take over meetings (🙌)
- How to deal with unruly engineers (🙀)
- How do people separate themselves from UXD/Project/etc.
- How do people find work/life balance
And more, until we had a list of almost as many different topics as we had people in the room.
We then discussed what major pain points we experience as Product folk, and essentially got to hear the context behind the topic selections through this session. This is basically when shit got real; we listened, commiserated, shared tips and advice based on past experiences, and identified themes for future conversation. And yes, our topics list continued to grow.
To remind ourselves that being a woman in Product isn’t actually all pain and strife, we turned the conversation toward recent wins, and thankfully, there was a lot that we could celebrate together. [An aside: Julie and I both work for the United States Digital Service. At USDS, we have a number of cultural norms that tend to confuse and delight non-USDSers. Most prevalent among these norms is what we call “crabclawing.” When you would normally want to clap for someone, instead you make a crabclaw with each of your hands. Try it — it’s fun. This has a practical reason behind it, but really now we all just love doing it. Anyway, by the end of this session, the whole room was crabclawing away for the inspiring achievements our peers shared. Ok, now back to the wins segment.] Some highlights: A number of women had recently earned promotions (🦀); others had some big product launches (🦀); one had taken a position on an advisory board (🦀); someone else had successfully advocated for including user research into their company’s product development system (🦀). Basically, all the 🦀 🦀 🦀.
And that’s the long and short of it! We had a great time getting to know each other, we identified a good roadmap for events in the near future, and we can’t wait for our May event — once we have a date, you’ll be the first to know. Hope to see you there!
~Stephanie & Julie
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This event was attended by ~50 product managers with a variety of backgrounds in the Washington DC area, hosted by Stephanie J. Neill and Julie Meloni, and made possible through sponsorship by Kristina Kelly & her amazing team at Blackstone Federal Consulting.
Women in Product is a highly-engaged community of women builders and leaders across the globe. If you work in Product and identify as a woman, join our 8,000+ closed-member community or sign up for the newsletter for monthly events, networking opportunities, and much more! And check out the WIP website for a full list of upcoming events.
