Women in Product Need To Share Their Voice
Where product management is concerned, there is a cornucopia of writing online; a bit of design thinking, some agile methodology, a bit about lean startups and growth hacking. Everyone is ready to tell you how things should be done. While there’s a lot of great content out there, much of it didn’t resonate with me. It took me a long time to figure out why. I thought there was a place for a ‘softer’ side to product management in addition to what I saw as “bro-duct management.” Slowly, I realized the disconnect I felt with my own experiences was a result of hearing predominantly male voices.
NUMBERS
What does predominantly male mean? In true PM form, we think it’s ‘show me the numbers’; so, I went searching for them. While Medium isn’t the only repository of writing on the web, it’s fairly democratic and tends to feature high traffic authorship so I thought it was a good place to start. I looked through the ‘product management’ tag on Medium and looked at the top 50 stories suggested to me for both ‘top’ and ‘latest’ and tried to infer the gender of the author. If a story was posted by a group ‘ex. Product Manager Blog’ I skipped it. Gender was inferred based on picture and name. I did this all in an incognito window that was not logged in to make sure my own browsing data didn’t influence what I saw. So what did I find?
For “Top”, only 14% or 7 out 50 were female. Particularly notable is that 3 of these came from the same woman. And with no disrespect to her, we need more than one woman to represent us. On “Latest”, the numbers were slightly better 20% or 10 out of 50 were women. It’s a relatively small sample so while it may indicate women’s voices aren’t echoed at the same rate as men it’s far from decisive. Numbers for a related tag, ‘technology’, faired slightly better but not by much. In and of themselves, numbers on a single platform aren’t disturbing but my experience indicates this is a larger trend. I ran this again a couple weeks later and the numbers were worse (4/50 presumed female writers on ‘product management’ latest).
While women tend to be unrepresented for a number of reasons, from what I can tell the rate of female authorship is disproportionate to the number of women in PM. There are a few public metrics on the gender breakdown of product managers but what we can say from the limited data we have is that at least interest in the role is diverse. The Product Management Association of LA ran a survey and found their audience was roughly a third female. According to SC Moatti of SF-based Products That Count their talks get about 40% female attendance. Regardless of their roles at, women are interested in the product field. So why don’t they speak up?
WHY WOMEN DON’T PUT THEIR ADVICE OUT THERE
My guess is other women, like me, have been taught to speak out only when we’re certain. We know our mistakes are remembered longer. We don’t apply to roles we aren’t 100% qualified for. Writing is in a way an act of claiming expertise. What makes us feel qualified to speak up?
I recently turned thirty. While I was 29, I made it a personal milestone to become more comfortable speaking authentically as myself because it was incredibly uncomfortable for me. In some cases this meant speaking on a panel or to press. In other cases this meant writing on Medium. I cringed when I first put stories out with a mix of “wow I hope someone reads this” and “oh god, what if someone reads this?” It got easier with time though. Writing and speaking up is, like anything else, a skill that requires practice and for women that initial “publish” hurdle may seem too high.
Historically, career advice for women has idolized the concept of mentorship; find a mentor and she will show you the way! While mentors are great, the number of senior women in the product field vastly are vastly outnumbered those starting out or interested in breaking in — and will continue to do so for some time if we’re eventually hoping to achieve equal representation. This promotes an odd imbalance of a select few senior women and a bunch of junior women hoping for a small slice of their time. This may also be compounded by our inability to claim expertise — how likely are we to view ourselves as experienced and capable of being the mentor? This is why I’m fascinated by the idea of peer mentorship where as you learn skills you share them.
Focusing on ourselves not as people with BEST ADVICE but as peer mentors lowers our perception of the expertise required to speak up. If you’re junior in your career, you may even benefit more from your peer group. Imagine asking a VP how they broke into product. They haven’t thought about this in months and haven’t been close to it in years while a peer might be much more effective at advising. It’s a different sort of advice.
WHY IT MATTERS TO HAVE FEMALE WRITERS
Reason 1: It’s good for your career!
In addition to it being considered an important skill for PM, writing in public forums online is about showing knowledge and expertise to a larger community — you’re building your own brand. For some people, they build brand through public speaking. While I get that going to and giving talks is great thing, they often aren’t a democratic medium. Ignoring the difficulties of scheduling and geolocation, the Women in Product conference was oversubscribed — you couldn’t get everyone who wanted to be there in a room. Writing ignores these difficulties and allows anyone to both share and read regardless of external assessment of expertise.
For PMs you’re often judged on what you’ve shipped but in building a product, individual contributions are often unclear when you step out of the immediate sphere in which you worked. Companies love seeing examples of your thought processes and writing is an excellent way to show it.
Reason 2: It’s good for all of us. Visualization = Normalization
We ask for things like equal representation at conferences but we also need to practice building our own expertise, speaking with authority, and making equal representation in areas where we have complete control. There is no barrier to publishing on Medium. There is no reason we can’t take a small public channel and improve the ratio.
Reason 3: Practice make perfect
If you’re new in your career and don’t feel like an expert, don’t fear. This is the Internet — lack of expertise has never stopped people from sharing their views. More importantly, though, writing is a form of self development.
Getting asked to do a bunch of product teardowns in interviews? Why not do a well organized succinct one you can use as a reference or even point to ahead of time.
Reason 4: Compelling Dialogues
I love the Women in Product Slack Channel. I love the discussions we have and all that I’ve learned. Everything done there is internally facing, though. I want to make dialogues public so we can continue to iterate with the rest of the tech community beyond our private circles. Let’s learn to share our knowledge and expertise beyond our immediate community.
WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT
Women PMs should write more and we should do more to make sure their voices are heard. Is this another thing to do? Yes. I know female PMs are often running at 110% to compete in a tough industry but being part of a public dialogue is an important part of growing individually and together.
Part of presence is normalizing — the more women seen in product roles the less unusual their presence becomes. So, in the spirit of specific audacious goals, I want to double the presence of women on the product management tag on Medium to at least 30%.
As a first step, we’re accepting posts for the ‘Women in Product’ Medium Publication. We don’t intend to focus on women-only issues, but do want to promote Women’s voices in Product and make a universal place for other women to find them. We’ll review these on a weekly basis going forward to make sure we regularly add new and diverse content from the women in PM. So again, go on, get writing!
