Userpilot’s Women in Product + Some Female Voices on LinkedIn We Love

At Team Userpilot, 47% of us are female, including 44% of the leadership positions.

Today – on International Women’s day – we wanted to introduce some of our women in Product, and then talk about why it’s important to make female voices in Product heard.

Abrar Abutouq, Product Experience Manager

Role: Product Experience
Day-to-day responsibilities: I’m in charge of handling a wide range of customer issues and improving the product user experience, and making our easier for users to use and understand.
Background: I studied Business Information systems and have experience in quality assurance, however, I recently decided to change career and work in the product department.
Personal note: When I’m not working, I like to pamper myself by purchasing new clothes or visiting a spa.

Amal Al-Khatib, UI/UX & Product designer

Role: Product Designer
Day-to-day responsibilities: I am responsible for the entire design process of our product, from research and ideation to prototyping and testing. I work closely with the product team and the engineers to create an experience that meets our users’ needs and business goals.
Background: I studied marketing and UX/UI design, and I have 2 years of experience working in the field of design.
Personal note: I enjoy taking pictures and making vlogs about my life, I also like skincare and makeup.

Rania Jamal, Head of Customer Experience

Role: Head of Customer Experience
Day-to-day responsibilities: I manage the customer support and success teams, ensure customer tickets and issues are handled properly and in a timely manner, analyze data to identify problems, and implement creative solutions to provide a better experience for customers. I also communicate with each member of my team individually and provide feedback to ensure they reach their full potential.
Background: I graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Information Systems, interned as a front-end web developer, and then I started my journey with Userpilot 🙂
Personal note: I’m far from an athletic person but I go out for walks after work everyday day to enjoy the sunset.

In 2023, like with most jobs, there’s a gender pay gap among product managers:

A male product manager earns an average annual salary of $115,412, while the average female product manager earns an average annual income of $110,934.

4% doesn’t sound like much compared to the yawning pay gaps in other industries, but female PMs are generally vastly underrepresented:

Female Product Managers by year — Source: zippia

While the percentage of female product managers has grown over the years, they are still heavily underrepresented in the industry – with only 34.8% of PMs in the US being female as of 2019 (probably a bit more now, but I didn’t find newer data + that’s in the US! I can only imagine what it’s like in more “traditional” economies.).

You can easily see this when you go to any product conference – the majority of the speakers will be male.

And there are so many powerful female voices in Product and Growth that just should be heard

So on that special day, we wanted to give some Ladies in Product that inspire us on LinkedIn a shoutout, and some extra screen time by sharing some their impactful posts:

Here’s all the GOLD you may have missed if the old algo served you the “mainstream” options:

Leah Tharin just killed Agile (well, almost.)

“We don’t have a problem anymore of not having products for our problems.

We have too many.

Our tools became so incredibly good at reaching everyone with products we created quickly that there is now a new enemy: Choice.

We don’t know whom to trust anymore. Everyone says they have the best, and convincingly so. It is an absolute bloodbath that everyone tries to solve in sales and marketing by convincing people somehow better.

And this in turn means being agile – building fast – is not enough anymore. You could have the perfect sprint and achieve nothing.

Agile may not be entirely dead but if anything it became a small cog in the machine. In the past, it was the machine. No scaled agile framework will ever change that.”

Büşra Coşkuner on what learning culture is, and what a Product Team really needs to become outcome-oriented

“Learning can only happen in a place where your team feels safe enough and motivated to trying things out, breaking things, and being late with releases, always with the aim to find a target group worth focusing on, opportunity worth pursuing, and/or solution worth building. This is what an empowered team does.”

Melissa Kwan made it OK again to be OK

A 3-time bootstrapper, traveling the world with her partner-and-co-founder, Melissa shares her struggles and thoughts of building multiple product companies without funding (hey hey we used e-webinar in Userpilot too!) in the most authentic way. Her posts are so raw, and so genuine, without a trace of humblebrag. So much depth & value. I love how she’s normalizing being normal. Take this one:

She also does the whole startup community a big favor by explaining what taking VC funding *really* means:

Read this post by Jason Lemkin on this too: “Does Raising Funding From VCs Limit Your Exit Options? If So, How Much?“

Dr. Else van der Berg is on a personal vendetta against digital trash (and we’re loving it)

“Burning energy to contribute to the waste pile, polluting society with marketing messages, deceiving and harassing to sell, setting VC money on fire, demotivating brilliant people… Speaking of unethical.”

She must really hate it on the internet now 😅

(Graphic from another g reat post by Bart Jaworski)

Elena Verna is sorry she’s not sorry

Yes, yes, I’m perfectly aware I do that too. I haven’t replied to someone’s email in 4 hours? I’m already “sorry”. The paranoia escalates. The best tip I’ve heard for this if you must say something: replace “sorry” with “thank you”. “Thank you for waiting for my reply” etc. etc. Elena Verna nailed it in her recent post: