Ep. 174 - Amazon's Nancy Wang, Founder of Advancing Women in Product

In this episode, Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, talks with Nancy Wang, Head of Product at AWS Data Protection and Founder of Advancing Women in Product (AWIP). Brian and Nancy talk about women in tech, a Midwest AWIP chapter, mentors, diversity, and product development.

Read the interview transcript at insideoutside.io

Brian Ardinger: Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, founder of InsideOutside.IO a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products launched new ideas and compete in a world of change and disruption each week will give you a front-row seat to the latest thinking, tools, tactics, and trends and collaborative Innovation. Let's get started. 

Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger. And as always we have another amazing guest. This week we are live from the Fall Experiment conference here in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And today with me on the show is Nancy Wang, head of product AWS data protection.  She was formerly with Google and she's the founder and CEO of a nonprofit called advancing women in product. Welcome to the show.

Nancy Wang: Thank you Brian. Thank you for having me here. As some of you may know Wisconsin is where I grew up. So I grew up in a small town in Upper Northwestern Wisconsin called Menominee and it's there that I grew in love with the midwestern lifestyle.  And also with the Midwestern culture. So part of me working out in the west coast and coming here is that love to bring more of the West Coast mentality in Silicon Valley entrepreneurship to the Midwest area  Brian Ardinger: You've been doing it for a number of years. So you've got broad experience of building products for some of the biggest and best companies in the world, Google and now you're working at Amazon.  But one of the key aspects of why I wanted to have you on the show is to talk about your nonprofit and the idea of how do you create a more diverse tech environment? Let's talk a little bit about your nonprofit. How did it come about and what is all about? 

Nancy Wang: I founded Advancing Women in Product or AWIP for short in 2017.  And the reason behind that was, you know, I found myself as one of the only woman in the room. Even though I had a great community of male mentors and sponsors and also managers who moved me forward in my career. I wanted that touch in connection with a female who I could look up to and so that was really the idea and the mission behind founding AWIP was that I wanted other women in the Next Generation not to have the same diversity challenges as I faced moving forward in my career whether it was starting out at the US government working for the Department of Health and Human Services. or moving to Google, then a venture backed startup and now Amazon. So part of our mission is to create skills-based workshops, as well as create Circles of executive mentorship, where our 12,500 strong community can come together and really Advance their careers, because seeing is believing. And I firmly believe in that when you see folks you identify with, whether that's gender and other characteristics, you then believe that you can get there as well so change for a AWIP starts at the very top. So we work with our community of ambassadors, who are. Executives in various fields to come together and either create policies or pipelines to make sure that women are well represented in the highest levels of tech leadership. 

Read the interview transcript at insideoutside.io