Five Creators to Watch in 2019 & Their Advice for Aspiring Female Leaders

Creators define new visions and bring our wildest imagination into reality. Earlier this year, we highlighted six funders to watch in 2019. We are excited to showcase four additional achievers in the Creators (product manager and tech leadership) category. They are not only high achievers in their own right but are also recognized by their community as amazing givers - leaders who take time to mentor and foster the next generation of women and minority leaders.

We want to take a moment to share insights from these four creators who are leading the way in product management. In their own words, each creator will share the disruption they believe will change their industry in 2019, their best productivity hack, and advice for the next generation of women in tech and female founders.

Here are four visionary creators to watch in 2019:

Tatyana Mamut, PhD - Nextdoor, Chief Product Officer

Tatyana Mamut is the Chief Product Officer at Nextdoor, a startup creating the world’s largest social network for local neighborhoods. She is a startup advisor & keynote speaker in Silicon Valley who has been a Tech Executive at Amazon, Salesforce, and IDEO.

1. Industry disruption? In 2017 & 2018, tech companies woke up to the importance of managing culture. In 2019, we will see tech companies big and small make headway in finally grappling with the fact that without a healthy organizational culture, there is no way to build a sustainable market or product strategy. Startups in the culture space -- from recruiting for culture tools like Textio to culture feedback tools like Culture Amp -- will flourish, propelled by requests from CEOs not just to buy these cultural-building tools, but to help their companies formulate the approaches to build companies that win and remain healthy for the long-term.
2. Productivity hack? I've been convinced by the evidence that a good night's sleep is critical for performance, so I'm making my bedroom a phone-free zone in 2019.
3. Advice for aspiring female leaders? Find and support a small circle of people who understand the value you all bring, and raise each other up. If you create a small but mighty posse of like-minded people working toward similar goals, you will get much further than going it alone. Having others who really “get” you talk about how great you are is more effective than you talking about how great you are -- and this only works if you do the same, generously and authentically.

Ron Hirson - DocuSign, Chief Product Officer

Ron Hirson, Chief Product Officer at DocuSign, is an entrepreneurial executive with over 20 years of experience in building internet companies (co-founded TheDigs acquired by iDrive; CPO at Ingenio acquired by AT&T; co-founded LON:BOKU; CPO at NASDAQ:DOCU), an advisor and investor in startups, and an inventor on over 67 issued patents.

1. Industry disruption? This year we are going to move beyond seeing every startup claim they have Artificial Intelligence (when in reality they just have simple programs or algorithms) to seeing AI used by large companies to drive meaningful results across departments and verticals.  An example of a growing company that is helping transform sales results I’m enjoying watching is People.ai.
2. Productivity hack? Not wasting time trying to connect to airplane wifi, which usually isn’t great (I’m looking at you United), and just working on long-form problems on airplane flights.
3. Advice for aspiring female leaders?  Do something outside of the scope of your job. By going above and beyond and working on a project that has broad impact -- likely requiring collaboration across teams --  you end up with greater visibility inside an organization and are exhibiting valuable leadership skills.

Barkha Saxena - Poshmark, Chief Data Officer

Barkha Saxena is the Chief Data Officer at Poshmark, where she leads all data science, machine learning and BI platform initiatives across product, marketing, merchandising, operations and business strategy.

1. Industry disruption? Machine learning will go mainstream as organizations overcome the operational challenges of deploying it at scale in production. I believe this will be enabled by technologies that bring self-service and automation across the entire workflow. Nexla for DataOps, DataRobot for Automated ML and Dataiku for Model Deployment are a few examples of companies which offer such solutions. Technology solutions offered by these companies allow trained data scientists to be more productive, while also enabling data scientists in training to quickly develop and deploy models.
2. Productivity hack? As my leadership team has grown over the last year, I’ve taken myself out of many meetings which are now fully run by my team. This has further cleared up my calendar and created time for conceptualizing and executing on a number of strategic business growth and team leadership initiatives. I am definitely experiencing JOMO (Joy of Missing Out).
3. Advice for aspiring female leaders? Be your authentic self, build on your natural leadership style, and push yourself outside your comfort zone to the next level of responsibilities, even if you don’t feel ready. When making career choices, focus on finding the right mentor who will be your champion and help you identify strategic opportunities. It’s the people, not companies, who will make an impact in advancing your career.

Irina Farooq - Kinetica, Chief Product Officer

Irina is an enterprise product leader with over 15 years of experience bringing innovative products to market across a variety of sectors, including analytics, AI, networking, hardware, IoT, SaaS & Cloud.

1. Industry disruption? I believe 2019 will be the year when enterprises start transitioning AI/ML projects out of their data science labs and into mission critical applications.  The key to this transition will be technologies that facilitate building ML-powered applications at scale while ensuring regulatory compliance. I am biased, of course, but I believe Kinetica's Active Analytics Platform is a great example of such technology.
2. Productivity hack? My favorite productivity hack is spending 30 minutes on Sunday night setting goals for the following week and creating a mental model of the key activities that need to happen to achieve those goals.  This helps make sure that I am laser focused from the moment I get into the office on Monday morning. Then, every evening throughout the week, I dedicate some time to reflect on the day's activities and how well I am progressing towards achieving those goals.
3. Advice for aspiring female leaders? It may seem like there are a lot of set expectations for what a female leader should be like.  My advice is to completely disregard all of those. Find your authentic voice/style and own it. Then, choose your co-travelers who share the same values and appreciate your unique style and perspective.  Don’t settle for anything else.

Sandy Carter - Amazon Web Service, Vice President of Enterprise Workloads

Sandy is a customer-obsessed leader who thinks big and truly cares for those whom I serve. She has held executive roles at IBM, ran her own ML startup in the Bay Area, and in addition to senior leadership at AWS is the Chair(wo)man of the Board of Girls in Tech. 

1. Industry disruption? In order for companies to have a solid Machine Learning strategy, they need a strong data strategy.  Finding the right data, enough data, and quality data is a big challenge.  I believe that using Machine learning to assess your data will disrupt the way data is readied for machine learning.   I’m not aware of a start up doing this today!
2. Productivity hack? I love to do lists but I do it with a twist. I group those to do’s that are similar and then ask for each group, if there is a way to complete all of them with one action.   I’ve heard this called the “game of leverage” and it helps me be more productive.
3. Advice for aspiring female leaders? A mentor gives gives advice based on their experience, but a sponsor will put his/her own reputation on the line to give you connections or benefits you need to advance!