Ep. 212 - Monica Rozenfeld & Lina Bedi, Her Product Lab Co-Founders, on Women in Product and New Product Development Incubator

Inside Outside

Monica Rozenfeld and Lina Bedi are co-founders of the incubator, Her Product Lab. Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, talks with Monica and Lina about opportunities and barriers for women in the product development space and Her Product Lab's new seven-week incubator program designed to help women launch and grow new product initiatives.

Interview Transcript

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, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat for the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends in 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. In fact, we have two amazing guests today, Monica Rozenfeld and Lina Bedi. They are cofounders of a new project and a new venture called Her Product Lab. Welcome to the show.

Monica Rozenfeld: Thank you so much, Brian. We're so excited to be here.

Lina Bedi: Very exciting.

Brian Ardinger: Monica, you and I met a couple of years ago. I had a chance to come up to Milwaukee for the Fall Xperiment conference last year and do some podcasts there. And I wanted to bring you on the show to talk about this new venture that you spun up. And some of the changes that you've seen over the last several months in spinning up this particular project. I know we actually had this conversation pre COVID, but we wanted to postpone it because a lot of things have changed. So, tell us about what Her Product Lab is, and then we'll go into how it came to be.

Monica Rozenfeld: Thank you for that intro. In my day job, I was organizing events for product managers. And I was in the New York office, we have a New York office and a Milwaukee office, and in the New York office there's a lot of conversation about how there really isn't a community for women in product. You see a big presence out on the West coast, Advancing Women in Product. They have done a phenomenal job of really elevating women, their career, getting them into the mid-level and leadership roles out there. And we weren't seeing so much of that even in New York City and looking into other cities like Chicago, DC, Atlanta.

Our goal, when we had started out late last year, is let's have these summits. We'll bring women together. We'll have women on the stage talking about their careers. How did they move into the director roles, how to build better products? It was really incredible because only in two or three weeks’ time, after coming up with this concept and connecting with Lina, who's also very interested in this. We had a website, tickets were live. We had something like 20 presenters right off the bat. And it was one of the easiest events I ever put together because there was so much excitement around it.

So, the date of our first summit, March 26th, New York City, same week as lock down. I actually did this really somber activity where I walked over to where our venue is. I live not too far from there. And everything's just boarded up, no people on the street in another universe, there would be 200 people in this room, and we'd all be super engaged and talking about product development. So, it was a really crazy experience for us.

But I think the other thing that we saw was that nobody was asking for a refund. Everyone wanted to know when the date was going to be changed. We had this really loyal community that wanted to be part of this. And so we were trying to think of, well, how do we keep everyone engaged without being able to have in person events. And so, we started with some of the virtual events and that led us to think of this concept of a virtual incubator, which by the way, I'll just add one thing. We wanted to do an incubator as part of our two-year roadmap. We're thinking like 2022, we'll have an incubator. It will be really cool. And it will be New York based. And now it's just virtual and global, which we're really excited about.

Brian Ardinger: It seems that coronavirus has definitely accelerated a lot of the disruption that we were already seeing in the marketplace. And this is just a perfect example of that. So, Lina, maybe can tell us about yourself and how you got involved in this project.

Lina Bedi: I was introduced to Monica through a mutual friend, and we were talking about, you know, women supporting other women. And how far women can get when they're lifted. And when we think about product management, we were looking at the overall job market growth and product management and product management was and is booming.

So, the overall job market in the past two years increased by around 6% and product management is five times that amount. And then when we dug into the data even more, we see that the majority, of women are in entry level positions. And so, our goal was to really create a network community where we can give women access to senior leaders and help mentor them.

You know, these are a lot of the things that help propel my career forward and it’s a way of paying that forward. And, you know, that was the goal. And even though what we're doing now has shifted because of COVID, that goal still remains the same. Those overarching themes of what we're trying to achieve by connecting women to these leadership roles and giving access to training. Those are still the big umbrella that we're operating within.

Brian Ardinger: One of the things that's interesting about her product lab, slightly different than a lot of the other incubators or accelerators out there. It seems to be focused, not just on starting a company, so to speak, but it's really about launching a product and maybe that early stage that it turns into a startup. Can you talk about why you decided to start with that emphasis?

Monica Rozenfeld: When we have a community of product managers, they're already thinking about product ideas all of the time. And they're not necessarily looking to be entrepreneurs, start a company, hires a team, go through the whole process of all that it takes to actually launch a company. But maybe they have a concept that they either want to turn into a side hustle that they want to even pitch to their current employer. And that's very common if you're working in, for example, I work in FinTech. Maybe you have a concept that you think would be really great in that space and you can sell it to your own leadership even. So, it's a very different model. We've talked to so many women in our community who have an idea, and I'm sure as you know Brian, a lot of people sit on ideas for a very long time and sometimes you just need that nudge of a next step.

And so, our goal is really to help connect them with mentors. One-on-one. Bring in coaches each week that can help them in each stage of the process. So, by the end, they have the option of what they want to do next. None of them have to quit their day jobs. We've created this to be around their full-time schedule. And after seven weeks they might say, Hey, I really want to pitch this to a VC and turn this into a startup. I really see the vision for it. ...