Interview: Nancy Wang —Advancing Women in Product & Amazon Web Services
We chat with the co-founder of Advancing Women in Product and the head of Amazon Web Services Backup about opening the door to leadership roles.
Nancy Wang leads Amazon Web Services Backup, where she focuses on data protection for AWS customers and manages a group of about 50 designers, product managers, engineers, and engineering managers.
In 2017, she co-founded Advancing Women in Product, a nonprofit that prepares women and other marginalized groups for positions in tech leadership and management through mentorship and skills-based training. AWIP now has some 16,000 members across eight chapters around the globe.
How did you get to where you are today?
My boss (Wayne Duso) — the vice president of file storage and edge computing at AWS — has just been very supportive. It’s something I want to touch upon a little bit later in our conversation, which is the importance of sponsorship in someone’s career. He actually put me up for the role, and prior to that I was on the same team but in a principal project manager capacity.
Prior to Amazon, I was in venture capital in Silicon Valley. And then before that, I was at Google and building network infrastructure products. So for most of my career I have definitely been in infrastructure. I started out as a computer science undergrad from the University of Pennsylvania.
I love building things, I love seeing how things work, and I actually started out my career in government. I was attracted to join the Obama administration back in the early 2010s, specifically working on the Affordable Care Act and leveraging how technology can bring more access to healthcare data. So I was part of the team that built healthdata.gov, which is available today. If you’re curious about, let’s say, access to primary care or access to specialty medicine, across different demographic groups or across different ethnicities, it’s there.
That was the whole point: We wanted to take all the treasure troves of data across the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Food and Drug Administration, National Institutes of Health, so on and so forth, and essentially make that available for everyday people like you and me, as well as academic researchers and folks in industry. And the purpose of that is really: How do you enable people to do different things with knowledge, with data?
What did you take away from that experience?
That started me down the path, which is really my passion, of: How do we provide equal access? That’s actually why I started my nonprofit, called Advancing Women in Product, when I was a product manager at Google. While there are many excellent organizations out there focusing on, let’s say, how do you get more women or people of color into internships or helping them land their first engineering job or product-management job or business-ops job, whatever it might be — there aren’t that many organizations still out there today that focus on “You’re already at the senior engineer or product manager level. How do you become a leader?”
So how does AWIP view leadership?
What does being an executive mean? For a lot of people, it’s not a role they may ever attain in their professional lives. For folks who are interested — who have the drive and the capacity to get there — how do they actually get there? I started the organization in April 2017 with the purpose of bringing the right skills. If you look at how people interview for director-level roles, it’s very different from how you would interview for an entry-level or even a senior-level role because a lot of it goes into how do you manage managers or, even take that a step further, how do you lead leaders?
Because at some point, you can’t be someone’s line manager or you can’t directly tell them what to do — you need to influence. So it goes into your ability to influence, your vision, your ability to pull things together. All of that is very important for leaders. If you look at the workshops that AWIP has done throughout our many chapters, a lot of it focuses on strategic vision, roadmapping, understanding customers — should we acquire or build in-house?
And that’s really been the core of our mission: getting a group of really awesome ambassadors and really imbuing the community with their interest in giving back.
What’s one way AWIP paves the way for folks to become leaders?
This year, one of our big milestones was partnering with Coursera and AWS to produce Real-World Product Management Specialization. Because again, what is so core to our existence is making things accessible. So if you look at product-management curriculums out there, they’re often five digits of cost and sometimes that’s prohibitive to folks who have been either out of the workforce or underemployed. And so we partnered with Coursera to essentially turn all of our content thus far into a four-course specialization where students and learners can earn a certificate at the end. Corcera’s rate is $79 a month; very accessible, very reasonable.
The curriculum is designed by a professor of business law from George Washington University and mimics an MBA curriculum. Students who come out of this four-course specialization will essentially gain the same knowledge and skills as someone coming out of a traditional MBA, as it applies to product management.
When it comes to leadership positions — whether starting a company or just having a higher-up role in one — is there a specific path prospective business leaders should follow?
It’s the old adage, right: You’ve never done something until you do it. So there’s always going to be that first job as a people manager when you have never been a people manager before. How I see most folks end up in that role: You have to be very deliberate about it. If you want a shot, especially at, let’s say, a FAANG company and becoming a people manager there, the bar is just really high these days. So how do you then prime yourself for the competition? It’s making sure that you take proactive steps before becoming an official people manager to do mentoring, to maybe leading mentoring circles, to shadowing executives.
There are tons of extracurriculars — it’s just like in high school when you’re applying to college. Obviously, there are the core curriculums, your grade point average — that needs to be good. At the same time, just having a good GPA or SAT score did not land you where you are [in college]. What did was a combination of that core curriculum plus something else: You could be an amazing soccer player, you could be an amazing cellist, or maybe you started this nonprofit that became super impactful in your community. Whatever it is, I call those extracurriculars.
It’s a very similar concept in the corporate world. Maybe you’re organizing a hackathon or a Shark Tank or something which shows that you have the capacity and the drive to do more, and you also have the interest in doing something bigger.
And that all goes into executive exposure, and that is, frankly, how I found my ability to get put up for bigger- and bigger-scope roles at a relatively young age. You show that drive. Because at the end of the day, your manager is simply looking for someone who can do the job. And you just need to insert yourself into strategic positions where you get considered.
Were there any pivotal moments or epiphanies in your career that made you interested in this line of work or were consequential to your career trajectory?
I think for me, seeing is believing. Like, seeing female leaders. For example, one female leader who has been very pivotal in my career is actually the executive advisor to AWIP. Her name is Tatyana Mamut, and she was the chief product officer at Nextdoor.
I discovered her when I was first checking out AWS back in 2016. (I didn’t actually end up working there, of course, until 2019.) We had met at a recruiting event. I just thought she was super authentic and really warm, and we immediately hit it off. I think it’s that sort of relationship where it’s not so much transactional but rather we check in fairly regularly; I want to support her in her fantastically amazing career, and she’s just been very supportive of mine. In fact, she’s the one who connected me to my hiring manager, Sandy Carter, from AWS, who’s another female vice president.
And so I think it’s really those relationships that are just so important. And as someone who strives or wants to get to the next level, that’s probably my biggest suggestion: Find your sponsor. It doesn’t have to be someone on your same team or even within your same company. Tatyana and I have never worked together, even though she was a GM at one point in AWS as well. But she and I have just kept in touch, and she’s connected me to so many awesome people in our network.
And that’s really what a sponsor can do for you. Even if they’re just really loosely connected or one of your networking contacts. So make sure you start building a sponsor or even a set of sponsors because that’s going to be how you can make your way up the career ladder.
Any other advice for high schoolers abroad who are looking at a career in tech or entrepreneurship or management?
Regardless of what end path you’re looking for, my biggest suggestion is do something. So, if you’re interested in tech in general, go build an app. I mean, there are so many low-code options out there today. Build an app, design a wireframe, demonstrate — especially from an early age — that you have an interest in this area. And not only will it help guide you in terms of what you end up doing in college or the courses you take, but also in internships and your first full-time jobs once you graduate.
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