Sessions: WomenTech Global Conference

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Session	Speaker	Share to Vote
Carmen Leiser Director/CEO at Movi Collective	Leading Without Extracting: A New Model of Power, Capital, and Community Movi began as a question, not a company: What if professional and financial ecosystems were designed around trust, reciprocity, and long-term judgment instead of transactions, status, and extraction? In the aftermath of the financial crisis, its founders—senior leaders from global finance—set out to test whether a different kind of network could produce better outcomes for people and capital. This talk shares what we’ve learned from building Movi as a live experiment in collective intelligence. Movi brings together founders, operators, investors, and executives across fintech,… read more
Zhixuan Zhang Product Designer at IBM	Designing Trustworthy AI Products: UX Patterns to Manage Hallucinations, Bias, and Uncertainty As AI features move from demos into real products, teams face a recurring challenge: users must make high-stakes decisions with systems that can be uncertain, biased, or wrong. In this talk, I’ll share practical UX patterns for building trustworthy AI experiences—especially for enterprise tools—covering how to communicate uncertainty, reduce over-reliance, design human oversight, and create audit-ready interactions without overwhelming users. Drawing from my experience designing complex B2B products and AI-powered experiences, I’ll walk through a repeatable framework: (1) define… read more
Misha Sheth Product Manager at Google	Career Hopscotch: Navigating your Journey in Technology The traditional "linear" career path is a myth in the rapidly evolving tech landscape. This session introduces the concept of Career Hopscotch: a strategic approach to navigating a non-linear journey through the technology sector. Using my own transition from Tech Consulting to Technical Account Management and eventually into Product Management at Google Cloud, I will share how to identify transferable "pivot skills," build a cross-functional network, and rebrand your experience for each new leap. Participants will learn how to turn a "jagged" resume into their… read more
Neelima Jyesta Senior AI Technical Product Manager	The Future of Tech: How Women Product Managers Can Shape Industry Trends In an era where technology is rapidly transforming our world, the voices shaping these innovations matter more than ever. This talk explores how women product managers are uniquely positioned to influence emerging technologies like AI and Environment, Health & Safety (EHS) tech, bringing critical perspectives that can redefine industry standards and ethical frameworks. Drawing from our experience developing AI-assisted operational learning software, we'll demonstrate how women's leadership in product management can create more inclusive, effective, and ethically… read more
Selu Gupta Engineering Manager at Tektronix	Give Yourself Permission to Lead Women, especially in technical fields where they might be "the only", hold back on leadership opportunities. They may discredit themselves before anyone else has a chance to. However, in today's world of technical industries, good leadership goes beyond technical skills and needs more soft skills, which may not get the same emphasis. This presentation looks at the skills that future leaders need, how to recognize them, develop them and then set yourself on the path to career progression. This will allow you to take ownership of your own career and navigate the next stage of… read more
Sanya Engineer Lead Product Manager at PayPal	Scaling Products to Millions Globally Bringing a product from concept to millions of users across international markets is exciting, but far from simple. In this lightning talk, I’ll share practical lessons from my experience leading large-scale product development at PayPal, exploring how experimentation, data-driven decision making and cross-market adaptation drive success. I’ll also highlight the challenges of launching high-impact consumer and merchant products globally and strategies teams can use to navigate complexity while delivering meaningful outcomes. Did you like this session? Share to vote.
Caitlin Kamm Head of People at Envoy	Happiness at work: How people metrics guide strategic HR leadership in the future of work In today’s rapidly evolving workplace, employee experience isn’t a “nice-to-have.” It's a strategic advantage. Yet too many organizations rely on intuition instead of data when making decisions about hybrid work models, culture, retention, and performance. In this session, Caitlin Kamm, Head of People at Envoy, will share how pioneering people leaders can operationalize happiness and well-being metrics to drive business outcomes. Her legal training– rooted in evidence, compliance, and structured analysis – allows her to approach soft skills with hard data. Caitlin will demonstrate how an… read more
Akanksha Gupta Senior Software Engineer at Google	Menstrual cycle: A superpower - What I wish I always knew How many of you feel the subtle differences when you're on your period? Did you ever go into a guilt/denial phase, when you prioritized health over work? Did you overstress and felt guilty that you worsened your menstrual cycle? This is a sensitive topic for quite a few people who menstruate. Do you know that the stress is real? Do you know the cycle is your superpower if you work with it? You wear multiple hats at work, as a Software Engineer or any other job profile in Tech. Get to know how to best sync your roles with the phases of your cycle and stay guilt-free! Let… read more
Lori Nishiura Mackenzie Co-founder at Stanford VMware Women's Leadership Innovation Lab	The Inside-Outside Condundrum You may have heard advice like, "Negotiate like a man," or "You have to work twice as hard as a man to get half the recognition." What do you do? Do you work harder to get the results or acknowledge that the playing field isn't level? This exact question is the heart of the inside-outside conundrum. In this talk, we will acknowledge the interplay between internal motivations and external forces in order to achieve more and change the rules of the game. Did you like this session? Share to vote.
Madhuri Dhulipala Managing Director at BlackRock	How do you drive AI Productivity Gains into Business Outcomes? As organizations move into AI adoption into all parts of the organization, most organizations miss out on understanding the levers in converting productivity to. business outcomes and what are the impediments to the ROI on AI investment. This talk will walk through the typical challenges and a systematic breakdown of the typical levers that organizations can deploy for enablement, transformation and measurement to ensure successful AI Adoption and ROI. Did you like this session? Share to vote.
Leelavathi Kumili Engineer Lead at Starbucks	Model Context Protocol for Humans: Applying AI System Design to Team Leadership Every AI model has a protocol, a system that delivers the right context, tools, and mission so it can perform at its best. When did we last design the same for our teams? MCP(Model Context Protocol) is the open standard that connects an AI model to the real-world data and tools it needs. In this talk, I'll show how the same architecture applies to engineering leadership. Your team is the model. You are the MCP Server. And your job is not to direct, it's to connect. Drawing on real examples from Starbucks, we'll explore how three primitives-… read more
Aysha Khan CIO and CISO at Treasure Data	Inward to Upward: Your Portfolio of Impact - The New Blueprint for Having It All Women are expected to choose: career or family, ambition or alignment, excellence or ease. But what if that choice itself is the problem? In this energizing and practical talk, Aysha Khan, CIO, CISO, and transformation coach, introduces the Portfolio of Impact: a new framework for women leaders to design a life where multiple domains of impact thrive together, not in competition. Drawing on leadership psychology, real executive experience, and strategic reframes, this talk rethinks “having it all” from a myth of perfection to a framework of alignment, where… read more
Julia Atalla Founder & CEO, Executive Coach at Brightworthy	Leading through the Identity Shift: When your role evolves faster than you do In periods of rapid change—AI disruption, organizational redesign, expanded leadership scope—many senior leaders find themselves quietly unsettled. Not because they lack skill or experience, but because their internal identity hasn’t caught up to who the role now requires them to be. This talk introduces the concept of identity shift—the often-unspoken transition leaders undergo when who they’ve been no longer fully fits who they are being asked to become. Drawing on decades of executive leadership and coaching, Julia Atalla names how identity lag shows up in decision-making,… read more
Stacy All VP of Product Design at Suki AI	Defining Success: Measuring Human Impact in AI Products AI is reshaping how products get built, but who's defining success? Too often, design and research teams watch from the sidelines as engineering metrics (speed, accuracy, efficiency) become the default measures of AI product performance. Meanwhile, the metrics that matter most (usability, trust, meaningful human outcomes) go unmeasured or get deprioritized. Design and research teams can change this dynamic by establishing responsibility for how AI success is measured, ensuring human impact is central from the start. Drawing on an approach I presented at the Federal Reserve… read more
Tiffany Rosik CEO at TGR Management Consulting LLC	Beyond the Hype: Using AI in DevOps to Shrink Delivery Timelines and Transform How Teams Work AI in DevOps is often framed as a deeply technical capability reserved for elite engineering teams—but in practice, its impact reaches far beyond code. In this session, I’ll share a real-world case study from a client implementation where AI was embedded into the DevOps lifecycle to dramatically reduce time-to-implementation for a new software solution. We’ll explore how introducing AI into build, test, and deployment workflows created ripple effects across project management, business and systems analysis, and UI/UX design—changing not just how work gets done, but how teams… read more
Ivna Curi Founder & Leadership Advisor at Brave Culture Institute	Why Smart Organizations Still Stay Silent: Designing Accountability When Speaking Up Is Risky Most organizations believe they have a communication or psychological safety problem. They don’t. They have a systemic accountability failure under power differences, risk, and consequences. In modern organizations, especially in tech, speaking up is rarely neutral. It carries political exposure, reputation risk, career consequences, and asymmetric power dynamics. Under these conditions, silence is a rational response to a poorly designed system. Yet most leadership and communication frameworks still rely on the same fragile assumption: If people… read more
Smita Saxena Board Member / Executive Director	AI Agents in the World of Public Education AI is rapidly entering classrooms, but most tools fail at the same point: translating data into action teachers can realistically take, week after week, inside real constraints. This talk explores how AI agents can meaningfully support public education when paired with human expertise, using a human-in-the-loop model grounded in real teacher workflows. Drawing from live deployments across charter and district schools, I’ll share how AI agents are used to analyze fragmented classroom data, surface the “why” behind student performance, and rapidly generate targeted reteach… read more
Kristin Gross Founder, CEO & Entrepreneur at Navdee	Scaling a HealthTech Company Early users and traction may come easily but how do you retain and grow your HealthTech product usage? In this session, we’ll look at ways to strategically and effectively scale your tech product from a combined product, marketing, and sales approach. Did you like this session? Share to vote.
Anjali Anagol-Subbarao Board Director at JobTrain	Agentic Commerce: Letting Sales Sell while AI Agents do the rest Sales teams spend more time on administrative work than on selling, inferring customer calls, configuring quotes, navigating systems, chasing approvals, and fixing errors. This friction slows growth and drains human potential. In this talk, I introduce Agentic Commerce: a new paradigm where AI agents orchestrate and automate the complex, behind-the-scenes work of commerce gtm tasks, quoting, pricing, renewals, compliance, and fulfillment, so humans can focus on what they do best: building relationships, solving problems, and closing meaningful deals. Drawing from… read more
Julie Iskow CEO at Workiva	From Builder to CEO: How Technical Leaders Earn the Right to Run the Company Technical leaders are increasingly stepping into the C-suite — but the leap from builder to CEO requires far more than technical excellence. In this session, Julie Iskow shares her path from engineering and product leadership to CIO, CTO, COO in tech companies, and then finally to becoming the CEO of a global public enterprise software company. She'll talk about the hard-earned lessons that allowed her to earn credibility beyond technology. Drawing on real executive decisions, mistakes, and inflection points, she breaks down what actually changes as leaders move from… read more