If you don’t know these women yet, you will soon. These fantastic women in growth are driving their company’s user retention and revenue numbers sky high. From marketers to product managers to software engineers, these women know exactly how to dig into the numbers and drive data-informed product decisions. Here are our picks for the top women in growth to follow in 2016.
**Adelyn Zhou** is a seasoned advisor, leader, and consultant in product marketing and business strategy. She was Lead of Growth Marketing at Nextdoor, where she grew their user base 7x by overseeing all growth, product, and email marketing strategies. Currently she’s the founder and CEO of Alight Labs, a growth consulting firm that helps startups execute a successful growth strategy, and co-founder of the Greylock Growth Community.
Alicia Shiu is a product marketing manager at Amplitude Analytics where she leads product launches and marketing campaigns. She also connects with customers to hear how they use Amplitude to understand user behavior and drive growth. In 2016, Alicia was listed by Drift Blog as one of “71 Women Shaping the Future of Product Marketing.”
Angela Li is a growth engineer Dropbox. She was the first software engineer on their growth team, where she focuses on building experiments, A/B testing, and instrumenting analytics.
Anum Hussain is a senior growth marketer at Sidekick, a startup up within HubSpot. She set their initial content strategy and grew their blog traffic from 0 to 55,000 monthly views in 6 months, was also involved in their early onboarding, retention, and virality strategies. In 2015, she was named one of BetaBoston’s “25 Most Innovative People Under 25.”
Chunyan Song is a growth engineer at Uber. Her job is to optimize rider acquisition by using trend analysis, A/B testing, funnel optimization, and virality. She’s an expert at balancing sustainable, scalable growth and profitability. Chunyan received her doctorate in computer science from the University of Chicago.
Julia Lipton is the Head of Growth at Rise and is involved in product marketing, marketing communications, and product management. At her previous marketing position at Quixey, she helped scale the company from 4 to 150+ people.
Julia Niazov is a mobile growth marketer at Hotwire, where she measures key KPIs to assess user acquisition, engagement, and retention of Hotwire’s mobile app.
Julie Zhou is the Lead Product Manager of Growth at Yik Yak and a mentor at 500 Startups. She’s an expert in growth strategy, product and mobile marketing, and “all things analytics.” Prior to Yik Yak, she was a “growthmaster” at Hipmunk, where she led user acquisition programs that drove more than 50% of their new mobile user growth.
Naomi Pilosof Ionita is the Senior Director of Growth & Product at Invoice2go. Naomi has experience in implementing a data-driven approach to product development as well as building a product-driven growth teams from the ground up. She’s focused on driving retention and monetization. Previously, Naomi was the Director of Growth at Evernote, where she focused on driving growth through user retention and conversion and increased their mobile app retention by double digits.
Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré is the Chief Strategy Officer at Inturact, an integrated marketing agency, as well as an independent SaaS consultant. She’s an expert at finding ways to improve retention and reduce churn at SaaS companies; her specialties lie in growth marketing, growthhacking, and community management. She also shares fantastic SaaS resources on her much-followed Twitter account.
Nikila Srinivasan is one of the people responsible for making sure that Facebook’s ads work, look great, and are tailored to different audiences all around the world, particularly in new markets like India, Turkey, and Kenya. Facebook launched a program called Creative Accelerator earlier this year to help brands and their agencies make their ads work on every mobile device and connection type.
Stefanía Ólafsdóttir is the Head of Research & Analysis at Plain Vanilla Games (the studio behind QuizUp). She’s a mathematician who analyzes and understands user behavior data to look at the impact of feature changes.
Susan Su is a growth marketer and distro partner at 500startups, where she develops growth operations strategies for portfolio companies. Her specialty is in inbound marketing and email; previously, she was heading up the sales team at AppSumo.
Vivian Qu is an iOS engineer on the growth team at Pinterest. She mainly focuses on worldwide user activation strategies (i.e. new user onboarding and education) and has worked on viral invites and user signup projects.
Okay, so why is this important? Women continue to be underrepresented in tech, regardless of role or position; those within the industry are rarely highlighted for their accomplishments and expertise. These women deserve to be recognized for being kickass growth experts.
Be sure to follow our Women in Growth Twitter list to connect with everyone we’ve listed here and more! We’ll continue to add to our list based on your recommendations.
