SUMMARY
In this episode of the Inclusive Exec Series, Maria Uvarova, SVP of Product Management at Stellantis, shares insights from her diverse career across tech and automotive industries. Uvarova discusses her journey, challenges as a minority in male-dominated fields, and the importance of mentorship and sponsorship. Highlighting key projects, she explains the significant impact of diverse perspectives on product innovation, such as virtual fashion try-ons and female-specific crash dummies. Uvarova emphasizes the need for inclusivity and why more diverse talent should join and transform the automotive industry.
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I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the first ever female crash dummy was actually created by a group of researchers led by a woman.
Welcome to the inclusive exec series where Inclusive Matters connects your D&I ambitions to measurable business results. Join us as we spotlight inclusive leaders around the world who are driving commercial success with effective DEI strategies.
Joining Inclusive Matters today is Maria Uvarova who began her career in the automotive sector at Volkswagen group. Her passion for digital innovation led her to e-commerce where she spent eight years at Amazon building, high-performing teams. Maria is currently SVP of product management. at Stellantis a leading global automaker and provider of innovative mobility, tech solutions.
Welcome, Maria.
Thank you so much. It’s great to be here.
Tell us about your background. What it is your doing?
Yeah, absolutely. So, as you already mentioned, I lead software product management teams at Stellantis, one of the biggest automotive manufacturers. And actually, funny enough, my career kind of made full turn when I came back to automotive, because I started my career in the automotive sector, just pretty much right after college, after I finished my mathematics and data management degree.
Uh, but after that, um, I kind of got a little bit disillusioned with automotive and moved away pretty soon to the tech sector where I spent 10 plus years doing fashion tech, travel tech, and then the, uh, probably biggest chunk, spent with Amazon doing software product management in different divisions of Amazon, which was actually great because it let me, uh, really learn so much about
very different aspects of technology and also software product management. But after that, I kind of discovered that, uh, during my absence, so much has happened in the automotive space. You know, we took a turn to software defined vehicles and overall took a turn to this huge digital transformation and modernization in the automotive sector.
And so I decided why not? Kind of leap back to where I started to see what changed. Well, spoiler alert, a lot has changed, but some things didn’t.
Where are you in the world?
I’m based in Munich, Germany, And with small changes kind of here and there, since in Luxembourg and Seattle, thanks to Amazon, I’m mostly based in Munich.
How big is your team?
It’s about 300 people
It sounds as though you are not native to Germany or to Seattle Where, where are you from originally?
Yeah, originally I’m from Latvia, so. when I think about diversity, I’m an immigrant. I’m a woman in traditionally male dominated industries, both automotive and tech.
Challenges in Tech and Automotive
So let’s talk more about that. How does it fit in to your work and what you’re doing?
When you just step into tech, you immediately realize that this area is pretty homogeneous.
What did you experience that made it clear for you there, there needs to be some change.
Well, I was the only woman in the room. You are invited to a meeting. You realize you’re the only woman in the room. You’re invited to some social gathering after work. You you go to a bar, maybe a sports bar. Your colleagues talk about some sports you’re not even interested in. And you are again, the only woman in the room. Maybe also on top of that, uh, the only immigrant. they all switch to some dialect that you only partially understand. So, yeah, that’s those are the challenges, and it’s difficult to work through that because, uh, it’s not at least in my experience, at least when it comes to, early in my career, not everybody was super welcoming.
Importance of Sponsorship and Mentorship
You talk about your experience coming in and being the only woman in the room. Was there a point where it began to become a barrier?
It did to a certain extent become a barrier and I, I was, however, lucky enough that I always had. Very good people surrounding me at work that helped me overcome that barrier, or just, you know, take a slightly different road and get to my point anyways. And this is why I always say that, uh, Sponsorship at work in your career.
This is just something that is absolutely critical. You can’t get far without that. I mean, I didn’t even consider calling it sponsorship back then, but I always had somebody at work who had my back. It was speaking on my behalf when I wasn’t in the room.
I managed to kind of find this type of people and cultivate this type of relationship where there was always somebody who was actually willing to advocate on my behalf when I wasn’t there. I wouldn’t be where I am today if it wasn’t for those people, right?
Because you’re absolutely right. You’re just not invited to so many meetings into so many rooms where decisions are being made and I was later on also in some of those meetings where my female colleagues or kind of other minorities, they just weren’t there and their fates were being discussed, right?
It could be a promotion review, it could be a discussion about some critical project and, uh, who’s gonna get it and who’s not, right? And something that would actually really impact their careers, And they were not there. They were not invited, they were not at the table.
You seem to have had a steady flow of impactful influencers for you. How did you make that connection?
Frankly, first, I was just probably lucky because I got an incredible mentor at my very first place of work. Somebody who genuinely wanted to help me learn and help me grow. And I observed his behavior.
And I actively tried to seek something similar when I made my career changes. I’m not saying that it’s easy, right, but when you are really mindful about what you are looking for, it is possible to figure out those early signs.
I was always very active in kind of seeking out this type of people. I I wouldn’t even call it networking, right? Frankly, I’m not great at it. I’m trying to push myself more out there, but I’m introverted, right? Not a surprise. I’m in tech, right? I’m a very typical kind of introverted tech employee, but at the same time, I’m pretty ambitious. And I, I never wanted to hide it. And also in pretty early stages, I was always talking about it. Of course,
About what? What were you talking about?
Talking about the fact that I’m ambitious, right? I’m part of the decision making process that I’m interested in more kind of, not necessarily high level jobs, but jobs where I can make an impact.
Where my full potential would actually be utilized. I was vocal about it with my managers. so that. When there is an opportunity, they would actually think about me, right? Because so many people, especially so many women, just never even talk about those things because they think that somebody would think less of them if they self promote.
You said you, you saw in your mentor, behaviors that were what I, what call them very inclusive, that helped you along. And then you looked for that further on, What kinds of questions would you be asking those potential mentors and leaders?
How is the work is distributed, how would we partner on certain things?
Would I be more second fiddle, or would we be really equal partners in certain things?
How would I know, and you know, that I’m ready to take on more responsibility?
What qualities and what type of results would I need to demonstrate so that we could both be sure that I’m ready for this next step?
What does success look like, so that we are on the same page. We have this kind of level set. in terms of what we both need to do, what I need to do, so that you feel that I’m successful in my job and I’m maybe ready for the next step.
Breaking Barriers and Biases
I’d like you to tell me more about, that journey through your career, up through the ranks, and where you recognize the barriers that you had to maneuver around.
Honestly, I was a little bit, I don’t know, surprised, disappointed to see that, uh, for me, the barrier was actually super typical because I always, we all like to think that we are unique, right? Not in this case, I think it was last year’s McKinsey report, uh, Women in the Workplace, it turned out that for me, the biggest barrier was exactly where they say it is.
Typically for women in the workplace, which is getting from the individual contributor level to this kind of first senior manager position.
When you really start managing senior people, this is where so many women. they never get to this position, and this is pretty much where the ceiling unfortunately is and this is where it was also for me So I’m just part of that statistics apparently
I was in that stage maybe a few years longer than needed, even though I was, as I already said, right, very active, very vocal, very ambitious. And still, when I compared myself to my male peers, they were promoted faster, even though we were. doing the same job, I maybe even received more praises, achieved better results. They actually climbed to that particular step of the ladder faster.
Because for whatever reason, people expect their managers to look and behave a certain way and women just don’t fit the mold.
You mentioned a very specific point around that McKinsey report, that for, for women, it would be getting to that really critical, you’re leading leaders role. Double click into that report where they would talk about women of color – their biggest barrier is moving into any first supervisor, manager role, and that’s much further down in that hierarchy, as you’ve mentioned.
So this is one of the reasons why you see even fewer women of color, in the leadership space. Those biases that you mentioned, I remember specifically getting one of my first performance reviews I was in a three year management development program. And in the bottom of the description, it asks whether this person should be on, an individual contributor or a general management track. And they put, individual. I didn’t agree with it at the time, but it didn’t click for me at that point in my career, what that was doing. So it was time for me to leave when I found out that this was always going to be that track. There was going to be no option to move.
And as you mentioned, being in the meeting rooms where you have the influence, you have the, title and hearing people discussing the futures of employees, who’s going to get what project, who’s going to be promoted. Do you step in? Because female leaders say that the burden for pushing diversity and inclusion tends to land on them because they are the only visibly diverse perspective in that leadership team. how does that resonate with you?
Every time I’m in one of those rooms, and I see that, you know, some, some woman’s career is being discussed and nobody else is stepping in, And this just gives me pause if this burden really falls on me, okay, it’s fine, I’ll carry this burden, but I can’t imagine, you know, myself being a woman and actually gone through those things and suffered through those things because they were not, not easy, I do, I do have emotional scars from some of those things, you know, when, when somebody told me that, um,
“You should be smiling more, um, in order to get to the next career step.”
or
“You’re a woman, you cannot be so assertive, it’s too much.”
again performance feedback, right, that I received. And those things, they, they actually, they scar you. They are more hurtful than people think. Every time I, I’m in one of those rooms now. I’ll do everything I can to break the bias and to support really more equal and diverse environment.
Inclusive Product Development
You talked about those examples, and I want to really make sure leaders get this point that, hey, it’s, it’s not something that’s happening over there. So let’s talk about, um, how Diversity, Equity, Inclusion shows up in the work that you do.
Yeah, um, I can give you two examples. One is from fashion tech line of work that I did when I was with Amazon and another one with automotive, actually a current one. So one of my biggest kind of revelations with fashion tech, um, was that, and it was during the time when most of my team was still, you know, male programmers.
And we were building a fashion product, a virtual try on. So how do you try the clothes actually virtually at home? Shoes, like how do you make sure that you don’t really need to, uh, go to the shop and try it on there? And my male colleagues, they were also like doing a lot of research and, uh, I mean, they did a great job. They discovered a lot of very important use cases, why people would actually use our product and why it would be important to them, like all the benefits of just convenience and speed, you don’t have to waste time and those things were all super important.
But it was for a female researcher on my team that discovered a super critical use case that really made me believe that we are doing something important. We are building a product that is important for women. First of all, she discovered a use case that women were really happy to use our prototype product because they said, now I don’t have to go to the store and take the clothes to the, trying room and feel bad in front of the shop assistant because she will judge me.
She will judge me that I’m too fat or too old or something else for these clothes and why the hell am I even taking it? Why the hell am I even trying it on? now, thanks to this virtual try on, I don’t have to do this anymore, I don’t have to go through this shame.
Oh my god, it was just such a revelation, that, you know, women really feel that.
How did this use case come up? Where did she get her moment?
She’s a researcher. So she did it through focus group and customer interviews. This is how she discovered this particular moment. And the interesting thing that she discovered is that the moment somebody spoke up about it, a lot of other women just piled on, right? So it’s definitely not a unique experience.
It’s just that nobody was willing to talk about it until, you know, somebody actually started this wave, right? And then it turned out it’s a very big use case. And, uh, when we then included it into the survey, right, because the problem with survey, uh, uh, unlike actual interviews is that usually people just pick A, B, C, and if you don’t include it, you wouldn’t even know that there was an option.
And that choice was never going to be there or wouldn’t have been there had she not picked up on this kind of dialogue.
Totally, totally. And we actually did face a bit of bias, uh, when we were working through this use case, because, uh, when we then brought it to the, like, you know, to the bigger group of researchers and, uh, product people to actually include it into the survey See whether or not we privatize building some specific functionality for this use case, for this group of people, we had a pushback.
“Oh no, it’s just one, one woman, you know, who feels uncomfortable about her body. It’s definitely not a big use case. Why would you bother about that?” So they really tried to minimize it based on their own biases.
So one person who was able to extract that data point then. it into the typical survey, I’m wondering why there would be pushback. to this particular area, if other questions, maybe don’t get the same pushback, maybe you can clarify that.
I think we got the pushback because. It was kind of unusual, and it also came up late in the process. We pretty much finalized the survey by that point in time. And none of other researchers, male researchers, ever discovered this type of use case. The only female researcher in the group brought this use case pretty much on the last day when we were already closing.
The survey, when we were discussing what goes into the survey and what doesn’t. What are the biggest use cases that we discovered through the customer interviews that we think we would like to actually follow up on in the survey to get more, quantitative data to actually understand the magnitude, right?
And so since she brought it in so late in the game and she was the only one, the outlier, Right? It was a little bit of a weird dynamic when people just, you know, “We pretty much finalized the survey. Why, why reopen it? It’s just so much hassle. Just let it go. It cannot be that big.”
You know, this type of thing. So nobody, nobody was, doing anything malicious. It’s just that it’s an afterthought. It’s just another small women problem. can’t be that big.
Tell me what happened next?
Well, the thing is that, um, it actually went into the survey and more than 50 percent of women actually ticked that
More than 50 percent of women. Wow!
More than 50 percent of women actually, like, I don’t know, I mean, of course we were probably, our survey went to online shoppers, right? So maybe that’s not your typical, um, boutique visitor who really enjoys it and enjoys, you know, the personal experience, personal shopper experience maybe or something like that.
Exactly, exactly. They’re our clients. And they specifically, uh, answered that this is why they prefer to shop online.
That’s why this virtual try on was so critical for them. Because, uh, before. You know, they still didn’t really want to go to the physical store, but they kind of pushed themselves sometimes because there were no alternative and now they had an alternative. So we discovered it’s like really 50 percent plus.
And thanks to that, uh, we actually started thinking about this client as our probably major client. Major customer, major use case. So what do we do for her? How do we make sure that she feels better about herself during this type of trial, uh, trial period? And we really then started thinking about more inclusive language, and, uh, how do you figure out how to maybe ask about, you know, your body type in a less intrusive way, So we don’t want to sound intrusive. We actually started also doing a bit more focus groups in that specific direction. We removed the question about your weight, because if you give us your height and you talk a little bit in more generic terms about your body type, we actually don’t need your weight to determine the right size for you.
Uh, but again, you know, originally our idea was just right from the get go, we ask about your weight, yeah? That’s just such a typical thing to do, like in the doctor’s office. Let’s see, this is. This, this is, one little thing
This body conscious female buyer was was now identified where that person had not been before.
It might have been, we have women, buyers, and we have men buyers, but now it was honing in on this diverse aspects.
That’s incredible. Did you just out of curiosity, did it go further? You know, did the pebble in the water have a ripple effect?
I don’t know about a ripple effect, The product was successful. our user growth was phenomenal. very visible and, user engagement was really high. We had, high retention. So people came back again and again for more. They kept shopping with us.
And one thing in terms of ripple effect that did come out of it was actually that we need to make sure that research teams were more diverse because it just was so obvious that in that particular case, one female researcher out of four and all the other three were male, she was the one discovering this critical use case and she discovered it because she herself was a woman and could identify it. Uh, with the interviewees.
I’m glad to hear this. I talk about, Acts Of Inclusion. They’re the small everyday gestures that you can use to, invite and welcome a person and their perspectives into your environment. These start the ripple effect.
Revolutionizing Automotive Safety
Let me tell you the second story, because I think it’s a good one too.It’s more about the industry in general.
In the automotive industry, when you look at the crash statistics, women are statistically better drivers. They get into accidents less, statistically speaking, but when they do, they sustain worse injuries.
So it’s less probable to happen if you’re a woman, because statistically women get into accidents less, but if that happens as a woman, you have 70 percent more chance to sustain severe, serious injuries versus a man. And that’s really because of the crash tests, the way they were done in the industry. There were no crash dummies really developed specifically for modeled upon women up until astounding 2019. 2019 was the first special really modeled after a real woman crash dummy created. In Sweden, by a team of researchers led by Dr. Astrid Linde. And this was a breakthrough for the industry because a lot more companies started using her crash damage to test specifically with, female dummies. My company also adopted it as one of the first ones.
And this is a very important thing for me. When I think about how we develop our products, also our software products for the automotive industry, when it comes to infotainment, when it comes to assisted driving, uh, products, uh, within the car. How can we think more about women? Because obviously they have been an afterthought for so many years.
And given the fact that women make up 70 plus percent of all decision makers in terms of car purchases in the world, because they don’t just decide for themselves, they actually decide for their families, right? They are the decision makers when it comes to the decision, what car the family will purchase. But we’re not building cars for them. Not entirely. Not yet. And this fact about actually how late in the game we started to crash testing. Thinking about female drivers, that is, that is shocking, right? So, and that’s why also for me, it’s just so important right now to be part of the automotive industry and, uh, see how we can make that, uh, more inclusive because, you see,
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the first ever female crash dummy was actually created by a group of researchers led by a woman.
Future of Diversity in Automotive
For the challenge of bringing other diverse groups into the automotive space, what do you think, what would, what would attract them to the industry?
First of all, the industry is changing. When I, as I said, right, my first job out of college was actually in the automotive industry, right? It was super conservative, pretty much male dominated. And. I even remember we had a training, like how to become, uh, how to become a better employee, a better leader in the automotive space.
And you know, what we were taught. How do you make your voice sound, more profound. Lower, lower register, so that you sound more like men, because, and they even told us that to us, point blank, you know, female voices, they’re irritating. So, high pitch, high pitch voice is irritating.
That’s, that’s telling. I’m going to us that as a title. Women’s voices are irritating. That’ll get people to listen.
So if you want to be heard, if you want to be respected, try speaking in a lower register. But okay, so as you can hear, I never really
And, and those were the times and it was kind of normal. I didn’t even realize, you know, how disturbing it was until I got some years difference
I can really 100 percent assure all the women that want to start in the automotive today, that the industry has changed and it changed, profoundly, it changed a lot. We have a lot of women leaders now that really paved the way and you can see that they’re doing a great job. You can see that we have female CEOs of huge automotive companies. We have females in the boards and so on and so forth.
That’s why I think it is also kind of mission driven, quite frankly, to join this type of industry now, to really make sure that you help get us to the tipping point, you know, when it really becomes inclusive. We need, we need more talented women to get us there.
So, how can people, learn more about you, and hear what you’re up to?
The best way is through my LinkedIn. I try to be relatively active there and post about our most recent interesting product launches and also my thoughts about, leadership and, inclusion
Well, Maria, for your time today and to all the listeners and viewers, we’ll see you soon.
Thank you
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