Deborah Liu

When Deborah Liu took the CEO job at Ancestry, the company was 40 years old and had just been acquired for $4.7B.

Her task: modernize a legacy brand, grow the business, and make the product resonate beyond its core demographic of Western European ancestry.

In her first 30 days, she met with more than 60 employees across the company and asked each one the same five things.

What’s working?

What’s broken?

What should we be doing that we’re not?

What would you do in my seat?

What do I need to understand about this company?

She pushed the company to invest in records that had been overlooked (like digitizing the Freedmen’s Bureau archive) and made those resources available for free.

She worked on expanding the product globally and made it more relevant for people whose family histories aren’t well represented in traditional archives.

She also changed how Ancestry worked internally.

When the company announced a return-to-office policy, employees pushed back.

So she dropped the requirement.

That decision kept women in the workforce who might have left and helped the company hold on to its talent.

Before Ancestry, Deb spent nearly 12 years at Facebook.

She launched Facebook Marketplace and Facebook Pay.

She led commerce across all of Meta’s major apps: Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp.

Marketplace alone became a platform used by over a billion people each month.

She also founded Women in Product, a nonprofit that now has over 30,000 members.

She started it after realizing that Facebook’s hiring process for PMs was screening out women by requiring a CS degree.

She pushed to drop that requirement, changed the interview process, and opened up more pathways for women to break into product roles.

Today, she sits on the boards of Intuit and Duke’s School of Engineering.

She’s been named to the NACD Directorship 100, Business Insider’s most powerful female engineers, and PaymentsSource’s most influential women in payments.

She’s also the author of “Take Back Your Power,” a book about navigating systems that weren’t designed for you.