Buiding the Kimolian Academy: How Eleni Lialiamou is helping women break into product

For Eleni Lialiamou, Kimolian Academy started quietly—coaching sessions on weekends, shared Google Docs, informal meetups in borrowed rooms. But today, Kimolian Academy is becoming a rising community for women in product.

Founded by Eleni, a product executive with a background in engineering, business and leadership across Europe, the initiative has grown from a passion project into a structured, high-impact practice, where women from underrepresented backgrounds gain real-world product skills, build meaningful confidence, and launch themselves into the field.

We sat down with her for an in-depth conversation on how it all came to be, what makes the programme different, and where the future of product is headed. 

I’ve always been in product. I studied computer science and electrical engineering, and spent years in engineering-adjacent roles before transitioning fully into product management. Over time, I led larger and more diverse teams—but what I kept noticing was how few women there were around me.

Even back in university, we were just 10 women in a class of 100. But the imbalance didn’t go away as my career progressed—it showed up in meetings, hiring shortlists, leadership teams. I started mentoring women in my teams, helping them transition from roles like QA, scrum masters, or account managers into product.

Eventually, I began running weekend coaching circles—informal spaces where women could learn, practice, and explore product as a real career path. Kimolian Academy was the natural evolution of that. I wanted to create a repeatable, scalable, and intentional structure for helping women move into product roles with the skills and confidence to thrive.

It’s a 12-week, hands-on group coaching programme—but it’s not just about training. It’s about working in real teams, on real problems, under real constraints.

Each cohort is made up of women from across the globe. Many have never met in person. Some are changing careers. Others are returning to work after raising children. A few are already adjacent to product, but lack formal experience.

They’re given a challenge space and they go from zero to one. Discovery, competitive research, journey mapping, ideation, prototyping, stakeholder presentations. It’s the full cycle.

But we also focus heavily on the human skills—how to collaborate, how to disagree well, how to navigate uncertainty, and how to advocate for your own ideas. It’s product learning with emotional intelligence at the core.

It’s very diverse. We’ve had women aged 23 to 50+. Some are from London boroughs like Tower Hamlets or Camden, others are joining from Nigeria, Egypt, Canada, Saudi Arabia, Kosovo, Austria.

Their career stories vary too. Some were designers, researchers, community managers. Others were out of the workforce for personal or health reasons. Some are in adjacent fields and want to move into product, others are starting fresh.

What they all have in common is a desire to grow, to learn, and to build something meaningful with others. And what’s amazing is watching women who didn’t know each other, often spread across time zones and cultures, create something together in 12 weeks that companies take months to align on.

We deliberately create cross-functional, cross-cultural teams. These women don’t know each other at the start. That’s intentional—it mimics the real-world challenge of building trust and collaboration from scratch.

They get a defined opportunity space—for example, how to help underserved women discover sustainable skincare products. And they go through discovery, research, synthesis, ideation, all the way to pitch.

There are no hypothetical frameworks here. They do customer interviews, run focus groups, use tools like Dovetail for synthesis, UI Wizard or Figma for wireframing, and they present their solutions to a real audience. It’s very real-world and immersive.

There are a few. The most immediate is the experience paradox—you can’t get a job without experience, but you can’t get experience without a job.

That’s why the portfolio element is so important. Our graduates can say, “Here’s what I built, here’s the research I ran, here’s the prototype, here’s how I made trade-offs.”

But there’s also the confidence gap—especially for women coming back to work after a break, or those from underrepresented backgrounds. Product requires a voice. You need to be able to say, “This is what I think we should build.” That takes practice. That’s what we give them.

Finally, there’s the reality that many companies don’t have structured pathways for early-career or returning talent. That’s a huge missed opportunity for fresh thinking and diverse lived experience.

"Some of our strongest graduates are women who’ve raised four children, pivoted careers in their 40s, and delivered incredible product work. They just needed a bridge."

We’ve built a living community. Every graduate becomes part of an ongoing network—with monthly calls, knowledge-sharing, alumni workshops, and community-led sessions.

Many graduates return to teach others—whether it’s a session on Dovetail, design heuristics, or usability testing. That culture of mutual support is really what sustains the work.

We also connect graduates with mentorship opportunities and increasingly with companies who are open to working on real case studies or innovation briefs. My next goal is to expand those partnerships further—to bring more companies into the fold.

AI is already changing product work—so we integrate it from day one.

We run sessions on tools like Perplexity, Dovetail, UI Wizard, Replit, and others. The goal is not just to know the tools, but to understand how and when to use them.

What we stress is that AI should be your assistant, not your replacement. We don’t want to outsource thinking—we want to enhance it. So we teach critical thinking, synthesis, and pattern recognition.

And in 2025, we’re launching a dedicated cohort focused on AI agents and workflow redesign—training women to work with engineers to rebuild processes using automation. I believe this is a field where more jobs will emerge—and women need to be equipped for it now.

Honestly, it’s challenging. Hiring has slowed. There’s still a bias toward traditional candidates and linear CVs. That makes it harder for women pivoting careers, or coming from underrepresented backgrounds.

We’re trying to counter that by offering real-world experience, strong portfolios, and community advocacy. But companies need to meet us halfway. They need to recognise the value of diverse perspectives—not just as a nice-to-have, but as a source of innovation.

The next step is building more partnerships with companies—especially ones open to letting our cohorts work on real, live briefs. It’s a win-win: companies get new ideas, and our women get exposure.

We’re also focusing on community visibility—showing up at events like #mtpcon, connecting graduates with hiring managers, and giving them a platform to share their work. This isn’t just about me—it’s about them showing up and being seen.

And finally, we want to keep evolving—bringing in new tools, new learning models, new types of roles, especially in the AI agent space.

Further reading