Méndez Palencia — Homepage Preview
Fall 2026 cohort — Applications open

Hi, I'm
Cristina.

I stopped building someone else's strategy.
Now I'm building things I'm truly proud of —
and helping other women do the same.

Strategic product designer · Entrepreneur & Founder · Stockholm
Apply to The Woman Entrepreneur Lab
Cristina Méndez Palencia — strategic designer and founder of The Woman Entrepreneur Lab, Stockholm

How can I help you?

Pick your starting point.

Flagship Programme

The Woman Entrepreneur Lab

For women in corporate who've been carrying an idea for too long. An 8-week structured sprint to test it with real customers — without quitting your job first. 7 spots. Stockholm. Starting September 12.

Learn more
Free Resources

Free tools before you leap into entrepreneurship

Know your actual financial runway before making any decision — and clear your Swedish digital footprint when you're ready to move on. Both free, both built for corporate women thinking seriously about what's next.

Get them free

You're probably caught in a loop that looks like this

Most women aren't failing to act
because they lack courage or capability.

They're caught in a cycle with no good exit — until someone shows them there's a third option.

01.

Something is off

The career looks right. The salary is real. But somewhere along the way, you started feeling like you're putting your best energy into someone else's vision. You have an idea. It's been with you for a while — clear enough to keep you up at night, not yet real enough to act on.

02.

The gap feels impossible

Quit without proof it works — and risk the financial security you've spent years building. Stay and keep waiting — and watch another year pass. You need evidence before you can act. But the only way to get evidence seems to be acting first. So you freeze.

03.

Another year passes

You stay. You tell yourself: when I have more runway. When things settle. When I finally feel ready. But "ready" never quite arrives. The conditions keep shifting. And the idea is still an idea. And the gap feels wider than ever.

The loop breaks when you have a third option: test your idea while your salary is still intact.
Real customer conversations. A working prototype. A first paying client. Before you resign.
That's what The Lab is built for.

See The Lab

The flagship programme · Stockholm

Build it while you still
have your job.
Leave when the data tells you to.

Most women I talk to aren't stuck because they lack ambition. They're stuck because they're facing a false choice — stay and keep the financial safety, or quit without a plan and risk everything. Neither feels right. Because neither is right.

7 women max 8-week sprint Kungsholmen, Stockholm Kickoff September 12
The Woman Entrepreneur Lab — in-person session, Stockholm
Scania · Unilever · Business Models Inc. · BSc Industrial Design Engineering — TU Delft · MSc Strategic Product Design — TU Delft
Cristina Méndez Palencia

About me

I make strategy tangible.
Through products, experiences,
and services people actually use.

For over 15 years, I translated complex strategy into things people could actually hold, use, and experience — digital products, physical services, new business models. I worked with organisations like Scania, Unilever, and Business Models Inc., where the gap between strategy and execution is wide and expensive. Closing it was what I was good at.

Then I burned out. Hard. And somewhere in that recovery, I had to ask a question I'd been too busy to face: whose vision am I actually building here? The answer was uncomfortable. The right people were benefitting from my work. They just weren't me.

"I realised I'd spent years being excellent at making other people's ideas real. I was very good at it. I was also completely hollowed out by it."

So I did something uncomfortable: I stopped. I took stock of what I actually cared about, what I was genuinely skilled at, and what I wanted to build that was mine. That question led to The Woman Entrepreneur Lab — and to the most value-aligned work of my career.

See what I'm building now

Why work with me

You don't need another course.
You need a method and a room.

Most programs for aspiring entrepreneurs are either a solo online course — cheap, lonely, easy to abandon — or a one-on-one coach — expensive, no peer accountability. The Lab is neither.

The method is built from real product work

I've spent years running customer discovery, shipping digital products alongside development teams, and learning what separates things people say they want from things they'll actually pay for. That's the method I brought to building The Lab — and what I teach.

I lived the process

My exit wasn't a leap — it was a plan. A financial buffer, a severance package, a validated idea. I built The Lab from the evidence I gathered along the way. I'm not teaching theory. I'm teaching what I did.

The room is the product

Seven women. Five in-person sessions. A cohort of people at a comparable level of experience and seriousness. The peer accountability isn't a feature — it's why this works when solo courses don't.

Cristina working — building her entrepreneur program for women