Tech’s diversity problem is about more than a company’s percentage of BIPOC employees. The industry’s overwhelming homogeneity leads to hardware and applications that are deployed half-baked, many times beta’ed with too small a user group and embedded with biases that can discriminate based on the race, gender, sexual orientation, physical ability, and socioeconomic status of the user.
Annie Jean-Baptiste, Google’s Head of Product Inclusion and author of Building For Everyone, is tackling the issue head on.
As the creator of the company’s rigorous inclusivity practices, the tech vet works with teams and senior leaders across product, engineering, and marketing functions to ensure underrepresented users feel seen and heard throughout the development process. She also emphasizes the importance of intersectionality, noting how overlapping identities affect user experience.
In this episode of Make Business Better, Quartz CEO Zach Seward and Jean-Baptiste dive into her four principles of product inclusion, the necessity of crafting more democratic and more thorough design roadmaps, and how companies can refashion their own R&D to build better products for all.