Building Diverse and Inclusive Product Teams

Building a more diverse and inclusive product team means building overall a more inclusive culture across your company. Here are a few tips:

• Start at the top: The CEO and most senior leaders in the organization need to care and prioritize inclusion or nothing else will matter. This means having a reasonable understanding of the issues, being open to learning more continuously, and being willing to make sacrifices and trade-offs.
• Consistent company values: The company values need to be consistent with the values of inclusion. This means the behaviours that are rewarded in the organization and the behaviours of the leaders need to align to inclusion. Is it a face time culture? Are people who achieve results but treat others poorly rewarded or protected? If so, the values aren’t inclusive.
• Set goals, measure and report: Just like any other priority in the organization, to make progress here you need to set goals, invest real resources, measure progress, and report on it frequently. Assessment should be qualitative and quantitative to capture the nuances as it won’t be easy to measure.
• Make career progression equitable: The most impactful equity issues are usually around promotions, titles and salary. To improve fairness companies should develop skills matrices / career ladders to clearly show what career progression looks like by title, develop an individually driven promotion process to move up that ladder reviewed by multiple people, and transparent salary bands (that are regularly audited) tied to those ladders. This level of transparency and clear process reduces bias and asymmetry of information.
• Policies & processes that prioritize the marginalized: Do you have strong parental leave and short term leave policies? What is the process for how meetings are run and who speaks? Do you have fully remote working options that are truly considerate of caregivers, those who can’t afford to live near a city and those with disabilities? Do you have gender neutral bathrooms?
• Safe spaces for marginalized groups: Create affinity groups or employee resource groups that are truly safe spaces for those only within the identified marginalized group to support each other. It is not the responsibility of these groups to work on DEI issues, but listen to and address the issues they raise. They know their own group’s needs the best.
• Training as a supplement, not a solution: If you aren’t doing much on the above, scheduling an “unconscious bias” training session and checking the box is ineffective and can actually do more damage than good. Training only works as a way to help supplement more systemic changes in explaining the why and helping those support the changes.
• Reduce bias in hiring: You might be turning away great talent and not even realizing it. Lots of ways that we recruit can be biased in which applicants we see and select. Reduce biased language in your job descriptions, reduce the number of requirements to those that are only truly needed, and reduce the number of steps involved in the interview process. Many people from marginalized groups will self-select out of a process if there are too many interview rounds or a take home assignment. This may be because of other life responsibilities such as caregiving, that often the most privileged do not need to worry about as much.
• Seek out diverse talent where people are: You need to do the work to find people outside of your own circle. Be careful with referral programs as it will exacerbate existing homogeneity. Partner with organizations that represent specific underrepresented groups. Consider alternative educational backgrounds. 

While not an exhaustive list by any means, these tips can help you with the thinking to make progress on this critical area. Also, as an employee, these are things you can look for to really understand if your company is aligning to your own values. 

One thing to be considerate of when building diverse product teams is that developing junior talent from underrepresented backgrounds is a great long term and sustainable strategy for improving the overall diversity of the field. We know that women, racialized communities, especially Black and Indigenous groups, LGBTQ+ individuals are all underrepresented in product. APM Canada is committed to getting more underrepresented people into entry level product roles and set up for success. So to all the product leaders out there in Canada, ask us how we can help connect you to great candidates from underrepresented groups through our programs.  

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