 Hey everyone, my name is Gaurav Hardikar and I'll be your moderator for the today's panel on D&I and the future product management report. Before we start, there's a few housekeeping items I want to mention. We have a great group of panelists here, but I want to provide a disclaimer that each panelist is representing their own views and not the views of their company and we're going to be going through questions that you're submitting. So please make sure you continue submitting on Slido or uploading others. It's on the right side of the screen or next to the stage chat tab. Before we kind of go into the questions itself, I'll kick it off with some intros. I'll just go for it. I'm currently VP of product at Brilliant Smart Home. I started off my career as a strategy consultant at Accenture and got into product at Trulia and Zilligroup almost a decade ago. I've been involved with product school for quite some time and was a product school instructor twice. I'll pass it off to secure to go next. Hi everyone. I'm Zach here. I currently work at Hoppin, which we're all on right now, leading one of our newer product verticals and I've been in product management for about eight years, most of which in big tech between Microsoft and Amazon and a smaller company named Shift. That's in the e-commerce space for used cars and I'm based out of New York. Thanks, Akir. Gauri, do you want to go next? Yeah, sure. Hi everyone. I'm Gauri. I am currently working as director of product and program at Zilligroup and I've been with product school for about a year. I teach a lot of their cohorts and I am based out of Texas. Excited to be here today. Leo, how about you next? Thank you, Rob. Hi everyone. I'm Leo. I work at Google as a global product lead. I've been dabbling in product for seven years and have the opportunity to work on our ads product, Google ads product. And I've had opportunity to be an instructor for product school, which was a fantastic experience. And I'm really excited to be here today. I'm also based in Oslo, Norway. Eva. Thanks, Rob. Hello, everyone. It's an honor to be here, have the opportunity to talk with all of you. My name is Eva Fung. I'm the head of product for Twilio, the founder of our team. Before joining Twilio, I was at Amazon, HP, ServiceNow. I was over in the startup before. Spend more than a decade in the enterprise world, cloud and build SaaS and cloud products. I'm also a instructor at product school. Thanks, Eva. Last but not least, Marty. Hey there. I'm Marty. I am a director of product here at Salesforce. Currently, I'm working on what I call Slackforce, which is we are rebuilding our products into Slack. And so I'm kind of working between both companies right now. So it's a fun thing. I've been in product for a really, really long time. I also teach product outside of work at the University of Washington, Seattle. And I'm super excited to talk to everyone today. Awesome. So let's get started with some of these questions. I'll start off with Akir to kick it off. What does diversity mean to you? Yeah. So because this is product con, I'm going to try and tie this to product as much as we can rather than give it a more generic answer. So I'm going to tie this to diversity of thought, and then I want to get the thoughts from the rest of the group as well. And so what I actually mean by that, and I think that's maybe a buzzword that is being used more lately, is really kind of how you think about the makeup of a team. The makeup of the team is, of course, there's a traditional D&I sense, but there's the aspects of personality and skill sets also playing a part of that role. And I think as you kind of have that diversity and build at the team, it's super important to have that balance. Because then each member of the team will have not only an equal opportunity to to learn from each other, but also an equal opportunity to grow. And then I think the growth aspect ultimately should be driven primarily from, it becomes more focused on performance and your ability to succeed rather than focused on just quotas or any of that sort. Thanks. Anyone else have any thoughts on this topic? Well, one thing I can think about is that I've always found diversity didn't mean something different to everyone. Right? But at its core, it's about inclusivity and being open to new ideas. Like anytime, you know, whether you're building a product, whether you're building a team, just being transparent and open communication has always meant a big thing for me, at least. Eva, I'll jump to you next for our next question. How can you get the leadership to focus on D&I as a priority? Yeah, that's a great question. I'll give it a short answer and a long answer. So the short answer is be an advocate. So what I mean by that, I think the diversity and inclusion is not only a leadership problem, it's not only impact the leadership, it's for all of us. So I think especially now we're at a product come, we're talking to product managers, put on your owner head, put on, really take ownership to solve this problem, because we should all be part of it, be advocated for diversity and inclusion culture, and really help driving, take actions to drive this in your company. Meaning that you can be the advocate, talk to the leadership, you can help set goals for your team and your company. You can also set the success metrics for the D&I for your organization. So I think that by doing this, it will really get the leadership teams attention, not only the leadership, but everybody's attention to be part of the drive, part of the force to drive the diversity and inclusion. No, it makes a lot of sense. I'm actually curious, Marty, having been at Salesforce and then now trying to do this across Slack and Salesforce, is it interesting that you're going through that kind of merger, how that impacts both companies? Maybe there's something to say there. Oh, absolutely. I think they have very similar, but distinctly different company cultures, and the approach to diversity, I think, is slightly different, but similar. And so really the melding of these two worlds has been really fun and interesting to see, and we're going to continue to meld and kind of come together. It's only been a few months since the acquisition closed, but I think the biggest thing that we've really impressed upon both sides of the house for everyone to understand is that shared level of empathy, because I think diversity really starts with having empathy for someone else's lived experience and understanding that their differences are there in their present, right? And so you have to be conscious of people on the other side of it who ignore diversity altogether and say like, oh, we're all here together. No, no, no, we're all different. But let's celebrate that and let's lean into that. And I think that helps, whether you're working across two companies merging together, or if you're just meeting people for the first time. That's an excellent point. I mean, on that note, I've always thought that it's about, there's a bottoms up approach as well as a top down approach to this. Like there's a lot of things you can do in your current team or your current role to kind of push this. And then I think for leadership, you can kind of set an example even within your own team to do that. And also you want to discuss values and culture with the leadership team and make sure your thoughts are heard. Leo, being at Google, obviously a much larger company in general, how do you think that impacts something there? No, absolutely. You're right that in terms of taking ownership, and you can do that from the bottom up, as you say, in being yourself and being in a psychological safe space is very important as an individual. But I think as leaders, those who have the real responsibility, it's very important that they go beyond their comfort zone and engage people who are not like them in all different ways and approaches. And I think especially if you want to be a good example, it's also mentoring and actually taking the time to coach and bring up talent which don't look like yourself in any way you're performing. I think that's a really good opportunity to show and demonstrate to others that there is an opportunity to learn if you engage with others. And we all know better, more diverse team produce better products. It's that simple. Thanks, Leo. Anyone else have anything to say on this topic? I'll chime in real quick, just from a Hopin standpoint. I think as the world moves closer to being more remote, more spread out, it's kind of on leadership to think about how you structure your teams to be present in many parts of the world. And by nature of doing that, you're itself enabling diversity. And I think so the empathy component that we talked about earlier, I think once you bring the empathetic aspect to that, then you kind of have the best of both worlds, both geographically and then kind of internally as well in terms of the culture. So I think that's going to be super important as more companies embrace that remote global workforce over time. Yeah, I agree. I think one of the things we haven't covered here but which is also important from a whole company perspective too is hiring, right? We are in a great resignation. There's tons of roles open people are hiring more than ever did and so a great way to infuse diversity, new perspectives into your products are by hiring people with these different perspectives. That's something I impress all the time. Like we can't hire people who just love our products. Let's hire somebody who hates it and who wants to come in and fix it too. They're going to bring a level of energy that we probably need around here and that's important too. That's a great point. Yeah, absolutely. I agree. I think the upcoming future of product management report at Port Act School has been working on also showed this trend because the product management is one of the fast growing role on the market today and a lot of companies have this pipeline problem. It's really embracing the diversity inclusion will help to compensate the pipeline growth or talent pool. So I think this is definitely very crucial for the business growth also. Yeah, thanks for sharing that Eva. So I'll jump to the next question. When promoting DEI among leaders, how do you handle the statement around merit? Many leaders say we only go by merit and we can compromise on it to hire for diversity. Leo, I'll pass it over to you. Yeah, I would say the simple answer is you never compromise when you are when you're first, right? But at the same time, you want people who are talented. But if you only look for people who look like yourself, who have had your same experiences that you had, you won't find the true talent, right? So I would rephrase this a bit around merit and talent. I think that's two of the different things. The good thing about product as a field of narrative work on is that you can bring a lot of perspective with a lot of diverse backgrounds. So why not embrace that in all the different ways that's possible to embrace? I think it's, to be fair, especially for the last part, the question of many leaders say we only go by merit, that's the attitude in leadership work. There needs to be some coaching here, both from the top perspective, but also from bottom. I have to say individual product people can go up and say, hey, this is not right. We want to have people who are based on the talent and the opportunities they have, just like Sakir mentioned earlier today. And it's very important that we really embrace the opportunity to get people who know how to grow and know how to learn and then see how good they are. Not just based on, you know, they have great degrees or come from an interesting company. I think Leo actually mentioned because I think merit should be one of the criteria and it should not be the only criteria. I think that's the argument here. So merit should obviously play a big role. But once you get past that, you want to make sure that you have a diverse pool of candidates that you're looking at and not like focused on one of them. Like I definitely remember an experience where when I was talking to one of them hiring managers about a role to which I had referred a candidate, he mentioned that the candidate did not make it who I had referred, but they ended up hiring someone for the role and he was like, oh, he was white and American. So no wonder he got it. That was a stark, you know, comment because it means that the rest of them were not from a diverse pool or they were not like people were biased towards it. So that's where we are trying to make a change and merit definitely plays a big role in here. So I don't think anyone wants to question that, but I think there should be a big shift towards considering a wide variety of candidates. Yeah, I think I'm, I'm actually concerned, right? And merit in diversity and it's even being in this context together, right? I don't think that you have to sacrifice one or the other to get the right candidate. If you have the appropriate sourcing and recruiting things, you should always be getting diverse pools. And if you're not getting diverse pools, those are systemic issues that you have to fix within your own company. And then once you've done that, there, those things aren't, you're not choosing between, right? You're just trying to find the best candidate for the role and figure out how to do that. And then once people are in roles too, right? And you're moving people up, you know, same thing. You should not have, those are not two vectors that should be going or battling head to head. And when they are, it actually makes me more concerned about the person on the other side of it who's thinking that way. So as a hiring manager for, for many companies, I hired a lot of product managers for different companies. I don't think I totally agree. I don't think merit and diversity are conflict with each other. But on the other hand, to hire diverse candidates and build this pool with diverse candidates does take longer. So I would suggest I think like from the hiring perspective that may require product managers, the leaders of who are hiring product managers to really be mindful and spend effort to build this diverse pool. And it will take longer and may take some planning from the organization perspective to hire, to hire this role, to pipeline this role and take a little longer time to have the opportunity for the diverse candidates to apply to get into this pipeline. Yeah, it's actually, it's, it's really good to hear you guys say all this stuff because it's another, another point is a lot of people might be sticking to like a specific like historical evaluation criteria for candidates, right? Like what they qualify, what they think is qualified historically. But if a company is good, like Marty, you talked about, hey, it's important to tie this to the hiring practice. And even you're talking about, you know, how you've hired across multiple, multiple companies, if you start to take a look at the cultural and company values, you may find that the evaluation criteria itself is kind of flawed. And you need to take a better look at how you qualify candidates. I think that's probably as you go as, as companies do take DNI more seriously, that is probably something to take a look at. So I'm going to pass it to Marty for the next question. How can product teams and human resources work together to advance DNI initiatives? Yes, I think this one's really interesting. And so for context, I worked in an intersection of a bit of both of this, right? So one of the companies I worked at was Workday, right, which is like your biggest HR company, then I also, but I worked there as a product manager. And so these kind of things came up quite a bit. And so what I think has worked really well, and I'm seeing as a trend around different companies, right, no matter if they're enterprise or consumer focus is leveraging the ERG groups, right, leveraging the employee resource groups to allow them to have a seat at the table when it comes to products. So think about it this way. You know, your company has these groups of historically marginalized people, people from really diverse perspectives, right, they know their groups really, really well. And so what if you use them kind of almost like a focus group to look at some of the new products that you're releasing, looking at some of the algorithms, some of the things that you're putting together and giving them an opportunity to weigh in almost as these internal consultants. And so many things are caught in that process. So many things are causing companies to get checked their things, go back to the drawing board on certain features or products that they're releasing and think, hey, are we trying to, are we leveraging all the groups, right? And that's a way to take a group that has historically been a little bit more focused on culture at a company and giving them a real business need and business purpose to make things better. That's a great point. Eva, given your experience hiring at so many different companies, is there anything that you can share as well on this one? So I totally agree with what has been said. And just from the Harry manager perspective, I think this is not really, I think this is a definitely pressing issue. And yeah, I don't have anything to go on top of that. Yeah, some comments for me. I think that like, there's a lot you can do from going back to that bottoms up versus top down kind of approach. Like, I think when you're hiring within your team, I think each team does have a lot of say into how they're hiring. So you do, you can actually influence that quite a bit. And like, you know, as you were saying, Marty, usually you have an HR business partner or whatever it is to kind of, you know, figure that out. That will make a big difference by, you know, bottoms up providing that influence. But even, you know, as that changes, and then maybe you have a team that's performing just a lot better because of these kind of changes that are made for a D&I. And that can be, that can be an example for the company and can actually make changes along a long way too. So that's just something that I've seen. Other vector I totally forgot about though, is when you are hiring, right, and you're trying to figure out how to structure teams for success, right? Having those teams and kind of intentionally thinking about how you're bringing in people with diverse perspectives, right? And diversity isn't necessarily, I want to make sure we're thinking of it like in totality, right? It's not just necessarily a race, sexuality, you know, all those things. It's also your personal ethics. It's how you think about the world and how you want to impact other people. All of that factors into what makes you different and what makes you diverse. And so being mindful with your HR business partner, especially as a people leader, to say that, hey, I want these diverse perspectives. I want to bring in a team of people that are different, that have these different backgrounds. There's a way to leverage them there and to do that in a way that makes sense for everyone and makes everyone feel comfortable because you don't want someone like, I just want the right team because I think you're different, right? But actually having a meaningful reason that makes everybody feel good. So no, thanks a lot for that, Marty. So the next question that I have for Gauri is, what are some metrics for DE and I? Thanks, Bravo. I think one of the ways to look at it is, and now that we have talked so much about hiring, to look at how we can think about DE and I at every single level of the company, right? So now that companies are already focusing on getting the right pool of candidates, getting the right set of people in the door, we also want to think about not just diversity, inclusion and equity at the entry level, but also at every level of leadership because what happens is that we do have a lot of diversity within a particular set of levels, but as you go up, you see that the diversity starts decreasing more and more and more. So having that metrics across every single level would be a good first step. Secondly, also looking at how do you think about DE and I when you do your promotions, like within your teams, just consciously paying attention to that is a big win for the company. For example, you see that there is not a lot of women representation at the leadership because as in when you see people moving through that ladder, a lot of women have to put their families in front because they don't have the right level of support. So if companies step up and then provide the right level of support, I am pretty sure that they will be successful and they will be able to move up the ladder too. So keeping that in mind is also one of the other ways you can do it. And the next and most important thing is probably pay equity. That is a big one that a lot of companies are now paying attention to, making sure that people are paid equitably across different levels, across the company. So keeping all of these minded is an important aspect of how you measure some of your DE and I initiatives. And it's not just important to do this at an entry level or at a mid-level. You have to keep doing it at every level so that people keep progressing through it and it doesn't just stop at like one level of leadership. So I think that's more important to keep in mind. No, thanks for that thorough answer. That's awesome. Marty, Eva, Leo, anyone else have an answer here in terms of what's happening at your companies for DE and I or is it Q2? Slightly different, not necessarily a metric but a process in play. A few years ago we spun up a full team to focus on ethics and inclusion within our product space. And so we have made ethics and inclusion review or we're trying to get it fully baked out, but ethics and inclusion review as important as a security review. So when you are going to ship out a new product, it goes through security review, make sure everything's down, but you also go through ethics and compliance. You also go through an accessibility review, all these different things until all the steps to releasing product now, that is now one of your vectors is to go and take whatever algorithms you build or whatever products and products you're using or depending on what kind of data you're collecting, all of that. Go run it with ethics and inclusion team and see if you are impacting any marginalized groups. That's a great point. I think the concept of an inclusive product is like fairly new, but I think it is something that you're going to see more and more down the line. I was actually just like presenting a PowerPoint slide yesterday and then it came up with a prompt that said, hey, do you want to enable subtitles for being more inclusive? And I'm like, well, that's cool. Like I didn't expect that to pop up, but it is one, just one example that you're talking about accessibility, websites definitely get graded on that. You want to be more accessible in every part you can, so that is a really good point to bring up. Since we have a couple more, I'll start. Go ahead, Leo. Yeah, I think it is important that we also think of the metrics, but also think of the impact. For a lot of areas, if you have 100% growth of whatever, let's say you're looking for a diverse set of group you want to hire, you want to hire. 100% growth doesn't really matter if you have two people and you have four people and it should have 200. So it's that impact element, I would argue, that you try to look for, okay, but what are we doing to write things? Should we just, you know, don't pat yourself on the back just for, you know, having you putting out reports and I know other companies are doing that, but I think it's very important that you go beyond the report and look at actually what has been changed, how are we changing our process? How are we actually working on this? Like so, you know, for us, we work a lot on diversity. It's a really core thing to what we do, but I think any company can be better at this and you just need to keep really focused on driving that up, not just from a metrics perspective, but also look at the impact perspective. Great point. So we have a couple of minutes left, so there's one more. Sorry, go ahead, Eva. Yeah, I think what really resonated with me is have the measurement at each job function and at each level, because just personal experience, I joined a women leadership group as well for women as executive and senior management positions. And then I noticed one thing is in this group, most women holding the traditional women jobs, like head of HR or head of marketing, but when it comes to product and engineering, the ratio for women leaders is very compared to the other jobs is much lower. So I really hope like for us, we can drive that for every single job. So we open doors for diversity candidates, not only women, but for everybody. And so it's not really like certain jobs for women, certain jobs for other types of people. So we have a couple of minutes left. So we'll try to go as much as we can in this last question. So there might be a generational gap between individuals and my corporation. How would you approach D&I keeping this in mind? And as a cure, I'll pass it up to you. Yeah, I think I think in some ways having a diverse group of you can think of it as like an almost an advisory board in some ways internally that encompasses both generations or multiple generations would naturally I think help that. I think if you can bring those, the perspectives from each of those generations into the fold, then again, naturally you're going to be able to have that diversity of thought. So I would probably start with that. That's probably the first thing that comes to mind. I would add in there too. I don't know, maybe this is my work style. I like to just knock everything out on the head. And so I would start with that like, hey, we have a generational gap. So I'm going to preface this conversation with the fact that half of our workforce is one place and half of our workforce is maybe in another stage in their career. However, here's what I'm seeing and here's where I'm wanting to make a change or wanting to see impact. And I think any time you are bringing things up, especially things that are a little bit more sensitive, it is so important to be, what's the word I'm thinking of, oriented towards success and trying to figure out something that works for everybody if you are coming from a really pure place that always resonates. And so kind of hitting things on the top of the head and then come again with a lot of authenticity in a pure kind of hearted nature and wanting to get to a solution, right? And then just bringing this up to be another employee griping, I think always really resonates and it can start the conversation in a positive way. I think this is a great question because diversity also means age diversity also. So I see companies that only have, for example, young folks in their 20s or 30s, and then they will use culture feds to filter out the candidates that are older. So I think that when we think about the diversity, we should also think about like generations and also approaching that, address the gap like how people from different, not only different backgrounds, but different age groups. Thanks Eva and thanks to all of the panelists for kind of going through these questions. It's been a pleasure. So it's been really fun. I'm going to spend a few minutes talking about kind of the future product management report. So this is the fourth one we're doing. We've brought together a working group of product leaders from, you know, a bunch of different top tech companies to call out these trends, have obviously a couple of people on this panel that actually we've worked with on that. So the Kira, Leo and Eva, we've been working together on that this last couple of weeks, actually months. And we've launched a survey. We've received over four and a half thousand respondents from the product school community here, the product community in general. So that's huge. We're going to be able to identify a bunch of key trends that definitely will include things on D and I, hiring and retention, a lot of the topics we talked about today. And it's going to be, you know, talking about what's product led expansion of the product career path, especially if you're a people manager or if you're, you know, aspiring PM and the thing it's going to relate to you. The final report is going to launch on March 29th of this year. And it's not too late to get involved. So, you know, you can still fill out the mini survey. You can look for there's a link underneath the stage. You can simply scroll up or in the tabs next to the chat on the right side. You can also find a link there. We would love for you to fill out that link and it'd be or that survey and it'd be really helpful for us. Some things to just talk about in terms of what we have found out from D and I, from the survey, you know, we know that something that Eva was talking about before because of the growth of product management and kind of the immaturity of the talent pipelines, recruiters are having to broaden their searches and they're looking for qualified candidates and that's just naturally diversifying the talent pool. So when you put the pressure on industry recruiting to create this pipeline that should actually result in more diversity in candidates itself. So you're going to keep reaching out to different diverse candidates and that should actually help product leaders understand what they're up against and help their adjust their expectations, the evaluation criteria, a lot of the things we just talked about. Low code and no code tools are also making it possible for PMs to break in product from different non-technical fields and now like, you know, like people on my team, for example, like, you know, they're not all from a technical background and that's totally fine. People can even build specific products from zero to one without having a full engineering team. So a lot of things are changing and that's just something to kind of acknowledge. More than, you know, some data points that also might be helpful. More than 50% of product people have a background in non-product roles, you know, the gender distribution does remain skewed. It's about 34% female versus, you know, 66% male and then 23% of PMs have business educational background versus 50% have a CS background according to amplitude. So we're seeing a lot of things, you know, change in the industry and I'm really excited for product school to share that with everyone in the product community. But thanks everyone, you know, for their time and, you know, make sure if you, you know, sign up link for the survey and return back to the main stage for more.