 Hello everyone, welcome to another product school webinar about the topic of DNI in product management. I'd like to spend the next 20 to five minutes about how we can incorporate diversity, equity and inclusion principles into building digital products. So today, first I do a quick self intro about myself and then I talk about why at all as product managers we should think about DNI in our work and what are some of the key root causes of the issues that we are seeing today in digital products. And spend some time to talk about some tactics at how we can address some of those issues. A little about me my mission, my life and carries to build products that solve that solve the challenges for next generations. I have 10 years of experience in product management in energy think food and HR. I have co funded two startups and one of them is cash move which was a social enterprise to connect farmers and consumers to cut the middleman in between. As I was working in cash when I realized that farmers like this lady really are excluded from the supply to food supply chain they don't have equitable access to the market and as a result of that. Their power is completely influenced by middleman to gain and the right price for their product and their financially their their life having been impacted as well. And started to do some research to learn more about diversity, equity and inclusion has been recent over the past year that has been my recent passion that how actually we can build inclusive products that create more equitable lives. But why why why it matters side from my personal passion overall for product managers, in my opinion is that it is it is really the right thing to do as much as we can talk about Hey, what is the business case for diversity, equity and inclusion. I think the most important thing is that it is a right thing to do and why why I get a share one example I was working with financial institution. We work on alternative credit products to understand how we can really disrupt the traditional way of credit scoring. And one of the ideas was really to use the customers neighborhood data to score them. Although it was a really kind of effective way of scoring customers. But because it was based on neighborhood data it was excluding a large population of people who are living in distress and neighborhoods and inherently because they were living there without being them being kind of a person with a good or bad credit because they were living in those neighborhoods, they were punished by that kind of model, and they strongly disagree with that idea and eventually we didn't go with that. We didn't pursue that that idea at all but my point here is that that I would have been a very profitable opportunity for the business. And it was not the right thing to do and that's that's my point, saying that the most important thing about DNA is that it is a right thing to do. We can sometimes think about business cases but sometimes it is also against the financial button, the bottom line of the company. Specifically, one of the main reasons that DNA is important is this is because of a reputational risk more and more we are seeing that public opinions and medias are putting the companies on fire when it comes to them having racially insensitive products. And one of the main reasons for that rising attention is that digital products have the potential to scale systematic bias because they are really scalable they can address millions and billions of people around the world. That that's why the opportunity is really big also the risk of scaling systematic bias is high as well. And the other side, the product teams may also miss a big group of their users and the good example for that is that the few years ago, Dominus Pisa had a very inaccessible website and it was, it got so over of that simply because it was excluding a group of people who were not able to order Pisa through their website and think of that any e-commerce company in the world follow the same practice and how they can exclude a large population of people from accessing to online shopping or online ordering in their day to day life. And when you're thinking about this kind of big issues and trends. One of the kind of the reasons behind it is that over the past couple of decades, the product management company has not been as diverse as it should be. And usually the same people get hired into those kind of product managers most of us know that getting into product manager career is not a really easy one. And usually we hire people who have an experience in product management. So we need more and more diversity of thoughts to really break this cycle of building the same type of products for the same group of people. And these are some of the headlines that when it comes to discrimination bias in digital products and it's said that they're all over different sectors from transportation right sharing to travel entertainment and social media, but But the good news is that the industry has evolved like many other things that industry has has learned over time that taking this as it started to respond by different initiatives I have just two examples of them over the past few years. One was by SAP about their initiative around business beyond bias to fight workplace discrimination by their HR products from recruitment to employee lifecycle management and performance management. And the other interesting one is Airbnb over the last couple of years that when they initiated their is their major research project to totally understand how Airbnb could experiment certain demographics from their product. There was actually a research by Harvard publish that on average a person with a black ethnicity could have a 16% lower chance to have their records accepted in through the Airbnb platform but that the platform or the Airbnb platform has started to think through the experience and to and to identify those opportunities and there's a dedicated product team to address this issue so you see that as product managers we have a really major role to address some of the issues that we are seeing when we think about the root causes. I would say that there are many root causes that we can talk about but I would say that these two, in my opinion, are the top ones the first one is that no matter who we are no matter what what is our job title. And no matter what is our background, we all have unconscious bias. So when you're seeing some of this bias challenges and take product it doesn't mean that the product managers the product teams were intentional to create those biases it's basically that all of us have unconscious bias. And because of our limited word views and lived experiences we are not aware of those unconscious biases and as a result of that is really easy to embed those unconscious biases into our products in the case of Airbnb. When Airbnb responded to media they said that hey, it was not the co-founders didn't acknowledge it based on their lived experiences that is possible to discriminate the person based on their photo and name. And it was news to them because it was again in their unconscious bias and they learned and now they are tackling and that's why it is really important to be aware of that hey we all have unconscious bias. The first thing we should do is to acknowledge it, not to ignore it, but also in the meantime not to fight it but to critically think about our biases. So how should we do that, but before we get into what to do I'd like to spend some time on clarifying that when we talk about diversity, equity and inclusion, diversity, sometimes people mistake diversity with equity and inclusion. As an example we say that hey we need to be more inclusive, we need to have more equitable processes and people say that and we need to address bias and people say okay let's add more people with more diverse background to the team. But that doesn't necessarily solve the problem and I love this analogy about DNI that if you think of a party, diversity means that we invite everyone to the party, everyone is invited no one is excluded. But inclusion means that when they're invited to the party they all can dance, so not only you're invited, but once you're in the party, you all can take action. So think of it as a kind of a product team if you just, if you are a male dominated group, if you are a white dominated group and higher female or higher people of color, but don't empower those people in minorities to speak up to voice their opinion to share their different perspectives that doesn't work, diversity will fail here. And equity means that not only everyone is invited, not only everyone can dance, but actually everyone has access to come to the party and has access and kind of the opportunity to everything they need to be able to dance. So I've seen many of the end of the year corporate parties that they organize it outside town one or two hours away from the town and say hey everyone is invited, but they assume that everyone can drive there and automatically with this kind of parties exclude many people. So again, when you're thinking about diversity and inclusion is not just about diversity of people or hiding more diverse workforce it is also about being more inclusive and being more equitable. And once you start to think about it, I really encourage you to think about to focus on two things. The first one, how we can decrease bias. And the second one how we can increase, enhance inclusion workforce work culture and work product. And when sometimes they have these conversations with product managers, they usually say that, hey, CME we are not a leader, we are not a VP of product or director of product. We don't have that much of influence and power to change things, but they really like this diagram from ACA who is one of the thought leaders in this space that she really encourages us to think about hey how we can serve ourselves, how we can influence the team and then eventually the product that we are working on, even if we only focus on ourselves. And then let's start to advocate what we are doing for ourselves with the team and the broader product teams, we can still have some influence to change the status quo. So let's take a look into some of those specific activities. The first one, which is a really interesting exercise I did a while ago and it was really eye-opening for me is three club trust exercise. So pick a sheet, list the most trusted people in your secret five or six people and next to their names start to write, hey, what is their ethnicity, what is their gender, what is their language, if there are people with disabilities or no. And it might be very eye-opening for you that usually I don't say it is necessary for you as well as for me. It was really eye-opening that I'm mostly in the circle of people that's very, very similar to me and there's not that much of diversity. And as a result of that, when we are dealing with people who are like us with the same background, the same way of thinking and worldviews, it really causes a bias, a really common bias in product management and other jobs which is called affinity bias. That means that we always think about the same, other people think the same as we are because we mostly deal with and hang out with people who are like us. So this exercise can help us to identify that opportunity. And then the next step is that, hey, okay, how I can make it diverse, then we can start to go into networking events to hang out with people who are not in our policy case, we are not usually kind of hanging out with them. And as an example, I started intentionally to reach out to people who are not in certain areas that I even like, let alone I'm comfortable with dealing with. And that helps you to start to reduce the gap that we have in our lived experiences because most of the bias that we form over our lifetime is because of the real experiences that we have in our life. And if there are other people who have different lived experiences, they can help us to gain different experiences. As an example, when I got married a few years ago, I started to understand that how female life could be different, how they make decisions differently. And that alone can help me to understand as a male in my lived experience with understanding female people. The other tactic that you can think of, and it is not only for yourself, but also about the team, is that how we can intentionally interrupt your bias and the team bias. There are a few ways that you can do it, but the most important one is that most of us are really familiar with the product development processes and different gates that we have from ideation to discovery, design, launch and post launch to do it with different checklists. That hey, to make a go-no-go decision to understand if we are on the right path to achieve the goal that we have for our products. So why not adding some bias checkings to our product development process? And there are some questions here to give some ideas what those kinds of checkings are. As an example, one of them is that in any stage of product development, ideation, discovery and design, are we excluding certain groups? If you have come up with certain solutions, ask ourselves if that solution may have unintended consequences on certain segments. As an example, we were building a digital platform for banking and we wanted to make our experience more efficient, and we wanted to kind of shut down all the legacy telephone banking that we had in the past. And while it was applicable for 95% of our customer base, we realized that, oh, there's kind of a small group of people who work and live in rural areas who don't have access to network at all. And if we shut down that telephone banking, they actually don't have access to banking through any mechanism at all. So we are intentionally excluding those people who, although they were five percent of our customer base, but we were talking about thousands of people which was a significant population. So we started to think differently and to partner with the telecom companies and other network providers to see how we can address that issue. But if we hadn't asked those questions, if we hadn't thought about them, there was kind of a risk that our digital banking initiative would have impacted those people significantly in their day-to-day life. The other thing that you can do specifically in ideation discovery design process with the engineering and design team is that ask clarifying questions. When you identify opportunities for bias, it is really easy that we ask the questions that make people defensive. I'll give you one example. I was working with the team on a global product, a global feature, that initially it was only targeting English-speaking people. And so my mind was that, hey, it is a global feature, not everyone necessarily speaking English. And then my thought process said that, hey, maybe you are discriminating non-English-speaking people. And then I couldn't have asked that, hey, it's exactly the same that, hey, aren't we discriminating non-English-speaking people? Instead of that, I said, hey, do you think we need to build this feature for non-English-speaking people as well? Do you think there's an opportunity to think broader this population? And we had more and more discussion about it eventually because of different reasons we decided not to. But it really helped a very productive and open conversation to understand why, and rather than the team being defensive, trying to have a very objective discussion about the decision we wanted to make. The other part is that throughout the product development process, as we have been thought that to be more and more data-driven, to use data in ideation, discovery, design, and measuring the success of the product, but the data itself is not necessarily objective, it could be biased. So whenever we are using data, make sure you ask the same questions and challenge the data to ensure it is not biased to a certain kind of outcome that it is talking about. And the last one, the common thing in product management, we need to have KPIs and metrics. If we don't measure the result and how we are moving and who are reducing bias, we are not going to be successful. And it is not really easy. I was still learning what are the best ways in different type of product, how to measure that, but the admin effort to define the right KPIs and to measure it, open up a lot of opportunities for discussion that they are on the right path or not. And the last thing is that if Diana is just become a nice thing to do, and some people want to do it, some people don't want to do it. And hey, we invest in resources for those kind of check-ins that they was talking about or gathering data or measuring the result. It's not going to be a successful initiative. It's not going to address the first thing I shared in the presentation that, hey, Diana is important, matters because it is the right thing to do. It becomes something on the sideline that is not going to be a priority for the team at all. As a result of that, we need to embed Diana into the product strategy or if you are a product manager for a future portfolio to the future portfolio strategy. So the thing is that the first thing is to ensure individual needs of the user and minority groups are thoughtfully considered. What I do is that I always try to think and challenge myself and the team to say that, hey, are there groups that we are not thinking about at this time of the product development process? Are we excluding anyone? Who are those? Try to reach out to them. Usually, PMs think that, hey, it shouldn't be a risk because through research, we listen to our users and customers. But back to that definition of equitable, the party that I was talking about, that you invite people to the party, they can dance, but they don't have access. They don't have a car to drive to the party. It's the same for our users in the minority group. Usually, we actively listen to the customers and users who are reaching us to us, who we have access to connect to them. But for those users that either they can't or they can't contact us or we don't have any means to access to them, it is really easy to exclude them. And it is really easy to ignore their needs when we are building the product and that's why we should be very intentional about them. That's why we should embed Diana into our product strategy. On the other side, I shared about, hey, how important it is that to address the gaps in our living experiences through having a diverse group of people in our team from different backgrounds. But if those people don't have an environment to easily speak up and they don't have the psychological safety to challenge the assumptions, the potential opportunities for bias or exclusion, that doesn't help us to remove those gaps. So it's really important that our product strategy, create that psychological safety for everyone to speak of and say that, hey, because our strategy is so and because it is so important for us, I see that opportunity for kind of bias in the product. As I shared in the example of launching that global feature for English versus non English speaking people, consideration doesn't mean that you eventually take action, but when we actively consider those opportunities, and we truly understand that we are going to be intentional with our decisions versus making those decisions based on our unconscious bias and be easy to think that, hey, it is a right thing to do and everyone in the world is going to think like us. And the last one, as I mentioned is that hiring is as important as all the other aspects, it is the, I think the most obvious one I didn't focus that much but definitely to build diverse and inclusive teams through a critical hiring process. And if you're not a people leader you may have less influence on it but where you find an opportunity definitely contributed. The last slide that they have to talk about in my in my presentation is about this code from Amina who is the co founder of different and the first head of product Uber and really, she's another thoughts within this space I really love her work that she emphasizes on that hey the more identities background experiences represented by founders or product managers, the more problem we can identify to solve the more user perspectives you can understand. If you don't have that diversity of identities and backgrounds in our team, or we are not soon surrounded by those people in our startup or advisory board. The less it is possible for us to identify those broader opportunities that are really hidden to us. The key word here that I want to make sure that if we think about this really identity sometimes we have a very narrow focus of diversity. It is really beyond gender diversity is really beyond the people of color it is really about different identities that we need to think about to add to our teams and empower the people from those diverse entities to speak of voice their opinion. I was really happy to have this chance to talk to you about some of the learnings that I have had recently about how to incorporate the and I into product management, I continue to grow on this journey would love to read your comments. What other tips you could share about the end product management. Thank you.