Hello, everyone. Good morning, good morning. Um Good evening, good afternoon, wherever, depending on wherever you are in the world. Um My name is Thin AJ Arita and um I'm the senior director of product at Eab and today I'll be talking to you all about building inclusive products.

Um Super excited to have this discussion. I'm I'm assuming if you're here, it's something that's of interest to you as well. Um So we'll go ahead and get started first. I wanna make sure, can everyone hear me? OK. Can you drop uh a mess line in the chat? OK. I see some good mornings. Uh Perfect and I see that you heard the music playing in the background so your hair will be just fine, so wonderful. So we'll go ahead and get started. So first I wanted to give you a little bit of details about me who I am, where I'm coming from, what my background is. So, um I've been working in technology for a little over 20 years um for the last 15 years I've been really focused on product management. Um And within those 15 years, those last eight, I've been really keenly focused on building digital education products. Um I find that really combining um my uh social good with what I feel like I do pretty well. Really brings me a lot of joy and energy when I come into work on a day to day basis. So I'm feeling very, I feel very fortunate to be able to do this. Um Some things that I'm passionate about. Um I'm passionate about de I um uh for some personal reasons in terms of my journey and my career journey and what I've experienced.

Um But also looking to just really help others to kind of overcome certain things in, in our corporate workspaces. Um I participated and led a few employee resources groups, resource groups um that has brought me um a lot of energy as I come to work on a day to day basis and sometimes honestly, it can be exhausting, but it all all altogether very rewarding. Um I love traveling off the beaten path. Uh One thing that I did a few years ago is that I hiked Kilimanjaro. I just found it to be a really enjoyable experience. It was tough, but um something that I really enjoyed doing and look forward to doing other things like that. Um And then lastly, but most importantly to me is like raising great humans. So I happen to be a mom of three. And I take that job um very seriously and I really want to make sure that I'm raising great humans for the rest of us. So that's a little bit about me. So before I kind of get started into um my uh some of the content here, I really want to take a quick poll. Um And you can drop, I don't have an official poll set up so you can drop your answers in the chat.

Um But I really want to get a sense from you all like when you think about building products with inclusion in mind, what does that mean to you? What does that look like? Um So give us like maybe about a minute uh to drop your answers in the uh in the chat there and I'll read off what I can see. Uh Let's see any uh any thoughts around. What does that mean? What does that look like in your day to day? All right, I'm not seeing anybody participate, thinking about all possible end users. I love that. Thank you. Anyone can use. Great. Yes. Yes. User experience that enables anybody to use them. Yep. Uh building products that can, that any user can successfully use and get value from. I love that building for not just not just some Yep products that are friendly to people with different backgrounds and abilities. I love these. Thank you for uh putting your uh your thoughts in there and feel free to continue to do so as we go through and um and interact that way. So I'll share a little bit about like my definition of what I think that looks like. Um And to me it's building pro products that delight customers by anticipating their needs, empathizes with their pain points through a diverse equitable and inclusive lens.

So I'll talk a little bit about what those, how I kind of came to this conclusion of like, here's my definition of how I view the world of building inclusive products as I go through this presentation. But this is kind of a little bit about what it means to me. So first I wanted to start with the, why, why do we think this is important? Why do, why should we even be thinking about inclusivity when we talk about product management? Um The first thing is not doing so could really stunt your product growth. Um You know, in a world of free enterprise where there can be anywhere between zero to an infinite number of competitors really trying to um you know, get market share from the same customer pool, one of the easiest and best ways and the quickest ways you can really do so is really developing a deep understanding of your customers and what their pain points are.

Um And are you and, and then building products that are best suited to solve them to help solve them? You know, remember that customers really only buy products that help solve solutions um to some of their key pain points. Um and the way we do that is really making sure that we know them very well and we can, and we see all the different uh I guess variations or aspects of, of what makes up our customer pool. Um I really love this quote by Jesse Jackson, you know, because I can, it's applicable, I think in several different contexts, but in the context of what we're talking about today, um inclusion is not just a matter of political correctness, it's key to growth. So again, um just really honing in on the fact that, you know, you gotta know your customers, you gotta know the, the depth and the variety of your, the bread, I should say, not that well, the depth and the breadth of your customer base. And um what are the things that you're building to kind of really help solve their pain points, keeping your customers engaged? So, as a product manager, this is one of the things that I think we are constantly um looking into in terms of a metric that we're trying to measure like how engaged are we kissed? Are we keeping our, our customers?

You know, what features are they using most frequently? How often are they using it? How long are they kind of engaging with that particular feature or capability? Um And you know, creating a successful project really means that you kind of have this high customer engagement.

And then when you think about that kind of going back to that second point, um your customers, 99% of them come from various different backgrounds, right? So we're talking about race, gender, ethnicity, socio-economic, um you know what part of the country they've grown up in?

So, really, again, thinking up through that diversity from the lens of like all the different um aspects of that makeup diversity and ensuring that uh we are building things that are really gonna keep those customers that we really want to make sure that we are engaging with engaged.

Um I love this quote from Sheryl Sandberg from Facebook. Um because I think it's kind of again hones in on it really well, you know, we're building products that people with very diverse backgrounds use. Um So we have to keep that in mind, um when we're thinking about um what we're building and, and why and who we're building that for. And the last point, you know, if, you know, some of the other points didn't kind of resonate. I just think it's just, it's just the right thing to do, right? Um You know, one thing that I think 2020 has really taught a lot of us is that with the pandemic and everything that has gone on with a lot of social justice movements, um, you know, in the, in the world. Um When we're thinking about, you know, the Black Lives Matter, the Asian um Asian American and Pacific Islander um movement and, and movement around, uh, Latin American and Native Americans and the list goes on. Right. Um, that it's really just the right thing to do and if organizations are not going to, um, hold themselves accountable, um, there's so many think tanks and organizations out there today that will hold your organization accountable.

Um, so if you, if you don't, if it doesn't, if, I guess if it doesn't appeal to just like your moral compass, that is just the right thing to do, someone will kind of hold you to account at some point that it is the right thing to do. Um So I, again, I, I love this uh quote by Steven Covey because I think it really just kind of, again, hits, hits it on the head in terms of our strength lies in our differences, not in our similarities and that we really want to kind of continue to celebrate those um versus trying to figure out a way to kind of make everybody the same um or uh eliminate where we, where we see some differences.

So, so, you know, I wanted to provide some examples of what can happen when we don't think of inclusion when we're building out our products. Some of these are examples that you're probably very much familiar with. Um if not, uh I guess you'll learn about them today. So the, the first one is Twitter's image cropping algorithm. So back in January of 2018, Twitter put an image cropping algorithm A I into, in, into their um into their product. Um And the interesting thing about this is that uh it's one of those where, you know, it essentially takes if you have some images that you're trying to, you, you have a group of images that you've kind of put on Twitter. And you know, in, in the case of maybe you have two individuals, I'm sure some of these individuals, these two gentlemen probably look very familiar to some of you. Um that um you know, that one happens to be white, one happens to be black, it seems to always have a bias towards showing the face of the white person first. Um So in the sense that if you have that kind of that carousel of images, and it's going to show you like a preview of what that image is.

It always seemed to uh defer to, it always seemed to kind of uh bubble up the face of the white person. Um So this picture here that you're seeing is actually as a result of um an experiment that a cryptographic designer, um cryptographic engineer um did and he was kind of playing out around with different variations, different iterations to see like what would be the outcome and the outcome was always the same.

So very uh very interesting there. So Twitter obviously had to go back and kind of course correct to make to resolve that problem so not the, not the best situation for Twitter. Next Google photos, labels black people, gorillas. I remember when this came out and myself and several of my colleagues were very were lid. So those of you might be familiar with this um with this uh tool capability, especially if you have an Android phone with uh your gmail and all that set up. Um It's basically Google's cloud uh photo sharing um application and um they released this capability that essentially the algorithm will kind of categorize your pictures into different groups. Um As you can see here, um In one case, um Twitter took an image of black people.

So this is a, a young man and his friend um and labeled those black people gorillas. Um So Google obviously had to go on an apology tour um and figure out a way to kind of um resolve that. Uh So again, not, not, not the best situation when we are not thinking about these things, when we're building out these algorithms, apple card algorithms does shows gender bias. So um this again was something that actually the US financial regulators had to get involved with because they wanted to understand why it appeared that certain um that, that men tend to seem to get higher credit limits than women on Apple's um Apple cards uh product um the Apple card product.

And it was clear that the, the algorithm that was being used to determine approval. Um had some gender biases in there. And actually, in this case, it didn't even include it, it kind of somehow managed to exclude women. So that automatically seem to have some kind of inherent bias in the AL algorithm. So, and then the last one, this one is a little bit more personal and near to me. Um So this is a screenshot of a capability within um one of my uh one of my in my product. Um And this is also shows the power of really having um strong partnerships with your uh with your, with your customer base. Um Because again, this played in right, directly into my inherent um bias. I didn't think about this, but clearly, there was a problem here that we needed to resolve in the sense that while this might not necessarily have been offensive to pe to students who can't physically walk.

Uh uh boy, it could have, but it definitely was not inclusive. Um So we've kind of gone through the e the exercise of changing walking to drop in. Um So that those that are not able to physically walk don't feel like we've somehow excluded them um from being able to make an appointment and just kind of drop in with their advisor. So something to think about. So creating a product inclusion plan. So I wanted to give you what I call like the four Bs to building inclusive products. So these are some things that I just kind of been as a, as a result of kind of reading some things, um some books and some doing, taking some courses, some ideas that I've kind of put together um as to what I think are the key things that we need to focus on when we're building products.

The first thing, build a diverse product team. So I'm not, by all means, I'm not advocating that you should, if you have a product team, that's just rocking it. I'm not saying go clean, you know, clean slates and build a diverse team from scratch. But what I will advocate for is that, um you know, if you see that you are in a very homogeneous environment, in the sense that everybody looks the same talks, the same has the same background. Um You know, and that can be anywhere from like where they went to school. What kind of education that they have really challenge that with your organization, right? Start to speak up and, and, and, and really make sure that your organization is thinking about how they can ensure that going forward that you are building your teams out with diversity with the lens of diversity in mind. So, um I love this um quote by Art Cleon. He's one of my um I love this book. It's a really small book. So if you're looking for like a really quick summer read, I highly recommend it, especially if you're exploring creativity. Um But this quote here, I think is really applicable. You're the average of the ideas you surround yourself with, so your idea income. So the idea of really, again build that diversity out so that you can ensure that, you know, are able to have those diverses diverse voices in the room.

Number two, be deliberate about challenging the status quo. So, you know, challenge sentiments, like if it's still, if it's not broke, don't fix it. Those thoughts and statements are really growth and change killers. Um So, you know, we need to do things like really challenge assumptions that underlie conventional wisdom in our company by really, by, by saying like, you know, it just because we've always done it that way, does that mean that we should still continue to do it that way, periodically disturb your work patterns to break up and in those ingrained assumptions?

So, um really thinking about like, what are different ways you can kind of, you know, who and maybe where you work to really help you think through things a little differently, maybe think about reversing how, you know, maybe in the past, maybe you've done what, how, why maybe try doing why, how, what, right, just to kind of switch it up a bit.

Um And then, and always, always think through like confirmation bias, always think through like, are you, are you just doing things just because that's the way you've always done them? So I love this quote. By Charlie Munger because I think it's very applicable. The first rule that you've always got to have multiple models because if you just have one or two that you're using the nature of human psychology that you'll torture reality such that it fits your model. So I think he's, I think he said it very, you know, very well. And there's nothing much more that I can add to that than, than what's in that quote. Number three, broaden your reach when it comes to product reviewers, focus groups and other customer engagements. So again, I think when we are thinking about building up those groups and those teams ensure that there are diverse voices in the room. Um You know, one of the things we're always doing is these like customer personas um within product management when we start to think through like, OK, am I, am I looking at the bread of those customer personas and I'm or, or, you know, have I missed something in the room and, and again, leverage, leverage your team, leverage the people that are with you that are coming from those different backgrounds to help you think through that, build an accountability.

So again, as I mentioned earlier that, you know, when I showed you the walk and drop in example, um I'm just so grateful for having the interactions and engagements with my clients that bring these things to light to me that I, you know, me and my team may not catch. And uh i it's, it's, it's, it really helps. And then, so one, I think it's important to have a good feedback mechanism to have a plan for how you handle that feedback mechanism so that you are able to respond in a way that is timely and shows that you are, you're, you're taking what you're hearing seriously and that you're going to do, um take some action, I guess with it.

So, um building those good strong accountability systems are important and I have two minutes left, but by all means, I would love to continue this conversation with anyone who would love to, who would like to uh so feel free to connect with me on linkedin. Um I would love to chat with it some more, but other than that, thank you so much for attending. Uh That was a quick 20 minutes, but I hope that it was helpful and insightful to you and, and I look forward to hearing more from you and uh enjoy the rest of the conference. Thank you so much for attending.