Thank you for joining today. Hope you are enjoying the conference so far. Um I'm really excited to catch up on some of the sessions and uh speeches that I've missed so far. But um thank you to the organizers for the invitation to speak today.Um I'm really excited to be here to share what product inclusion is and why you should prioritize inclusive and equitable processes when building and shipping products. So a first quick intro and a little bit about me. Uh My name is Cindy Jung. Uh You see her pronouns for my visual description. I'm an Asian woman with short chin length black hair. I'm wearing a black top. I always wear black. Um On this note, I will try my very best to describe any important images that may be displayed in the slides. This one is just my headshot and bio. Uh I'm currently based in the Chicago land area which sits on the traditional land of the Council of Three Fires. I had just said a few minutes ago that I was based in New York pre pandemic and I very much identify as a New Yorker. Um But anyway, as a few weeks ago, I started working at Snap on the product inclusion team. Before that, in 2020 I had started the product inclusion team at Verizon Media, which is now Yahoo. I've been a PM in the entertainment and media space for over 10 years and had worked in film and TV.

Prior to that, I definitely had one of those like circuitous paths into product and I'm sure that resonates with many of you. Um I'm also active in community advocacy and do a ton of work with employee resource groups. And I'm a program director at Gold House, which is a nonprofit collective that is focused on accelerating representation and success of Asian Pacific Islanders or the API community. Um OK. So before I get into product inclusion and what it is, I actually wanted to level set with some discussion around the topics of diversity, equity inclusion or dei, I don't want to assume that uh we are all in the same place on this journey or maybe we don't share the same definition.

So I really wanted to set the stage to make sure you all knew what I was talking about when I use these concepts and words. Um So in 2015 diversity and inclusion expert Verna Myers said the following quote which is displayed on the slide, uh Diversity is being invited to the party. Inclusion is being asked to dance and perhaps you've heard this because it's actually pretty popular and it helps to kind of define what D and I seeks to achieve. And while that quote still holds true, there's actually a lot of other factors we need to consider and acknowledge and it may feel really confusing um to have all these like terms and this like growing alphabet. But really, I think of it as a win because it's showing that we're getting more nuanced in these conversations and it shows that we're maturing and evolving on this topic. Um So where are we now? So in keeping with this party analogy, I wanted to expand a bit on um some other concepts. So we start again with diversity, which is, you know, who's at the party? Is there a difference among the folks who are in attendance?

And now we have equity and we ask who's trying to get to the party but can't and what are their barriers? So, for example, was this party located in an area that had good public transportation, you know, did it also have parking access? Was it walkable and accessible? You know, what other obstacles might deter someone from getting there? And how would we fix that? And then inclusion again is, has everyone's ideas and voices been heard and respected if it were a theme party? For example, could the theme be potentially offensive to a subset of the people? And on the flip side or the other hand, is it a theme that everyone can participate in easily and finally belonging is everyone feeling valued through positive connections and able to bring their authentic self.

Um In short, you know, can people at the party feel like they can dance like no one is watching. So the party analogy makes it seem like these concepts are pretty easy, right? And the question then becomes, you know, why haven't we figured out how to live in this utopia then? And the one thing to understand is that everyone is biased you me, literally everyone. It's actually a function of how our brain developed as human to understand things like danger.

Um And it's not necessarily a terrible thing because it saved us from like getting eaten up by wild animals. Um But we've actually become more nuanced as humans as you probably all know. And so categorizing things into defined buckets or trying to separate things into distinct binary doesn't always serve us well, especially because our identities are complex and intersectional. So take, for example, this view of dimensions of identity as exemplified by concentric circles.

So this internal circle, purple circle represents your core personality. And as you move out, there's your primary dimensions like race and ability, you can kind of think of these as like a person's quote visible traits, you move out one more and it's your secondary di dimensions like your socio-economic background, citizenship, language, et cetera.

And these things are like, aren't as obvious. And you might have to ask a person to understand or know that, that these dimensions about them. And finally, there's a tertiary dimension which is really the things in your mind, like your values and beliefs. And so your identity actually spans across all of these circles. And it's what makes you and every single person intersectional and also super complex. OK. So thank you for bearing with me on that. Um I want, like I said, I just want to make sure that we set the stage uh and make sure you have the contacts into de I so that we can now talk about why it's important to embed de I into the product development process. And to be honest, inclusion is actually pretty difficult to find because when we're included and when we genuinely belong, we're happy and we don't think there's a problem, right? But exclusion on the contrary, it really stings and we become very acutely aware when we're left out, you know, think about like when you were a kid and you were trying to like play with a group of kids and they, you know, said they didn't want to play with you that really hurt, right?

And so, you know, when we have to uh deal with misrepresentation or have to deal with the inconvenience or sometimes even pain um of employing a hack to make a system or product work for us. That's when we realize what, in what the kind of opposite of inclusion is, right. So allow me to share some headlines of the ways products and technology have excluded misrepresented or even harm folks. There are only nine headlines on this slide and they span from racist and sexist A I and everything from automatic soap dispensers, self driving car algorithms, mortgage algos medical devices. And of course, there's a camera which was built on a history of exclusion and racism and even spacesuits and crash test dummies that are sexist and not size inclusive. And lastly airport scanners that aren't inclusive of transgender people like this is mind blowing, right? And this is just nine examples of like so so so many more. And here's the thing much like you and me, the people who created these products set out to solve problems and the question becomes, where did they go wrong? So I remember a few slides back when I spoke about intersectionality. I said it's what makes us complex and unique.

Well, most times it's not purposeful exclusion that creates the headlines I just mentioned or shown on screen sometimes by trying to scale a solution for personas which I'm sure we've all employed before, you know, those like averages of people who we think are using the product or that we're targeting, you know, whose uniqueness we've kind of distilled into these land set of qualities like Jerry, the office worker who loves to read and drink wine or Susan, the working mom who loves to read, you know, and do yoga or whatever and you know, or maybe like, it's looking at the data that they're using or that we're using.

And there's this like really attractive plump middle area of a bell curve and it looks really great because that's where, you know, we want to ski. But what happens when we try to scale for kind of a blanket everyone rather than working with folks who the products are actually intended to help. And so here's a short story from Todd Rose. Uh He's an author of a book called The End of average. This video is of Todd telling us about a case study and displays animation of his story while he speaks. But the the the words um are obviously the thing that I want to share with you all. Um Let me just see.

It's 19 fifties, the Air Force has a problem. They just invested heavily in the jet powered aviation with the assumption that the massive gains and performance from their pilots. But in fact, the opposite in one day, 1 17% and no one really knew, no one really knew the pilots, the pilot instructors. And they figured out it was they had built the cockpit around this idea, average size, pilot as defined at one time, they commissioned the largest study, the study of the pilot body size, what they found there was not one single if you average on average, actually fit the Air Force and performance.

Ok.

So sorry. So I'll just sum it up really quick just in case. So basically in the 19 fifties, the air force invested in jet power. A um they were really excited, of course, and they uh started to design the cockpits and what they did was they commissioned the study of trying to figure out like what does the average pilot look like? Uh And then they designed based on this average and they took flight and in one day, like 17 pilots crashed. And of course, they were like, what is going on here and what they found was that not a single pilot actually fit the average dimensions. And so TLDR, like if you design a cockpit for like an imaginary average, it actually fits nobody. And of course, once the Air Force figured this out, they banned the use of averages and started to design more flexible cockpits and performance work. Um So sorry about the echo.

I actually tested it right before too. Um Anyway, this is one of my favorite stories because it helps people to begin to understand why you must build with and not for. And this actually happened again with NASA. So in 2019, NASA was actually meant to launch a record setting spacewalk featuring only women for the first time and it's 61 year history. But at the 11th hour, just days before they had to swap in a male astronaut because they lacked smaller size spacesuits. And I won't get too much into the history, but essentially NASA had prioritized the production of medium and large suits over small and extra large because the medium and large quote fit most people. So as you can see by trying to solve for an average or for the most, it actually creates a barrier for folks in the margins. And these exclusionary product decisions can prohibitively affect marginalized folks for even decades. So the question is what can we do? And this is where product inclusion comes in. So the accepted kind of current definition is stated on the slide and it says the practice of applying, applying an inclusive lens throughout the entire product development process. So in effect, what product inclusion does is it ensures that diverse perspectives have been incorporated. And in the case of the jet pilots, product inclusion would have introduced size inclusivity by trying to understand different body types of pilots versus trying to scale for an average of folks.

So what does this look like in product development? It's making sure that every phase of the product development life cycle considers our special alphabet D eib. And obviously, this is a very condensed phase and it's linear and it should really be circular. But when idea is proposed, for example, the question becomes who proposed it, who endorsed it? Who is contributing to it? The problem isn't going to be with that specific working group. But surveying who's actually missing from that group. And so we need to understand, you know, was there any diversity in the identities and lived experiences of people who put out that idea? You know, similarly did research and UXR reach out to diverse users if yes, did they ensure that people from systemically marginalized communities have equitable accommodations in order to participate in testing? You know, the did the team, for example, know about accessibility best practices?

Did the market team when they created their campaigns ensure that messaging and imagery were diverse and authentic? And most importantly, did they consult with people from these diverse communities? Rather than making assumptions? It's important to note that product inclusion is an ongoing process.

As you can see, I try to make it kind of embedded into this um product development life cycle, right? From idea ideation to launch, never view this as you know, a check box or gatekeeping mechanism because that it will fail, then it should really just be part of the culture and a foundation on which we design and build products. Ok. So perhaps you bought in, you know, you, of course, you want to build inclusive products. The headlines from a few slides back were egregious and you don't want that for your product or maybe you've actually experienced exclusion yourself and you want to make sure no one else feels that way. And the fact is most people, once they're exposed to inequity or injustice, um they can't go back to ignorance, right? And the tweet on this slide is one of my favorite examples of the social reason or the human case. So this individual who is black has a picture of their hand and on it is a skin tone band-aid that is almost impossible to detect and their caption rates. It's taken me 45 trips around the sun.

But for the first time in my life, I know what it feels like to have a band aid in my own skin tone. You can barely even spot it in the first image for real. I'm holding back to yours. They have actually really quite emotional thread about this experience. Um It's really moving and impactful right to see a consumer response to a product that focuses on inclusion, representation and belonging and all that is wonderful and heartwarming. But you're thinking you're probably gonna ask me like I'm an employee of a company. I can't sell my team, my leadership or my or or got an emotional tweet. So how do you get buy in for product inclusion? So like everything else in your company that gets resources, you need to ensure you have a business case and product inclusion can impact your company in any of or all of the following ways um in this little grid on the left here. So it can promote user growth or engagement by users who actually feel genuinely represented. Or as I mentioned, you know, maybe they don't have to employ a hack to use to make the product work for them. It could also help increase innovation because it forces ourselves to think about how to create solutions that are more representative and meet users where they are. It can help to generate more authentic brand love by people who feel the product was actually made with them in mind.

Similar to the band, a tweet that I just showed and it can protect the business from anything like bad press litigation, reducing your competitive edge and even the cost of reactionary fixes to address issues that crop up. Another approach which I've kind of shown on the right side of the slide is a framework by Carl Groves. And he's an accessibility consultant who says anything being called a business case must be able to defini definitively answer at least one of the following. Will it make us money? Will it save us money? Will it reduce risk? And as you can see, you can easily map each of the four things that I stated earlier to each of these questions. And as an aside, I did exactly this when I pitched and created a product inclusion team at Verizon media. A couple of years ago, I actually took a job listing off our company website and I use it as a template to define what product inclusion would look like at our company. You know, I detailed what a product inclusion specialist um with a product background like myself um would do what my responsibilities would look like. And I also include the potential impact of the work on the business.

And on the flip side, the problems we could face if we didn't start to prioritize inclusion and equity. Ok. So I know I've thrown a lot your way and it may feel super daunting. But let me just pause and say you don't have to solve for every single dimension of identity at once right out the gate. And this idea of creating digital curb cuts is something that can help you. Uh actually scale solutions um to many by getting specific about who you actually want to solve for, for those of you that might not know curb cuts are the part of that sidewalk that kind of slope down. Uh And it allows wheelchair riders to move about without being impeded by, you know, the the curb and the work of disability activists help cities all around the country and the world implement this design feature and it not only facilitates mobility of wheelchair riders, but for many other folks as well because if you think of it, you know, have you ever like been rolling your luggage or if there are any parents or caretakers out there pushing a stroller, that little curve cut has helped you, right?

Or think about like Children or elderly who are maybe not as mobile and even that like three inch step or you know, 23 inches. I'm not really sure what the average curb cut is, um, can cause, uh an impeded impediment to your mobility. Um, something else is something like closed captioning, which was meant to help people who are deaf or hard of hearing. But now it's ubiquitous and helpful for people who are trying to watch TV. S and like loud sports bars or maybe people who are on trains and airplanes or people who are trying to learn a language, um even parents trying to watch TV quietly as their kids sleep. So the the message here is that when you hone in on a specific identity, you actually can find that it tends to cascade down a spectrum. And what I have here in this graphic is um the different ways a disability can be experienced. And this is from Microsoft's inclusive design toolkit created by cat homes. And it really expands on this idea of a persona to a spectrum that includes permanent temporary and situational. So in the first example on this uh slide demonstrate what this might look like for the idea of touch. So on the permanent end of the spectrum is someone who has only one arm. Whereas uh uh sorry, I I got a notification about the next session.

Um um the permanent in the sector is somebody who has one arm and the um whereas someone with an arm injury, let's say the person who is wearing the cast in the middle also experiences the inability to touch with both hands but only temporarily. And on the other end of the spectrum is someone who is experiencing a situational obstacle. So in this case, the illustration shows a woman holding a baby in one arm leaving only the other one free. So you can imagine that solving for these individuals, you'd actually be helping others on the spectrum. The idea here is that by solving for one, you can extend to many. OK. Before I close, I wanted to offer a few takeaways by the way, these 20 minutes flew by. Um I'm borrowing these from K Holmes who was the same person that was responsible for that persona spectrum. She also wrote a great book called Mismatch. You should definitely check it out. It's a really quick read and it's actually very compelling and helpful to understand some of these uh ideas. So she has a framework for designing inclusively, which is a great summary of the things I've kind of covered today. One recognized exclusion as I mentioned, everyone has a bias and it's our responsibility as technologists, as builders, as designers to really help mitigate that. And two learn from human diversity, don't rely on empathy alone involve and amplify people from respective marginalized communities.

This is the idea of build with and not for. And three is something I just covered is solve for one and extend to many. So innovate with inclusion as a core tenant and it will actually likely scale to other marginalized folks. And also most importantly, start now start asking questions, read more articles, listen to the podcast. You don't have to have inclusion or equity in your title to do this work. You can actually be the one to bring this to your team and your processes. And sometimes you may actually be the only one who advocates for this but don't give up. And lastly, I want to remind everyone about the definition of product inclusion. Again, specifically one part where it says product inclusion is a practice so much like a yoga practice as you can see in the cute little illustrations on this side, it's something that you have to be intentional about and something that we have to work on continuously in order to get better at.

So if we stop flexing our muscles, so to speak, it will lose its effectiveness. So I look forward to practicing with all of you. Thank you for listening. Um And also in case any anyone is interested here are some books that help me get started on my product inclusion journey if you'd like to read up. Um But thank you so much for um joining today. Um And I hope that I get to either meet with or uh work with you all soon. Really excited.