Inclusion and Product

Importance of Inclusion

You know — we’ve been doing this for a while. Well, at least I have. I’ve been involved or on the board of many organizations that support or serve the LGBTQ world. That work has been important to people and to me personally. When we talk about inclusion, we also often mention diversity and equity. If you need to know more about these things — please google them.

It’s about to be Pride Month. This story and why it’s important has been told in many ways. People celebrate or plan protests around it. There are many stories on how exactly Pride started and who were the instrumental players. For the purposes of this post I’m just going to say — Pride was a moment where a group of marginalized people stood up for equality and equity against an oppressor who either enjoyed the oppression or were just going along with it because everyone else was doing it. Implicit Guilt.

Your Product and Inclusion

As a product manager (and hopefully as a product owner who has the authority to make the good decisions to support inclusion…) there are so many things to consider. One of them I hope people in this role consider is inclusion.

Think about your product and how it includes or exclude sets of people — maybe based on some odd factors but more so on some obvious ones.

If you haven’t checked out TED Talks such as Kriti Sharma’s “How to Keep Human Bias Out of AI” and others — it’s time well spent: (https://www.ted.com/talks/kriti_sharma_how_to_keep_human_bias_out_of_ai?utm_campaign=tedspread&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=tedcomshare)

Equity and Inclusion

What I really want to hit on is something that has been bothering me personally for well over a month or two. I am having a horrid experience with a product around Inclusion. Maybe you’ve been having this experience too?

I have been trying to add my pronouns (he/him/his) to my LinkedIn profile. As a person who has friends who often use a they/them or something else that does not correspond to pronouns given to them at birth alone. However, I cannot add my pronouns.

You see — LinkedIn product management has decided to roll out this “feature” in your profile slowly to various groups of people. In the product space, we often say roll out the feature to test it out with real people. Let’s get feedback and adapt! This is great! Really — it is. If you’re not doing this — please start!

The problem comes when your use of that feature gives you additional abilities that the rest of the world can see. And — that rest of the world does not have access to those features. Here is where equity comes in to play. I have many friends who have received this feature and have taken advantage of it. Yay for them for being a pioneer and adopting new things quickly. And yay for them for helping other feel included by such a simple act of indicating their pronouns.

I have yet to receive this feature. In fact — I have had some people ask me WHY I have not indicated my pronouns so that they would feel more included. They have even pointed out that it’s odd that my decades long involvement in the DE&I space has me still not indicating my pronouns and creating that inclusive environment that I’m well known for.

This is where a product, by trying to learn, has created an uncomfortable divide for it’s members, it’s users. My likelihood to want to tell LinkedIn to #^(% @## is high right now. It’s become a product I don’t want to use — mainly on principle.

I guess I tell this tale to add more work to an already full plate for Product Managers. But — some things are important. And given what was fought for these many years of Pride — and now my ability to have more equal rights — it’s worth that fight to ask people in these roles to please consider DE&I topics in the products you build. It matters.