Grow a Diverse Product Team
Interview with product leaders and actionable steps
Developing a Diverse Product team is a full company approach that starts with the founders, permeates through the culture and requires persistence through the organization to sustain and nurture. Tackling just one facet is a good start but just like an MVP requires consistent discovery, feedback, and investment. In this article, we go through the definitions, the state of the world for Women in Product and then into actionable steps you and your company can take today to hire and retain a diverse product team.
First of what is Diversity?
Let’s start with the foundation. What does diversity mean?
“It means understanding that each individual is unique, and recognizing our individual differences. These can be along the dimensions of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, age, physical abilities, religious beliefs, political beliefs, or other ideologies.” http://www.qcc.cuny.edu/diversity/definition.html
The way I think about diversity is that your product’s customers are diverse, thus the people building the products for them should be as well. The background a person brings with them to a job enables them to capture the nuances of each person’s user journey and build tools for them.
Diversity makes Business Sense
For the quantitative of us, let’s talk business. Studies show that diverse teams positively contribute to the bottom line and outperform homogenous teams.
According to McKinsey Digital
“ethnically-diverse companies are 35% more likely to outperform financially, with gender-diverse companies 15% more likely to outperform.”
“More diverse companies, we believe, are better able to win top talent and improve their customer orientation, employee satisfaction, and decision making, and all that leads to a virtuous cycle of increasing returns.”
Despite making business and human sense, we’ve got a long road ahead of us to get to diverse product teams building products for our customers.
The State of Women In Product
To understand where we want to get to, let’s start with the baseline of where we are today. Women in Product surveyed 1,000 participants in 2018 to glean insights that help product teams advocate for more awareness of and solutions for cultural, economic, and institutional changes in the workplace. Get the full report here https://www.womenpm.org/advocacy-study
A couple of low lights
•63% of female PMs don’t recommend their company or are passive, and the NPS score is an appalling 11
•There are percentage and leadership gaps
The graph explanation:
•Y-axis: % of participants who answered the question to the study
•X-axis: % bracket of how many female PMs are at the company
•Blue: Total female PMs
•Pink: Director or above roles occupied by female PMs
The leftmost pink bar indicates that 69% of the survey participants say that less than 25% of their director or above positions are female leaders.
72% of companies (30%+42% (left most blue bars)) have fewer than 50% of their team as female PMs.
Retention is at risk and so is onboarding of new talent
•61% are considering leaving and are at risk
•34% of all women who want to leave, say it’s related to gender issues
For a deeper look at the number and insights take a look at the study. https://www.womenpm.org/advocacy-study
What you can do about it
We had a chance to sit down at the ProductCraft conference with Anne, the author of the advocacy study, and two product leaders Ana and Elena to speak through their approach to hiring and retaining a diverse product team at startups, growing teams, and large companies. We then workshopped solutions with attendees that they could execute on immediately at their companies.
Anne Cocquyt — WIP Product Executive Director
Ana Grace — VP of Product Macy’s, formerly Walmart, GoDaddy, BestBuy
Elena Luneva — Product Leader, Nuna, LiquidSpace and OpenTable
What are the reasons for you personally and for your companies to build diverse product teams?
Ana: The more diversity in the room, the better the ideas. The N(1) is never as powerful as the N(Many), bringing all of those ideas together is really important. We’re talking about all sorts of diversity and inclusion. One of the biggest lessons I learned is when I went to Walmart, we had a woman that was on my team that lost her site. She became very passionate that the site was accessible. So we asked her to take on that role for the organization. Within about a year and a half, she fully turned around the product thinking around accessibility overall and dramatically changed how we think about designing our products from the beginning to think about our varied customers. We would not have done that if we didn’t have someone in the room that was passionate about accessibility. So it’s something that I am bringing into my new role at Macy's.
One other little tidbit. I had a member of the Macy’s team come to me who is a part of the Transgender community and they said, Hey at Macy’s when you go to the account page you have to select whether you’re male or female and I don’t choose to pick either one of those, I would like another option. So we had a great conversation about what options should be included and brought in different voices to talk about those. Very soon we will be launching additional options on our site.
How about for startups and growth teams where there is not always budget or access to ERG (Employee Resource Groups), how do you think about diversity and inclusion, how did you measure it?
Elena: The importance of diversity is that our customers are diverse. Thus adding different viewpoints in our thinking process will enable us to create the best product for them and result in growing the business. In smaller companies often you don’t have the resources, the structures or the processes, however, you do have the ownership mentality. Thus I find that it starts with me. By letting my team know and my recruiting partner know that diversity on the team is important.
I had the opportunity to work with a recruiting partner who identified as Lesbian and had knowledge of and access to networks I didn’t. She was able to post on sites and access candidates that were not finding us on their own. For the first candidate screens, my ask was a 50/50 gender split. We also had metrics around underrepresented minorities and the number of candidates we were speaking to at each stage.
How do you bring this diversity conversation into the leadership conversation and make sure it’s not just a nice to have but is measured and also finds its way into the HR goals for the managers?
Ana: I am really lucky that I am in an organization that is committed to diversity. I have 7 people that are my direct reports and they are 5 women and 2 men. It is the first time in my career that I have that balance rather than the other way around from a gender perspective. For me, like Elena said, really putting a stake in the ground and saying I am not going to hire unless I see a diverse slate that includes all the different diversities available to us and that’s what we’re doing, just being very specific about it.
We’re challenging ourselves at the leadership level. At BestBuy we did a study that found that if the stores had a mix of male and female on the sales floor, sales massively increased. Fascinating! We created an entire program called the women’s leadership forum (WOLF) to try and bring more ideas, build more women-focused products. What we really learned was it wasn’t about male or female it was about stores matching the diversity of their community. So whatever that was trying to mimic that within the store.
What has been a program that you’ve seen run that has had a huge amount of impact to change the way the pipeline looked and impacted who eventually got hired?
Elena: More grassroots what I’ve seen be successful was to take a look at all the Slack channels at my company e.g. LGBTQIAP, PetPictures, Watch Your Language, Bird Watchers — which had a completely different set of people and listen to the conversations and educate myself on the topics. Then show interest and identify the people passionate about these topics and start a conversation to both learn more and let them know I am hiring. Frequently they would think of other networks or places to broadcast that we’re hiring.
Plus they would be a good barometer to review the job descriptions we post for language. Because language is not what we say but what is interpreted, it enabled me to keep the criteria rigorous but check my own biases and make sure the words we use are inclusive.
How do you write job descriptions to ensure that everybody feels welcome?
Ana: Be very specific about what is really really required and what is nice to have and what you’ll train into. It is important for women to feel the job is approachable to them.
Elena: Get people from ERG groups, or at startups Slack interest channels, to do a second read of the JDs for language and see what they flag. Avoid jargon and instead, focus on the actual deliverables, the person is driving. Again, language is not in what you say but in what is heard or perceived and you as a hiring manager might not be conscious of how a word is interpreted from the context of the reader.
Once you have the job posting where do you socialize it?
Ana: Well Women in Product of course. LinkedIn, the Business Networking groups I am a part of. I will also send it, to Elena’s point, to people in other groups and ask them to forward it on to their networks.
Elena: Everything Ana recommended plus we post to external Slack Channels such as MindTheProduct, ProductManagerHQ, and others. Plus if you have the opportunity to hire outside of San Francisco, one thing we did at LiquidSpace was to look for university hubs in the US and then searching for candidates there on LinkedIn. We found a fantastic designer in Salt Lake and another in Barcelona and tremendous engineering talent in Minnesota and Bellarussia.
Ana: One more program that worked really well for us at Walmart is the returnship. You can do this on your own or through companies that help you. Essentially it is like an internship for folks who have spent time away from the working world due to illness or having to take care of children or aging parents. The program allows them to come in for an internship with the intention to hire where possible. We had about 30 at Walmart last year and made offers to most of them and it was an incredible experience for us and for them.
So let’s say someone in their 50s comes in for the interview process. How do you design the interview process to make it feel like she belongs here?
Elena: The best idea for us has been to propose to the candidate the interview panel that we’ve come up with, and then ask “is there anyone else you want to talk to or a topic you are interested to go deeper on?” That enables people to choose who they want to connect with. It might be a question about strategy. It might be to connect me with a person of color. That really showed the candidate that we care about them as a person.
Any other out of the box sourcing techniques?
Elena: To dovetail into the returnship suggestion that Ana brought up, Tours of Duty, a concept championed by Reid Hoffman, have been successful for me.
People in other departments are often curious about the role of Product. There is a little bit of mystique as we’re somewhere between a project manager and the CEO, so I start with a conversation to get at their motivations. If there are business and skill alignments, and the team has the time for mentorship and coaching, we think through a project with a fixed start and end date, typically a quarter, that focuses on an outcome and a core product skill area. We come up with a 30, 60, 90, day plan that’s focused on something specific for example user research, data analytics or any of the other core skills. Then we evaluate at each checkpoint if there is still interest and a fit and if there is a business need for that person to join the team. These programs have been successful in bringing different candidates into the product team that already have traction with the company and increased retention and motivation.
Ana: I do a lot of personal fishing on LinkedIn. I look at what you said, if I love what I see on Linkedin I reach out to ask if you are open to a chat. It’s great to get to know people. Often these conversations don’t go anywhere but then they can connect me with other people. I try to set time every week to reach out to a handful of people to keep that network warm and make time on my 8 am commute for the conversations.
Elena: To add on to what Ana said, just drink a lot of coffee. Network all the time with all different levels as you never know what the next role will be.
Is there any take back to the office actionable advice you would give
Ana: Change is often started by one person who is brave enough to speak up. So be the person that speaks up. This is not unsolvable.
Elena: Start. Take one step a week. Think of diversity as your product. It’s at MVP but you continuously discover and improve for users — the people at your company and the candidates applying to your company.
Resources
https://www.lever.co/blog/50-ideas-for-cultivating-diversity-and-inclusion-in-the-workplace/
- Women In the Workplace Report — McKinsey & Lean In
https://womenintheworkplace.com/
- FairyGodBoss — Great D&I resources https://fairygodboss.com
- Why Inclusive Leaders Are Good for Organizations, and How to Become One
