Diversity and Inclusion in Product Development at Airtable

For this blog post, we’re zooming out to highlight the people who build our product. Airtable’s mission is to democratize software creation — as Apple and Microsoft did for personal computing. We believe software is the most important innovation of at least the past century, and yet its potency as a medium for economic value creation and creative expression remains inaccessible to most. Our product is used by millions of people to build their own software to satisfy a plethora of use cases from delivering meals to frontline workers to major video productions. Because we are building a product for everyone, we need all types of people building our product.

At Airtable, we believe that Diversity and Inclusion is part of everyone’s job. In addition to the reasons mentioned above, promoting diversity and inclusion is simply the right thing to do — everyone deserves equal access to opportunities that they are qualified for. This means that we need to attract and retain talent that is often overlooked and underrepresented.

Diversity and inclusion are embedded in both our mission and culture. Here are some examples of how we integrate these values into our engineering organization:

Product Development

A diverse set of perspectives has undoubtedly helped to shape our product. For example, our Universe hub features Airtable bases created by our community, including resources for anti-racism, military veterans, and women in tech.

We’ve expanded our focus on accessibility by developing a checklist of standards that our product designers use when mocking new features. We’ve also recently updated the colors in Brandkit, our marketing UI library, to have appropriate contrast ratios for people with vision impairment. And we’re creating reusable standardized components to make it easier for engineers to build or update features with accessibility. These common components have other advantages: accessibility patterns improve searchability and testability by making elements available to crawlers and tools. However, we still have much work to do!

Belonging and Inclusion

In the past year, we’ve established a women and non-binary group mentorship program within our development team. We’ve set up groups of 4–5 people for recurring monthly get-togethers, forming the groups based on shared interests such as technical craft, career path, industry news, and leadership development. As a result of this program, underrepresented genders were more likely to report that they made strong relationships outside of their immediate team in our company culture survey. We have also seen low attrition rates among engineers of underrepresented genders.

Employee resource groups are communities focused on improving belonging and inclusion for underrepresented groups across Airtable. Our ERG leaders are paid for their time, create their goals in partnership with our People and Recruiting teams, and have driven impact by coordinating career coaching workshops, referral jams, and representing Airtable at virtual conferences. This year, we launched BlackViews and Women@ The Table, with more to come soon.

Inclusive Hiring

On the recruiting front, our sourcers spend a dedicated amount of time per month on exclusively sourcing diverse talent. We’ve strengthened our candidate referral program to provide larger bonuses for people from underrepresented backgrounds.

We design our interview process to mitigate bias. For example, for the first technical phase, candidates can choose either a live phone interview or a coding project done on their own time. For the coding project, we implement a true “blind” review by removing the names of the candidate before our team reviews the code. We also try to assemble diverse interview panels for candidates reaching the final round of the interview, while balancing the number of extra interviewing hours we put on underrepresented engineers.

Because we believe building a diverse team is everyone’s job, our engineers get involved in growing our network and building connections with underrepresented candidates as well! Our engineers have enjoyed the stipend we provide for coffee chats/meals with prospective candidates, and as a result they’ve been able to build strong relationships with underrepresented talent. We frequently run diversity referral jams to keep the program top of mind and have seen a meaningful increase in the number of underrepresented referrals received since the program launched in November.

Finally, we partner with organizations like Year Up, Techqueria, Breakline, WITI, and NextPlay events to recruit talent beyond our immediate networks. We’ve hired a handful of engineers from these organizations, and are committed to building long term relationships with their communities.

Our stats as of June 2021:

While every dimension of diversity is important, we recognize women and people of color have historically been underrepresented (URPOC) in the tech industry. We track and set goals against our ability to attract and retain women and people of color. Given our numbers, we’re primarily focused on increasing representation at the leadership level. In the future we’ll use what we learn to expand out to veterans, caregivers, and other underrepresented groups. These are our stats as of June 1st, 2021:

• Women & non-binary teammates make up 24% of Engineering and 47% of the company. URPOC make up 5% of Engineering and 11% of the company.
• 30% of engineering management identify as women, and none identify as URPOC
• 40% of directors and above identify as women, and 5% identify as URPOC
• 50% of our hired executive team members identify as women, and none identify as URPOC

We’re always looking for additional ideas of how we can support and uplift underrepresented groups. We’d love to hear from you and learn from others in the industry! Reach out to our DE&I team if you’d like to get in touch!

On the topic of inclusion, we strive to make our culture friendly to those with childcare and family responsibilities. Mary (our Automations lead) wrote a blog post about Being a mom and engineer at Airtable during the pandemic.

Lastly, if you’d like to come join us to work on interesting and challenging problems — we are hiring!