Building diverse products is a moral duty — Black lives need to be represented

I’m a Lesbian Latinx who is in charge of overseeing all product development at a small software and AI consulting firm called “Brix Labs”.

I came onboard to fill this crucial role when my company was seeing exponential growth and our executive team decided it was time to start focusing more on US based expansion.

They knew that in order to grow a US customer base — they would have to have a different strategy and the normal status quo would not be enough.

This meant bringing on stronger product leadership who could lead the change within and beyond to diversify not only our team, our process, our offerings, but also our clientele.

With that would need to come trust and overwhelming support for this new leader to help establish this change within our own company.

Our company began with two Chinese founders (one Chinese born and the other American born). While studying together at UCI, they saw there was a clear opportunity to help companies (US based and beyond) connect with development and data science talent all over the world.

The problem?

Remote work had a lot of perceived issues with trust with code, intellectual property, and clear racist assumptions working with different bodies of people from different religions, races, skin color, and ideologies.

The answer?

Creating a platform that helps connect founders and builders to developers, designers, data scientists, and PMs based on requirements and skills.

They saw as Asian minorities that there not only was racist assumptions about working with international asian talent but this was the case for minorities all over the world.

Due the lack of marketability and timing, Brix pivoted to creating a consulting agency to take on building projects for clients and building state-of-the-art AI and Machine Learning applications/models.

As COVID-19 approached, we began to revisit our platform and strategize how we can help the 16+ million unemployed people in the US alone recover their cash flow by equipping them with tools and our internal platform to conduct remote product development with ease.

As a white-passing Latinx leader, I know the importance of intentionally seeding and building any marketplace userbase. The early userbase will dictate the future userbase of your product. As a product owner, your users are the extension of your team.

As a team (currently) comprised of majority asian minorities and one Latinx, we stand together as allies for the Black community.

We believe in diversity.

We believe that Black Lives Matter.

We believe no one should be judged by the color of their skin.

We believe that anti-racism is a core value in our company.

We as non-black minorities have experienced racism in our daily lives but we know this is not the time nor our moment to speak about this.

This is about Black lives.

We want to make it clear that we will stand by you, build with you, share our resources with you, and stand up to anyone who believes it’s okay to judge you by the color of your skin.

Your friend/ally/homie/friend,

Salina Mendoza + Brix Labs Team