Diversity within Strava’s Engineering Organization

with contributions from Debbie Ly and the EDIG team

At Strava, we believe that building a diverse and inclusive culture is crucial to bringing out the best in our team.

• Creating a safe space fosters a sense of belonging, where all teammates can be more comfortable sharing their ideas and perspectives.
• Fostering an environment of inclusion will continue to encourage strong candidates to apply to Strava, expanding our potential talent pool.
• Creativity is an essential component of engineering work. A diverse set of experiences and backgrounds expands the knowledge base we draw from, and ultimately inspires inventive solutions.
• We will deliver a better product to our athletes if our engineering team more closely matches the world demographic.

These values have always been important to us — a group of volunteers created the original Diversity and Inclusivity Group (DIG) in 2015 to begin advocating for these issues. However, as our company grew larger in size, we needed more firepower to drive all of the improvements that we were constantly discovering. In mid-2017, we formed our Engineering Diversity and Inclusivity Group (EDIG) with a focus of attracting and engaging diverse engineering candidates and employees.

The first initiative of our group involved expanding our talent search to new, diverse talent pools. For example, one of our engineers talked to students at Harvey Mudd about job opportunities at Strava, where over 50% of the computer science graduates are women. Our engineers have also been working with Code2040, an organization focused on creating engineering opportunities for black and latinx students, to mentor fellows from underrepresented groups in the technology industry.

However, the process of interviewing at technology companies can often be stressful for candidates from non-traditional backgrounds. To combat this, we are beginning to send an informative packet to all candidates before their first interview. The goal is for candidates from any background to start the interview process feeling informed and prepared. Because we believe that having teams with diverse skill sets adds value to our engineering projects, we ask candidates questions that gauge their potential value to Strava outside of purely technical contributions. In doing so, we are able to draw a more holistic picture of what a candidate will add to their prospective team.

Hiring and retention are only the first steps towards our vision of a truly inclusive environment throughout our engineering organization. On an ongoing basis, EDIG members host diversity lunches and actively encourage all employees to join in. During these sessions, participants break out into small groups and engage in a safe conversation around current diversity issues. To incorporate external viewpoints in our way of thinking, we invite prominent speakers who have worked on major diversity initiatives at other technology companies. By encouraging these conversations and creating a safe space for employees to hear out new perspectives and ideas, we can foster a workplace where all voices are heard.

EDIG encourages all engineers within our organization to actively pursue diversity and inclusion. Traditionally, the challenge engineers face when participating in committees outside their core function is that they feel like they are taking time away from their day-to-day projects to work on something that is not universally seen as directly advancing their engineering career. At Strava, we explicitly encourage and support all engineers to dedicate time and energy to make Strava a better company in any way they see fit, including participating in diversity groups and attending diversity/inclusion conferences and talks. To start, we have seen more people throughout our organization gathering diversity data, scheduling lunchtime talks on important issues, and improving other parts of our hiring process.

From our internal surveys, we see an 18% year-over-year increase on the belief that Strava values diversity. In the past year, we’ve hired ten women and nine people of color to join our team. We have made good progress in 2017, but our team continues to explore other ways we can further improve. Strava is committed to furthering these principles and building a diverse team in 2018 and beyond. Stay tuned for more updates and learnings from Strava’s EDIG.