4 Steps for Building More Inclusive Products

In a time of crisis, revenue and customer growth become even more critical.

One clear way to empower a company to find more growth opportunities is product inclusion. This doesn’t mean going completely outside your core use case, but rather considering how communities / people who are currently underrepresented in your user base may receive value by using it and ensuring they can access it.

Crescendo has gone through this journey multiple times and identified a set of important steps for how to develop a product in ways that include people of all backgrounds.

Step 1: Acknowledge past mistakes

Every company wants to move as quickly as possible. However, every product development process should have time to reflect first on mistakes, missteps, and growth opportunities from previous iterations. At Crescendo, we use this Inclusive Product Development Framework to help guide this step.

To make this step successful, start by assigning relevant roles to your product team. Using this framework, we assign three unique roles for any projects on top of functional roles: 

• An overall Project Owner who works with everyone.

• An External Materials Reviewer to conduct objective research on best practices for our idea/product type to identify past mistakes and set ourselves up for success.

• A Risk Assessor to keep an eye out for issues from previous projects and identify risks at each step in the current project.

Think of this step as conducting your own bias-check to avoid mistakes. Here are the questions we use internally:

• What groups are impacted by this? In what ways?

• Do we at Crescendo feel we represent that group or do we need to bring in outside consultation?

• Does this have the potential to make anyone feel othered?

• Is this centered in whiteness or the majority group and is this only targeting a white (majority) audience?

• How will different clients be affected differently? Consider geography, language, etc.

• Are there any implications on privacy or security?

Also here is an example of why this is necessary. Before we had this process implemented at Crescendo, we launched a campaign for Black History Month and there were parts of it that were centered in the experiences of white people. Our campaign was catered to teaching white folks about black experiences -- which for black employees, was othering and attracted awkward attention to them. 

Thankfully we have fantastic clients and one of them called us in and shared some feedback on the phrasing we had used. We quickly corrected our mistakes and learned a lot from it - but it was an unacceptable error and so we developed and implemented the framework linked above.

As you can imagine, a process like this can feel very personal in nature, especially in small teams individuals are often solely responsible for important decisions. Whenever it comes to topics of identity and difference it can be easy to jump from oversights directly to being labelled a racist, sexist, or any other “ist”. While sadly there are people out there who are purposefully discriminatory, most of us are more likely to be unaware or ignorant to how something may impact others. So when going through this exercise, make sure everyone is coming to this with an open mind, the intention to learn, and to improve the overall outcome of the project - not to personally criticize each other.

One important thing to keep in mind is that intentions and impact are not the same thing. Just because you unintentionally do something doesn’t mean that it can’t cause harm to others. If you do unintentionally harm someone, the best way to react is:

1. Acknowledge that you made a mistake 

2. Don’t get defensive 

3. Control your own feelings of guilt or shame so that the other person doesn’t end up having to comfort you after they give you the feedback. You may certainly feel these emotions, but it isn’t their job to comfort you, so save those for personal reflection later or a therapist if you have access to one.

Step 2: Root out biases and barriers

Once you’ve reviewed mistakes or misses from previous projects, leverage your team to root out any biases or issues with the current project. 

Our current project was a curriculum around how pandemics drive xenophobia in light of COVID-19.

After assigning roles, we got to work on designing the curriculum and paying attention to what marginalized communities needed from the offering. In this case we engaged two stakeholder groups: 1. Our Asian Canadian colleagues

2. US-based D&I professionals in our network.

TIP: Focusing on human experiences - identifying marginalized communities as specifically as possible - helps make biases and barriers much clearer than general brainstorming.

In this case, it became clear that we needed to address xenophobia and racism. Our product - a cultural competency training tool - already picked up on racism against Asians in response to COVID-19, but we realized that we needed a public-facing educational campaign around this information. 

Our External Materials Review and Risk Assessment uncovered that many people expected individuals from marginalized communities to educate them and assuage their concerns - we felt this was not a fair expectation and wanted to use our platform to reduce that burden.

Step 3: Get product and executive support

With any business endeavour, show you are connected to the business’ overall goals:

• Tie your work into the company’s vision and mission. 

• Connect with the product team to ensure that your plan can fit into their processes and priorities. Gain an understanding of all the things they’ll need from you in order to make this happen, that way you avoid delays or excessive re-factoring.

• Coordinate with your product marketing team to ensure you’re aligned on how to launch these updates.

For example, here is our Vision, Mission, and Product Purpose:

Vision: Create a world where differences allow us to thrive. 

Mission: Transform workplaces by helping people understand and embrace new perspectives. 

Product Purpose: Help employees build stronger relationships in a global, distributed world and build products & campaigns that personally connect with users.

When we looked at the COVID-19 pandemic, we knew that our clients - and the world at large - were going to face struggles: 

• Customized information: We knew there would be a lot of generic advice around remote work and mental health, but our product was uniquely positioned to offer customization at scale with a lens of diversity and inclusion.

• Inclusive support: We wanted to provide organizations and individuals with support resources on how to be inclusive while working remotely

• A focus on education: We wanted to remove the burden many people of colour, particularly Asian and Black Americans, face in terms of educating their colleagues about xenophobia.

• Including marginalized communities: Most of our clients and network are tech companies, which is not an adequate cross-section of the world at large. We wanted to ensure thought and consideration for people who may be less wealthy, so we included a track on how this all relates to Socio-economic status.

If you’re not in a situation where leaders are already aligned to your inclusion goals or you’re asking for large changes to how a product is developed in order to make it more inclusive, here is a quick step-by-step list of how you can approach doing this:

1. Ensure you have an understanding of who is responsible for that part of the product development process

2. Understand what their OKRs/priorities are for the year

3. Come up with an idea for how you could potentially support those priorities while accomplishing your D&I goals

4. Approach this person for a call/coffee chat to learn more about them, their goals, and see how you can support them in accomplishing those, while also bringing your D&I goals into the fold

5. Suggest the idea you have thought of in step 3 and get their feedback on it. See if they would be open to having you and possibly your colleagues' support with accomplishing this

6. Outline next steps and timelines

Stefan, one of our Co-Founders, speaks frequently with D&I practitioners, ERG leaders, and just D&I advocates in general. He often hears one of the biggest challenges is getting others to take action and support their initiatives. He has created this quick exercise for you to go through that will help craft a compelling and influential story about your initiative.

Step 4: Launch and listen

With a key outcome in mind and support, the next step is to launch and listen. In our Pandemics and Xenophobia initiative, we looked at articles shared to ensure that our product was doing the heavy lifting of educating people, not pushing them to rely on Asian colleagues. Further, we looked at the kinds of recommendations given to make sure that it centred on the human experience, encouraging more empathy and understanding backed by data and education. 

Like any product and marketing launch, we also paid attention to how the launch was received:

• Segmentation to see who was (and was not) engaging.

• Keeping note of feedback we got (to make future “bias checks” more efficient and effective).

We saw how the situation was evolving with COVID-19 and wanted to continue adapting the content we had included in our curriculum. This meant not only hard-hitting knowledge but also integrating positive and heartwarming news to provide some hope during these dark times.

For people who didn’t have Slack or wanted to have virtual discussions, our Customer Success team created three virtual lunch & learns focused on high priority areas our clients had shared with us. If you’d like to access these, they can be found here.

Leveraging Product Inclusion For Growth Opportunities

As you launch your new initiative, make sure you’re focusing on how people from marginalized communities can be included. This is not to say you should change your target audience for the sake of including every person in the world. Instead, it’s about ensuring that everyone who fits into your core user persona can access and benefit from the product, no matter their identity or ability. It can also give you a new lens to look at your user base and consider - are there any groups we’re missing out on? 

As you move through this journey, make sure that you:

1. Constantly learning from your mistakes

2. Root out biases and barriers in your product & processes

3. Get product and executive support throughout your planning and execution

4. Always have a tight feedback loop after launching your new product

By appealing to these underserved demographics in your user/customer base, you open up new growth opportunities. 

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Thank you to Annie Jean-Baptiste and Mike Young for reviewing and sharing your feedback on this article!