Building product teams with diverse lived experiences creates the opportunity for more dissonance, discourse, innovation and ultimately—untold competitive advantage.
I think it's so important for product teams to tap into diverse perspectives by both recruiting diverse people and talking to a diverse array of users. We're regularly seeing the adverse impact of monolithic teams: facial recognition algorithms reflect racial bias, initial versions of Alexa had trouble with accents, dating apps have marginalized the LGBTQ community, etc. Companies are opening themselves up to disruption from startups that take diversity more serious--ShareChat is a good example of winning people away from incumbents with a better localized product.
As you said, diversity isn't just the right thing to do--it generates competitive advantage. I think this is true for all types of teams, but B2C product and design teams are where it should start so that millions users don't pay the price.
I think it's so important for product teams to tap into diverse perspectives by both recruiting diverse people and talking to a diverse array of users. We're regularly seeing the adverse impact of monolithic teams: facial recognition algorithms reflect racial bias, initial versions of Alexa had trouble with accents, dating apps have marginalized the LGBTQ community, etc. Companies are opening themselves up to disruption from startups that take diversity more serious--ShareChat is a good example of winning people away from incumbents with a better localized product.
As you said, diversity isn't just the right thing to do--it generates competitive advantage. I think this is true for all types of teams, but B2C product and design teams are where it should start so that millions users don't pay the price.