As designers and design leaders, most of us understand the ethical importance of making our products accessible and inclusive for all the people who use them. But we don’t always understand the best way to go about doing this, or the business case for making it a priority.
That’s why we were excited to speak with Annie Jean Baptiste, Head of Product Inclusion at Google.
"If there is one voice in tech to listen to right now, it is Annie's on the material impact of inclusion in business today and in the future."
—John Maeda
Annie recently wrote a book called Building For Everyone: Expand Your Market With Design Practices From Google's Product Inclusion Team. We ask her about what spurred her to write the book, along with some of the strategies she uses for researching, designing, and shipping inclusive products.
We hope you come away from this conversation with some ideas you can bring back to your own team, to make better products for everyone. Thanks for listening.
Takeaways:
Learn about the "ABCs of Product Inclusion" which Annie writes about in her book
Hear about hiring practices to build inclusive teams
Get guidance on how to build this role into your own team.
About Annie Jean Baptiste
Annie Jean-Baptiste is the author of Building for Everyone, the first book about building inclusive products across the intersections of 12 dimensions of diversity.
She built the practice of product inclusion & equity in order to expand how product teams thought about inclusion as it related to development and design. Since the launch of the product inclusion team in 2014, many companies across industries have followed suit and creating their own product, inclusion, teams and strategies.
She currently serves as an intrapreneur in residence at the University Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education, a facilitator for Penn’s Chief Learning Officer Business Acumen program and a member of both the CTA Health Equity and Access Leadership (HEAL) Coalition and sits on the IEEE's Executive committee, Ethically Aligned Design committee and co-chairs the DEI committee. She’s been inducted into the Haitian Roundtable’s 1804 society as “One to Watch” and inducted as one of the 30 Black Stars for Face to Face Africa in 2019. Annie is a former American Heart Association spokesperson and a One Young World ambassador, focused on healthy lifestyles in underserved communities. She is also a former Hack the Hood mentor.
Annie is also the Head of Product Inclusion & Equity at Google. She leads strategy across the company and consults with various Alphabet companies, including consultation, communications, scale and research and created the movement as a way to ensure underrepresented users felt validated throughout the product design process.
