Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Patreon's chief people officer's exit leaves the company without any female executives, women now outnumber men at the New York Philharmonic, and Annie Jean-Baptiste pushes Google to build more inclusive products. The Broadsheet will be off for the rest of the week for Thanksgiving in the U.S.—we'll be back in your inbox on Monday.
- Product updates. Diversity and inclusion have always been important to Annie Jean-Baptiste. A longtime Googler, she joined the tech company in 2010 as an account manager before stepping into a D&I role four years later.
While in that position, she realized D&I had a place outside of talent: in product. She took advantage of Google’s 20% project policy, which allows staff to dedicate 20% of their time to an area outside their core role, to explore how she could apply inclusion to tech offerings.
She started with Google Assistant and the camera sensors team and, together with her colleagues, identified four critical parts of the product development process that are inflection points for inclusion: ideation, UX, user testing, and marketing. Working at those four junctions, they pinpointed which Google Assistant responses to eliminate and taught the assistant to effectively respond to prompts like “tell me a fact about Pride or Black Lives Matter.”
“It’s not just about removing things, but also showing up for people in the moments that matter most,” Jean-Baptiste says.
Today, Jean-Baptiste oversees a team working on these issues full-time as Google’s director of product inclusion and equity. Additional product inclusion staffers are sprinkled throughout the organization.
Their recent work includes the launch of “women-owned” and "LGBTQ-owned” attributes that businesses can add to their Google pages and improvements to the Google Pixel camera to better represent all skin tones in photos and videos.
It's a task that sometimes intersects with high-profile issues at Google. Take, for example, the news yesterday that U.S. lawmakers are urging the company to fix misleading ads alongside searches for abortion services. Most of Jean-Baptiste’s work is centered on consumer-facing products, separate from the ethical A.I. controversies that have engulfed Google in the past.
“At its core, it’s really about belonging,” Jean-Baptiste says of building inclusive products. “It’s saying, ‘Who else needs to be included? And whose voices are missing?’”
Ironically, Jean-Baptiste’s work could make her role obsolete by ensuring Googlers think with an inclusive framework without prodding. So far, she says the company has made the most progress in hardware, where much of this work started. Her team wants to iterate that success and create a “repeatable process” for others. “We’re aiming to build that muscle…so everyone has it.”
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
@_emmahinchliffe
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