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December 8, 35 min

Google’s Annie Jean Baptiste: Building better products for everyone

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Featuring
Annie Jean-Baptiste

Annie Jean-Baptiste

Head of Product Inclusion, Google
About The Episode

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. Our recent guest John Maeda said, “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.” 

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.

Bio

Annie Jean-Baptiste is the Head of Product Inclusion at Google, and author of Building for Everyone. She leads Product Inclusion strategy across the company, including consultation, communications, scale and research, and created the movement 3 years ago as a way to ensure underrepresented users felt seen throughout the product design process.

Annie is passionate about making the web and Google’s products work for underserved communities while ensuring that Google is a place where everyone shines for their differences. She’s responsible for working with Google product teams and senior leaders on the creation and execution of their inclusive design strategy. She formerly created programs related to Diversity talent management and career development within several technical product areas within Google.

Meet Your Hosts

Aarron Walter
VP of Design Education

Aarron Walter is Director of Product on the COVID Response team at Resolve to Save Lives. Previously, he was VP of Design Education at InVision, and founded the UX practice at Mailchimp where he helped grow the product from a few thousand users to more than 10 million. He’s the author of a number of books, the latest of which is a second edition of Designing for Emotion. Aarron’s design guidance has helped the White House, the US Department of State, and dozens of major corporations, startups, and venture capital firms.

You can find Aarron on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Eli Woolery
Director of Design Education

Eli is the Director of Design Education at InVision. His design career spans both physical and digital products, and he has worked with companies ranging from startups (his own and others) to Fortune 500 companies.

In addition to his background in product and industrial design, he has been a professional photographer and filmmaker. He teaches the senior capstone class Implementation to undergraduate Product Designers at Stanford University. You can find Eli on Twitter and Medium.

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