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.