Who exactly is doing product equity?
by Matt May
Happy iPad Upgrade Eve to those who celebrate.
For those of you who were wondering if this product DEI newsletter was ever going to talk about product DEI, rejoice! This one’s about working in a product equity role.
Given that I own a company called Practical Equity and Inclusion, I guess it’s reasonable that I spend a lot of my time thinking about equity. Not just how it’s defined, but the signs of its presence or absence of equity in a system, and motion in either direction.
Corporate equity work doesn’t always suck, but inherent in any such role, no matter how supportive, is some amount of suckage. Finding an equity gap in a company’s product portfolio is like looking for hay in a haystack. And given how all-encompassing the problem can be, how diverse (by nature) the stakeholders are, and the amount of coalition building, managing inertia and pushback one needs to do just so that they can do the actual work involved, the stress adds up fast.
If you’re in a role like this, it’s fairly easy to conflate what you are doing individually with what you might say your organization is doing. I strongly suggest you don’t do that.
Story time: the year was 2019, and it had been about 15 months since I moved out of the accessibility team in my company to become their first head of inclusive design. For those of you who don’t know, “head of x” has turned into the go-to title for senior product managers doing director or higher-level work, usually with responsibilities far outweighing their resources. I was a solo practitioner with some travel budget, and that was it.
Anyway, one of my first public talks in my new role was at the CSUN Conference. It was an early, kinda cringey attempt at bridging the accessibility community’s more standards-and-policies focus on inclusion with other marginalized communities’ focus on equity and justice (See Two gaps and three pillars for more on that). About halfway through, while I was going through examples of racism found in modern products, a Black woman raised her hand. I called on her and she asked: “How many people of color are in your organization?”
I was caught flat-footed. My organization was one person, and one-person orgs are as non-diverse as they come. I didn’t have statistics on who worked at my 25,000-person company, and if I did, they wouldn’t have served as cover for the fact that I, a white guy, was lecturing a room on Kimberlé Crenshaw and racist soap dispensers, in the name of a Fortune 100 company—one that I couldn’t show was practicing what I was preaching.
I blurted out the only thing I could think of to say: “It’s just me.” She walked out.
It’s just me. Shit. That sucked to say. I certainly had quite a few supporters internally. And I could come up with some examples of what my colleagues were doing here and there, after the fact. But none that reflected the fact that I wasn’t prepared to connect my values to my company’s. At that moment, I was just aspiring to be doing the work I was presenting.
That one instance of accountability led me to two things: a master’s program, where I learned about things like agonist design (relax, that’s coming soon), co-design and participatory action research; and a day-long, mandatory inclusive design workshop curriculum that a team of experts and I built and then delivered to every designer in the company over the next 10 months. While the work is never complete, at least there was a foothold.
I’ve seen a lot of people starting to align around the term “product equity” over the last couple years. It’s still kind of a Rorschach test to define. I’ve learned to ask two questions of people who have that as a title:
- How do you define that where you work; and
- Who’s doing that work?
The definitional work is underway. That part is important: I’ve written several job descriptions for product equity positions, and that’s exceedingly hard to do when almost nobody knows what one is or does. I once hired an intern who told me: “I didn’t even know this was a job someone could do!”
So far, there are only a handful of companies that have evolved past single practitioners, or people working to be in that role. A lot of them are researchers, and I think a product equity organization of any size needs as many of them as they can get. There really is no product equity when people traditionally outside the organization aren’t engaged, and that’s the researcher’s role. Others are designers or product managers who want to direct their skills toward equity work. I haven’t come across anyone who’s just tagging along for street cred, but if this formulation has any legs, then there will certainly be marketing types trying to repackage generic design agencies as product equity practices.
Speaking as someone who soloed most of his way to doing this work, stumbling mightily along the way, here’s my advice: if you can get a role doing this work in your organization, be wary of equating your work with the organizations until you’re sure that work is going to come to fruition.
That sounds wrong: you get the job, and then you don’t say your company is doing that work? Think about it as a form of research and development. If you hire a researcher who’s working on cold fusion (not ColdFusion, that’s less impressive), you don’t say your company has done it until you can prove it, right? And it’ll take years, and maybe never happen at all. If this practice is your responsibility, you cannot ethically sell a product you know you don’t make.
A product equity practitioner in 2024 is only laying the groundwork for a broader practice. These practitioners should not be focused on evangelizing an ethical framework on behalf of their employer until it’s taken hold. It is okay not to hold yourself out as the conscience of an entire company. It’s too much. You will burn out. This is a thing that I know from experience. Instead, think of yourself as the R&D for a new way of doing the work. This is much more sustainable than the alternative, and, critically, it preserves your reputation in case you need to move on.
Office hours
I make time on Thursdays to talk with people about their careers and what they’re going through. I have limited availability, but it’s free. You can book a 30-minute slot today. If it’s empty, there will be more next Monday.
Have a great week.
(P.S.: The Rorschach image is of two Pikachus drinking from a Stanley Cup. I will not be taking any questions.)