Ask HN: How does diversity improve product development?

One of the recent emails said diversity improved products. I’ve racked my brains and can’t think of how this can be the case–on the whole.

I could understand having someone with cultural knowledge doing UX. But, say, a programmer? Does, for example, a Welsh person create better APIs by virtue of being Welsh? That doesn’t follow!

One anecdote I can think of here is that when the Apple health app was released it didn’t have a period tracker. If more women were involved with that application it likely would’ve had one.

reply
Good example.I think in general women take care of their health more than men. Women may well have been the main users of the app(?).

Not having people who represent your main/large user groups does seem problematic.

I don’t think it calls for automatic diversity, still. Instead, a definite consideration of who is using the product.

reply
I worked for Aflac for over five years. They have a good track record as an ethical company that treats employees really well, etc. They also have a good track record on diversity specifically.They always said something like We hire “everyone” because we sell to “everyone.” There are things you just will not think of if you are not part of a particular subgroup.

The other thing I will suggest is that in order to have diversity internally, you need a certain level of general respect for people of a sort that fosters good communication. If your people are too similar, the odds are really good that there will be implicit bias showing in how you word things or whatever. This implicit bias will be something that seems innocuous to insiders. Most people are not very welcoming of hearing that the way they do things smacks of implicit bias. This feels really ugly to them, so it is incredibly hard to change such things. Even if someone is willing and able to point it out, most people will not only not listen, they will actively deny it. But if you have a lot of implicit bias, most people won’t even try to tell you that you are doing this Thing that excludes them and others like them.

I do blog a bit about such topics and would be happy to pull up a relevant post or two from my blog if you are interested. I have a track record of promoting diversity in online forums and I appear to be the highest ranked openly female member of HN.