Technology affects everyone. It’s the infrastructure for civilization at this point. And each decision we make as we build products has a downstream impact on individuals and communities.
We recently sat down with Snap Inc.’s diversity, equity, and inclusion VP, Oona King, to dig into DEI from the perspective of software developers and other engineers. We wanted to know what DEI actually means for those in our community who are looking up from their machine learning models and rethinking their roles within tech spaces today.
“Do no harm is a great mantra as a minimum absolute MVP, but you need to go beyond that now. You need to think about how your product may inadvertently exclude or harm groups, communities.”
Oona King
In the interview, Oona shares how we can leverage tech’s problem-solving mindset to drive DEI progress, her vision for open-sourcing DEI, and the next big leap for DEI — more deeply understanding how product plays into the space. You’ll hear insights from her time working in the UK Parliament, British media, YouTube, Google, and Snap… and what we can learn from her favorite show, The Wire.
“Tech always talks about 10x. How do you increase tenfold, 10 times, 10x what you’re doing? And they will do that for everything else in the world, but not think about it for DEI.” — Oona King