Written by Rakshana Balakrishnan
Senior Product Manager Technical @ AWS
Tech in Motion Contributor

The growing prevalence of cloud-based tech products across B2B, B2C, and B2B2C sectors has brought the world together and enabled humankind to be better connected than ever before. The tech products that you build today irrefutably appeal to a global customer base.Incorporating diverse perspectives, ensuring equitable access, and fostering inclusiveness (DEI) is now more critical than ever before to develop successful, customer-focused products. If you’re a Product Leader who owns a portfolio of products or leads multiple product teams, how do you ensure that all your products are built with DEI at their core?

Well, we know that your product managers typically need to ensure that their cloud-based products are aligned with the requirements of your specific product organization (being secure, reliable, scalable, etc.). So, here’s an idea: why not add DEI as a required criterion that acts as a forcing mechanism for product managers to build intentionally inclusive products that resonate with a broad customer base.

Build a DEI Scoring Methodology

Now, let’s get to the fun part – building a DEI scoring methodology for your tech products!

Step 1: Define your customized set of DEI scoring parameters (here are a few key parameters to look at):

Breadth and diversity of customers and stakeholders interviewed: In the early stages of the product scoping and user journey mapping phases, it is critical that customers and stakeholders from multiple diverse backgrounds (such as age, gender, ethnicity, income backgrounds, geographies, disability, education levels, etc.) are interviewed to understand their pain points and motivations for using the product. This parameter measures the number of diverse personas interviewed.

Number of user journey maps created for the product based on interviews with diverse customers/stakeholders: Simply interviewing diverse personas is not sufficient; product managers need to incorporate feedback from diverse customers and stakeholders, apply design thinking, and ensure that they create diverse user journey maps to truly empathize with the feelings and motivations of diverse personas. User journey maps should be updated to ensure that diverse personas feel happy, excited, and empowered when they use the tech products. This parameter measures the number of diverse user journey maps created for a tech product.

Watch Rakshana's Presentation at a Previous Tech in Motion Event: Empathy at the Core of Product Design and User Journey Mapping

Localization score: Global tech products must be versatile to appeal to customers across different geographies; this requires tech products to support local languages, currencies, and modify images and videos (where applicable) to represent customers in their local regions. This parameter scores the product based on how adaptable it is to support customers across a wide variety of countries.

Accessibility score: A key hallmark of a tech product’s inclusivity is determined by how well it accommodates customers with varying disabilities. Accessibility includes (but is not limited to) providing descriptive text, closed captions for videos, the ability to adjust readability, color contrast, and more. There are technical standards such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) that helps to evaluate the accessibility levels for a tech product (such as A, AA, and AAA) and several countries also have accessibility legislations such as the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), Europeans accessibility act, Accessibility Standards Canada, and more. This parameter provides a score based on the number of accessibility legislations, standards, and requirements the tech product complies with.

Fairness and impartiality score (for AI tech products): Most cloud-based tech products will inevitably evolve to cover GenAI use cases, if they haven’t already. GenAI models need to be carefully evaluated to ensure that the outputs they generate, across various modalities (text, audio, images, video, and more), are unbiased, fair, and refrain from promoting hate speech. This parameter provides a score based on model training and test errors to determine how unbiased and fair the product is.

This is certainly not an exhaustive list, and you can create your own customized set of parameters based on your organization’s specific needs and DEI objectives.

Step 2: Create a scoring rubric for the DEI parameters

Next, for each of the parameters that you had defined, you will need to define a scoring rubric. You can specify scores from 1 to 5 (low to high) and define the range for each parameter, based on your organization’s DEI requirements. Here is an example of a scoring rubric for parameter a: Breadth and diversity of customers and stakeholders interviewed

Sample Scoring Rubric:

Step 3: Score and evaluate!

After creating a scoring rubric for each of your parameters, you can ask a reviewer in your organization (or even your organization’s DEI champion) to score the tech products and aggregate the sum of the scores across various parameters to identify the cumulative DEI score for each product. You can now clearly identify how each tech product in your organization aligns with your organization’s DEI objectives. You can take this one step further and even correlate the DEI scores with each product’s customer adoption metrics (such as daily active customers, retention rate, usage frequency and duration, satisfaction score, and more) to determine how DEI centricity positively influences customer adoption.

Prioritizing DEI Centricity for a Winning Outcome

Customer loyalty ultimately boils down to how they feel when they use your tech products; they need to feel happy, included, and empowered to be encouraged to use the product more. As product leaders who lead the development of cloud-based tech products, you might increasingly recognize that customer-centricity and DEI-centricity are joined at the hip. If you are struggling to identify a systematic approach to raise the DEI bar for your product portfolio collectively, you are not alone! Establishing a mechanism to score your tech products based on their commitment to DEI will enable your product organization to become more intentional about building products that are diverse, equitable, and inclusive.

Author's Note: All opinions expressed are my own and not affiliated with my current or past employers.

About the Author: Rakshana Balakrishnan is an accomplished cloud infrastructure product leader with over 12 years of experience in designing and delivering technical cloud-based products from concept to launch, including 0-to-1 and 1-to-n launches. She empowers global customers to create better business outcomes through their cloud journey, by delivering impactful products focused on Cloud Financial Management, Cloud Security, and AI/ML specialities. 

As a recognized thought leader, Rakshana has spoken at numerous international conferences, published articles on cloud product management, and served as an industry judge at international award programs. Passionate about fostering diversity in STEM, she serves as a community engagement leader and actively mentors hundreds of young women, in partnership with nationally recognized non-profit organizations.