Janeen Uzzell: Chapter 1: Winning by Building Inclusive Teams

M-A-C-H-I-N-E-Y-E-S-R-X-I-S-T. It's Machine Yearning from Assist. It's a podcast where we think and dream about the future of AI, the talking internet, and how we're reshaping our culture. This chapter is an excerpt from our interview with Janine Yuzel at the 2018 VOICE Summit. The largest single gathering of the conversational design ecosystem. While we were at VOICE, we met people who were living at the front edge of creating a more inclusive culture in technology product design. Enter Janine Yuzel. Most recently, Janine was the head of women in technology for GE. There she worked across the 300,000-employee community, leading a culture shift to accelerate the number of women within GE's technical female workforce. Janine spoke with conference organizer and friend of the pod, Janice Mandel. In this conversation, they talk about how you build and lead inclusive, diverse teams so you can attract and serve a diverse customer base. This is just a taste, so make sure you grab the full episode and subscribe so you never miss a single Machine Yearning. Janine Yuzel.

As an emerging market leader, my job is to really understand the global market. And to put our technology in those spaces or to understand what technologies can work well there.

You did how many years with GE?

I was at GE for almost 2 decades in a number of roles from operations. I worked in global health and then ended my time there as the head of women in technology. So wonderful experience. I was leading a team and we were focused on ultrasound. More specifically— You mean when you have a baby? Yeah, ultrasound. So a large— ultrasound is a really large, bulky, heavy product and it needs a lot of consumables. What you actually need to make it work and the power and electricity that it generates.

You said it was like the size of a washing machine.

Yeah, we call— I call it the washing machine.

Right.

And so it's a mini washing machine, but a washing machine nonetheless. And we were simplifying this product to take it into markets like Indonesia and Bangladesh and sub-Saharan Africa. And the result was our handheld ultrasound, which is a product called vScan. It's a wonderful, wonderful product. It can be solar powered. It can be used very non-traditional spaces. And it does very, very basic ultrasound technology. In a handheld? In a handheld device. Now, you know, when we were putting this product together, we definitely were thinking about the end user. You couldn't tell me we weren't. I lived in India, worked there, been to Africa, watched the midwives work. We know how to design this product. And at the end of the day, we are creating job opportunities for non-traditional task-shifted users. We were helping support the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. We were going to generate incremental revenue for the company.

—All good. All good. You had your white hat on. I was ready.

Like, give me my finish line and run over the edge. Until it just— none of that happened. We had certainly designed what they needed. This product gave them what they needed— solar-powered, handheld, easy to use. It just wasn't what they wanted. Some of the most basic things— for example, the product is white. It gets dirty too fast. We're not proud of it. It looks dingy and old. We don't want it to be unattractive because we're businesswomen. And we're trying to build our company and the other women don't like the way it looks. We really don't want it to be handheld. We don't have any pockets to put it in because we wear saris or very traditional clothing and women didn't have pockets. So we're thinking, you know, you put on your lab coat and you put it in your pocket. But in Indonesia, which has some of the largest population, over 100,000 midwives that go through their midwife program, they don't have pockets. They're wearing a traditional garment that doesn't have that. So they're like, "I need a handle. I need something to carry it with." So some of these things were so easy and so simple, but cost us in the end because now you're talking about going back to marketing, going back to the design team, having to recreate a product and redistribute it. And fortunately, it did work for us, but every company won't have the resources or the opportunity to do that. Right. So we've gotta catch this up front. And solve it early on.

So how do you do your research then? Are there some ways that people can be mindful of making sure they're inclusive?

I am a very strong proponent of going as grassroots as possible for research. I was very non-traditional. I was in the field with the midwives, working with them, trying to understand this most. But what I could say to people overall is you have to ensure that your sample size is broad and you have to think out of the box. And so if you're a financial you're designing a financial app to teach or to ease the process of investing, I'd go talk to the people that don't have any money. Why are you going to sit around and talk to people that have tons of money, call their financial advisors or know how to use their apps, know exactly what they want to do? I'd go to the folks that want to aspire to be that and don't do traditional banking because then they're going to say something like, "Well, when I click on this, I want it to give me a small definition. I forgot what that means. I don't remember all my investing terminology," or, "I just want to use something "Something that's entry-level, something that allows me to invest a dollar a week or save my change at the end of the month that will—" And, "I don't make enough money to be in your organization or to be in that group of sample size." But I'd get the data from all of those people because now you're going to design a product that's going to market and expand to people that think that they can't even be a part of your continuum. I'd also, again, I like to talk to— media, whether it's magazines or schools or programs, for anyone that I think could be a potential end user, live with one of the end users, know someone that has a grandmother or an aunt that could be an end user, all of those folks are important to content. And the more conversations you have with people, the more you'll be able to learn where your resources are, and they come from the most non-traditional spaces. And so, data is everywhere. It is everywhere. It's on the bus, the subway ride that you're taking home. It's just a matter of being open to the uniqueness of where it can come from.

Now, I know that fintech gave us a jumpstart, right? They figured out how to make things available the way people live, run, you know, into— make banking available just, you know, so they didn't have to make the dangerous run home. Correct. Right? And they can just send it home. We have a dangerous situation coming up because there are no laws right now that talk about employment and what these algorithms will control. How are we going to do that?

Well, right now, you know, from a legislative perspective, there's some things that are always thought about, right? Age, race, some of the basic discriminatories. But there are communities of people that even I can't think of them all, but for example, people that work the midnight shift or some of the non-traditional users that I talked about earlier. And when we're not covering or thinking about them, then obviously, you know, legislation needs to go much broader. The opportunity to put more seats at the table is absolutely where we need to go. Also need to include ethicists. They need to have legal teams at the table. This table has to go broad. And just Just when you think it should just be my programmer, my coder, and the person that understands how voice technology or any technology should work is exactly when we're missing it. So, we've got to come together. There are some organizations and guidelines and teams that have been put in place by like IEEE and other organizations to say, let's convene and ensure that this table is broader. I think psychologists need to be at the table. That's important. There's a level of thinking that's very different as we're starting to tap into the homes and the lifestyles of people with this type of technology. Where's the privacy? How are we managing this differently? I think we'll start to see it in all sorts of ways as people are starting to leverage social media and all of these apps to run for office or to determine where they stand politically or socially or economically. Having all of these people at the table is going to matter tremendously as we get deeper into this. That's interesting.

It's a big job. You know, Steve Case and his, uh, is it "The Third Wave"? He wrote a book recently, and he said, you know, we're past the time where you can make an app and sit in your dorm room and everybody will get it and that's it. We're now messing with the very fundamental foundations of our society, and that's a big ecosystem.

It's huge, because we don't know— I mean, things go everywhere all of the time now. I was reading where an author was saying that the disparity or the circumstance that we're leading to could be circa, you know, just the challenges of civil rights and some of the problems that we've had because we're at the mercy of the thoughts of the programmers. And again, we know that some of those, while they're not intentional, some of them could be, you know, some of the racism, sexism, otherwise. We're teaching machining how to do this now. Right. Machining is now going to become bias to end users. And machining, we're not even talking human beings. So now we've got humanity and the machining, right, all turning against members of society, possibly just based on the programming of one group of people. And while it could seem like, is that possible? It absolutely is, which is why— Huge. I said earlier, there is proof that some racism is stemmed just from programming.

Wow. So you got a big job ahead of you.

Well, I want all of us to take it on together. And I'm telling you, it's the responsibility, again, of every technologist, every person that decides that they want to work in this space and be a part of the growth of this business. It's the responsibility of the leadership, the people who lead the teams, the people who contribute to the content. The lawyers, the ethicists, the psychologists, all of us, because all of us are gonna be affected by it. It's our world. So it's no way that you could say, "Oh, I don't use that, so it's not gonna faze me. I don't need to be involved." You're involved. Facial recognition, you're involved. Anywhere you go and your photo is being scanned, you are now a part of this. Don't wait until you have a negative experience to decide that you wanna get involved.

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