Startup CXO

Chapter 101Increasing the Funnel and Building Diverse Teams

A lot of people talk about building diverse teams, a lot of people wish for that, but if you're not intentional about it, it will never happen. We were intentional at Return Path about building diverse teams. I believe that Product Development is a profoundly creative profession and that the quality of the work is lower if you lack diversity—diversity in people, in experiences, in ideas, and in approaches. Without diversity you're worse off as a product development team. Creativity depends on life experiences that we get when we broaden our stereotypes of who an engineer, product manager, or data scientist is. While building diverse teams takes longer on the whole, in my experience, it returns better results in the long term. Non‐diverse, homogeneous teams of like‐minded people who have deep experience working together are naturally faster at collaborating and getting something going quickly, but their solutions can often be one‐dimensional, and non‐diverse teams lack the creativity and tenacity to think differently about problems and approach problems from a different angle. When we broadened our candidate pool, removed biases, and searched for people who didn't fit the traditional stereotype of an engineer, we generated a number of key (positive) side effects:

• We had really interesting candidates to choose from to continue to help us build even more diverse teams.
• Diversity has a positive impact. When you have diverse ...