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Ask HN: Examples where diversity helped ship a better product?

4 points by iceman_w ↗ HN
There's this narrative everywhere that having a diverse team is good for businesses. Instead of just forcing it on everyone, I think it would be very helpful to collect examples where having people from diverse backgrounds in a team helped ship a better product.

Example: YouTube figured out that many videos were being uploaded upside down from mobile phones because some left handed person in the company ran into it.

5 comments

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itamarst
There are many examples of products that are much worse due to lack of diversity.

For example, every website with tiny font and low contrast text (like this one!). Older people tend to have much worse eyesight, and so suffer much more from these problems, but are missing from many teams.

babygoat
> forcing it on everyone

What is so terrible about having to work with someone who might be different than you?

iceman_w
I don't have any problem with working with people who are different from me. But I think showcasing the benefits of diversity will make everyone actually embrace it rather grudgingly support it just to be politcically correct.
muzani
Someone in the target market should at least be present in a team. I see so many teams from rich, happy families trying to help out someone in a poor country... without having any experience at all in that country. They have no understanding of how deep corruption cuts.

For example, in some countries, the harder and more tiresome a process is, the higher the odds that someone will bribe their way past it. The more inefficient a process is, the more money they make. They also happen to be highly underpaid (similar to American waiters) and rely on "tips" to make a living.

Over and over again, I see some first world company offering them an excellent enterprise solution and not understanding why it hasn't been adopted.

BjoernKW
Classic example: IBM vs. Apple

The pre-90s IBM was the epitome of a non-diverse and uniform work-environment. The latter is to be taken quite literally, these were people wearing uniform suits and ties and singing company songs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyQEbLx6AEY

Apple on the other hand was the prototypical scrappy startup made up of a ragtag bunch of hippies.