Annie Jean-Baptiste spends her days making sure everyone matters. As Head of Product Inclusion, Research, and Activation at Google, that’s a pretty big job. Annie is tasked with making sure everything Google puts on the market is inclusive of the people who will use it, from ensuring Google assistants use sensitive language to making sure skin color renders correctly in cameras.
That last bit is what recently spurred Google to create a 2,000-member team of “Inclusion Champions,” who help test upcoming products to make sure they work for all kinds of people. According to Digital Trends, Annie set out to institute a defined process for inclusion testing after an image-quality engineer flagged that different skin tones weren’t showing up correctly in the Pixel phone camera. When that engineer asked Annie what the process was to make sure products were being tested to avoid bias, she recognized that there wasn’t one. Beyond products, Google has previously been called out for its lack of inclusion in its own workforce, and in its search engines.
Annie has been doing work to increase inclusion in all areas for about a decade now. She took a quick break from her busy day-to-day to share what a typical day in her work life looks like — from walking her dog, Hercules, to amplifying marginalized voices.
A Day In Annie’s Life
Annie shares thus;
7:00 a.m. Wake up. I start my day by saying three things I’m grateful for and setting my intentions for the day. I’ll use Headspace to meditate for 10 minutes, but some days I forget or don’t feel like it!
7:15 a.m. Workout. I like to mix up my workouts, but today I worked out with my trainer, Fred.
8:15 a.m. Get ready and ask my Google Assistant (whose voice is either John Legend or Issa Rae) about traffic and the weather. My dad taught me to choose my clothes for the week on Sunday to eliminate having to decide during the week. Google doesn’t have a dress code, so I can express myself however I like. I made a pact to support more Black designers and designers of color this year. Some of my favorites are Aminah Abdul Jillil, Andrea Iyamah, Arryles, Cushnie, Pat McGrath, and Mented Cosmetics.
8:45 a.m. Walk my eight-year-old Yorkie, Hercules! He comes to work with me nearly every day and has essentially grown up at Google. I wear my Upright Godevice while walking Hercules to improve my posture. It helps me to remember not to hunch over my computer!
Heading To Google!
8:55 a.m. I drive over to Google’s San Francisco office. I like listening to podcasts, like NPR’s Code Switch or Hidden Brain, to get inspiration from different industries about how they think about inclusion and exclusion.
9:30 a.m. I arrive at work and grab breakfast in the café and check emails, i am an Inbox Zero person (or at least under 10). so I spend this time clearing out any non-important emails to help prioritize my day. I have large chunks of time blocked off for brainstorming and strategizing, but on my most hectic day, I may have 12 meetings with different research, product, executive, and marketing teams.
10:00 a.m. Meet with a product team about an upcoming launch. As head of Product Inclusion, my job is to work with different product teams (like Google Assistant and Android) to figure out how to bring a more inclusive lens to their work. Have they gotten feedback from users outside the U.S.? Have they spoken to people of all genders? How does skin tone render? These are the types of questions we ask. I love being able to partner with and learn from so many teams. Each role — whether it’s engineering, user experience design, or product management — has a different perspective to bring and a responsibility to uplift underrepresented voices.
Lunch And More Work
12:00 p.m. Lunchtime! I grab some food and take Hercules for a walk.
1:00 p.m. Work with a group of 20 percenters on inclusive dogfooding (what we call user testing). Google has this initiative where employees can use 20% of their time to work on projects outside their day-to-day work. In fact, Gmail came from someone’s 20% project. More than 2,000 Googlers from across the global company have volunteered to work on product inclusion and help teams bring an inclusive lens to their work. They help us dogfood and stress test, providing feedback on their experience through focus groups at different phases in the process. We love when product teams start working with us at the ideation phase so we can embed inclusion in from the beginning of their journey, but they can bring us in at any part in the process (even a day or two before launch).
2:00 p.m. Meet with Google’s senior leadership team about our hardware (devices and services team), and how to embed product inclusion into their design framework. We have several exec sponsors around the company who make sure that product inclusion is a key part of the process, as well as advise on research about the business case for inclusion.
4:00 p.m. Prep for my talk at Consumer Electronics Show, the largest consumer-technology-focused conference that draws more than 170,000 attendees. Being a first-generation Haitian American, I’m passionate about everyone feeling seen and having their voices heard. Though I’m an introvert, I’ve been working on speaking more about how important representing underrepresented users is. I practice a decent amount and also love to power pose before every talk or fireside chat.
Done For The Day!
5:00 p.m. Check emails and spend some time prioritizing which are urgent, semi-time sensitive, and can wait until later in the day.
7:00 p.m. Get home and check WhatsApp. My family is always sending videos and jokes to one another and it’s a nice way to be connected to my brother, who is in New York, and my parents, who are in Boston. I also try to call my grandparents at least one time every three weeks. They split their time between Haiti and the East Coast of the U.S.
7:15 p.m.Read 10 pages (minimum, ideally more, depending on the book!). It doesn’t seem like much, but I read 15 books last year. Some of my favorites are Memoirs From a Young Black Chef, Originals, and How to Speak Machine.
7:45 p.m. Dinner with my husband. I usually meal prep for the week on Sundays, but on Wednesdays, we try a new restaurant or recipe. It’s our time to catch up.
8:30 p.m. Check outside-of-work activities. I’m the Intrapreneur in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education (go Quakers!), so I plan office hours with the students that I advise. I also mentor young people looking to get into tech, so I may connect with them.
8:45 p.m. Pack for a business trip to South Africa. I’ve been lucky enough to be able to represent product inclusion across the globe. I have a suitcase already packed with the essentials like workout gear, chargers, headphones, and toiletries since I’m on the road a lot.
Annie Rests
9:30 p.m. Late-night walk for Herc (though usually I have my husband do it!).
9:50 p.m. TV, reading, or hanging out before bed.
11:00 p.m. Pray, then sleep. One of my non-negotiables is getting at least eight hours a night! I’m not my best when I haven’t had a lot of sleep. Senior year of high school, I got 11 hours each night and was living my best life (those were the days).