I'm the vice president of developer productivity, at MongoDB, and I have a passion for both creating really high performing developer teams and really creating, hyper high inclusive cultures, in order to support those teams.As I like to joke, I'm one of those people who can check off a lot of HR boxes. I belong to many different employee resource groups, and over the years, I unfortunately have seen a lot of troublesome behaviors. Mostly they are the hardest category to deal with because they usually come from thoughtlessness and social habit rather than malice. It's easier to call out somebody who's actively being a jerk because they're almost certainly also visibly violating employee codes of conduct. But if you're an employee who is on the receiving end of a thousand paper cuts of thoughtless behavior, it's also easier to stay silent when nobody around you even notices there's a problem.

But more importantly, beyond being the recipient of troublesome behaviors, I have also personally committed troubling behaviors, usually with the best of intentions. It's only by the grace and patience of many people and a lot of personal self reflection that I have learned how to be a better coworker and hopefully a better leader. And finally, you'll notice there in addition to all of my categories, I've been a member of many nonprofits to support inclusion in tech industry, and I'm sure many of you aware that the changing political landscape has made even talking about diversity and inclusion a risk proposition in some quarters.

Women Who Code was forced to shut down their doors last year when all their funding dried up. Other long standing organizations such as Chik Tech, Girls in Tech, Dames and Games, and many others have also shut their doors in the last eighteen months, while other organizations such as the Anita Borg Institute and the National Diversity Council are struggling financially.

The current efforts to roll back all that we've learned over the past decade about the value of inclusivity, I think, is to the overall detriment of our industry. But I didn't always have a ton of focus on inclusive cultures. My whole career has been focused on making developers more productive, and a lot of that, especially beginning, was by helping create new tools. Everything from continuous integration systems to bug tracking systems. But along the way, I came to understand that it's not just good tools that makes for a productive developer. Many other people were thinking about this as well, and it's been an interesting journey that spans over two decades. And trust me. I'm gonna bring this all together. So observe the progressions of endless developers and development teams create software. We started in 02/2001.

Martin Fowler and a bunch of friends went up to go skiing on top of the mountain. And it was, like I said, 2001 very early in the internet era that was about five years old since the, the launch of Netscape Navigator and the World Wide Web. And the previous decades of software development best practices had proven to be inadequate to this burgeoning new industry. So smart people went off skiing like I said and came back with the Agile Manifesto. Note the very emphasis emphasis on the four key values is on individuals and interactions. This is a pattern on people that we're going to see persist in various forms over the years. 02/2009: DevOps emerges.

This, the admin of DevOps as a development philosophy, we see immediately that collaboration is a key value. We want to break down the functional barriers that slow things down and make it easier for all employees, especially developers, to understand more about the overall process of shipping software, not just be in their little corner working on a small set of features. Continuous delivery speaks to how to maintain a consistent level of quality and lean principles is all about taking the traditional bureaucracy of organizations and as much as possible throwing it out the window and instead have people connect with each other more freely to get done more quickly.

And you'll notice we also start talking more explicitly about the value of having a learning culture. Technology is now officially moving really quickly and people need to be good at adaptation. Fast forward again 2015 project Aristotle. This study by Google focused exclusively on how culture, not technology, is what differentiates elite teams. And as technology continues to evolve more and more quickly, go to market strategies become more urgent. Innovation is something expected in weeks versus years. What Google's research tells us is that strong culture is critical to enable technical innovation because innovation itself is increasingly shifting left. No more can you just have a few individuals architecting everything for your business.

You wanna be able to leverage your entire technical staff as much as possible, and that means an environment where everyone feels personally empowered to share in the ownership of your company's success. And as you look at this category, you can see starting with the one, psychological safety, key element. Do do your developers and do your development teams feel confident taking risks? And taking risks is what will drive innovation. So as we look at the other things, dependability, structure and clarity, meaning, impact, these are all things that help culturally bring developers together in order to create innovative new technologies that will drive your business. Alright. A little bit later, we have the state of DevOps and a new book called Accelerate. What started as an annual industry wide survey, the state of DevOps report, ultimately turned into a book Accelerate, which built on both what the survey results and also the recent Google study told and tried to further quantify what a strong team actually means in measurable ways so that all companies can try to recognize whether or not they have the teams and culture they need to maximize success.

Accelerate also introduced us to the valuable concept of Westrum's generative culture and the critical nature of this idea as another driver of elite performing organizations. So as we look at the key metrics here, deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, time to restore service upon failure, these are things that are the outcomes of all of the work your development teams have put into developing the features and products and how healthy that process is.

You can imagine how important the culture around ideas like experimentation, risk taking, and communication are all going to feed into these outcomes having good scores. And then further digging into Westrom's topology of organizational cultures, you can imagine if you look on the left there, it might be a little bit hard to read, sorry about that, the pathological or bureaucratic ideas around organizational cultures are clearly not ones that have cultures that will foster risk taking and that subsequent innovation.

So the generative culture that emphasizes high cooperation, communication, risk taking, and that learning culture that we started to hear about back in 2008 with the DevOps revolution. These are all starting to come into play in increasingly strong ways. Alright. And finally, for me at least, the most recent effort to define what it means to have a high functioning team I found was the space framework for Microsoft Research. Ironically, a lot of the same people that were part of State of DevOps and Accelerate also contributed to the space framework. And you'll notice the themes here again emphasize cultural elements as a key component of success success with regards to developer velocity and efficiency. Space being this, anagram. Satisfaction and well-being satisfaction. Right? and foremost, are your developers in a position where they feel motivated and incentivized in order to do good work?

The performance and activity are sort of measures, of success, but then right away we also see communication and collaboration, key elements of a strong healthy culture that is clearly a key contributor even in the latest research. Now we're twenty years in to research about how to make developers better and communication and collaboration are continuing to be a very obvious and clear winner. So what's our takeaway? The real key to high performing teams isn't technology even though for me that's how I started developing those tools way back in the day. But it's building the strong cultures that result in performance both for your teams and ultimately your business. Alright. I've told you this grand history of the state of development productivity. Why does this matter? Alright. Let's talk about now bringing this all together. If you've never seen the soap dispenser video, I have to say it's a must see. It was probably almost ten years ago the time that I saw it.

A poor man with dark skin cannot get the soap dispenser to work for him even as it works just fine for his white coworker. He eventually gets the soap dispenser to work by putting a white towel on his hand, and then the soap dispenser can see it. Similarly, you may remember when VR was all the rage to the point that Facebook renamed itself Meta and started talking about its metaverse. If only people had realized at the time that due to a number of physiological and hormonal factors as many as seventy eight percent of women or half of their total customer base potential customer base was prone to motion sickness wearing a VR equipment. Right? They're not really sexist but it sure felt that way. Historically there have been thousands of products that even now can't be used by the heart of hearing or the heart of seeing.

And there's also countless products from women's soccer cleats to bulletproof vests that do not work as well for women because historically they're just small versions of what's made for men whose bodies are very different usually. And I have to help I have to start thinking a diverse employee base helps with this. I mean think if they even had one dark skinned person at the soap dispenser factory they probably could have avoided this problem. These and many other things that over time I increasingly became aware of and started to see the abysmal numbers in the employee demographics of our industry as a whole and that's when diversity and inclusion became just as important to me as developer productivity. Oops. Oh my goodness. Okay. So what are the key elements of an inclusive culture and why does an inclusive culture even matter? Well, an inclusive culture is necessary in order to have diversity because not everybody thinks the same.

They come from different backgrounds and honoring that is a key to driving those key things we saw in the developer productivity slides around communication and collaboration. And what's the thing that's important for an inclusive culture? Well, wouldn't you know? Psychological safety. Everyone, no matter what your background, or where you come from, should feel safe to express ideas, ask questions, admit mistakes, and raise concerns. Right? This is not just good for people, who happen to be women or people of color or come from a non traditional background. It is good for everyone. So if you get it right for some, you get it right for all. Respect and fairness, also critical. Equity and opportunities. Representation with empowerment. Oh but look: ongoing learning and accountability. We're definitely seeing some patterns being repeated when we think about inclusive cultures, not just good cultures for developer productivity.

So how do we connect the dots? So as leaders, we model and reinforce behaviors we want. Culture starts from the top but is supported from below. Right? That's a a mentor that I try to follow. So things that in particular we want to model. So checking our naturally occurring biases. Right? Biases can actually happen for a number of reasons. Sometimes it absolutely can be due to race or gender, but sometimes you can have biases based on familiarity, either positive or negative. We call these biases halos and horns. You assume a favorite employee is always above average and an employee you may have had a problem with in the past must always be a poor performer. No matter what the cause of the bias, you must train yourself and your leadership team to always be aware of them and support each other in avoiding them.

Building these leadership muscles is as as a fundamental aspect to an inclusive culture. And also remember, DevOps tells us to shift left, and Google tells us that structure, meaning, and impact are critical to high performing teams. This means tell your teams what you need, then get the heck out of the way. Encourage and celebrate and support the unique ways your developers may approach problems, and their solutions might not be what you would have chosen. But if you've given the correct criteria for success for things such as performance, durability, and important functionality, that shouldn't matter. You're giving them the agency to make those choices. Language is also critical.

At one point at a at an organization, we would often use the term ghetto code to refer to code that we wrote in a hurry, that we might throw away, that we really didn't think was good code that we wanted to save. Never thought of it. Had been using it for years. The team had been using it for years. But I had an employee who happened to grow up in a ghetto, and he pulled me aside one day, thankfully, with psychological safety and said, hey. You know, I grew up in a ghetto, and we didn't have a lot of money, but I have a lot of fond memories of my neighborhood. It makes me kinda sad to think that we're using this as an analogy for bad. And I felt terrible. Right? That of course, like I said, I've made mistakes, and they're usually thoughtless. So without much, controversy, we came up with a new term, janky.

I have no idea where this name came from, but we looked checked carefully to make sure that there was no discriminatory associations. And now we use janky code, when we wanna refer to bad code. It's so simple and yet so powerful and such an important thing for us as leaders to model. Finally, lean into what you consider the success criteria of an inclusive culture supporting a diverse employee base. Do you even know what it looks like? Do you understand how to measure it? The inclusion you see should be everywhere and so should the diversity, Meaning, you should see representation of the diversity that the inclusion should be supporting.

This absolutely will also be part of your brand as a leader and your company's brand brand as an employer. So you want it to be a good brand, and you need to constantly check to make sure that you are succeeding in your goals. Fundamentally, if you do not have representative leadership, please ask yourself why and do what needs to be done to make sure that you are leaning into equitability, fairness, and opportunity. Where we can get it wrong. Has your company traditionally only talked about hiring wins for diverse employees, but maybe not retention of a diverse workforce? Have you had employees take diversity training without tying it to concrete outcomes? For example, changing where you recruit and how you interview. Do all of your employees feel like they're part of a community, or do you continually have employees who feel isolated?

Do you have ERGs whose members are expected to do all the work without recognition or professional benefit? Do you reward your leaders who actively invest in their employ employees, and do you hold leaders accountable who don't? Do you measure the success of your leadership and the strength of your culture through employee surveys, and do you use that data to improve? Even if you start with the right intentions, your inclusive culture can fail through complacency. It's on us as leaders to make sure it's a core part of your values. But when we get it right, we see the opportunity in concrete ways. For example, you know, your business wants to expand in public sector. You have teams that are struggling, with with structure and performance. Maybe you have some veterans who can help with both of those things. You wanna expand globally.

You wanna go into countries that are very much not like The United States. Do you have companies who speak that language, who are from there, who can tell us the nuances to help us understand? Why is all of this important? Well, there are studies that say that diverse teams are 70% more likely to capture new markets. Right? This is in your best interest to have employees that can help you with this. Therefore, it's in your best interest to make sure that you have an inclusive culture that those employees will thrive in, again, regardless where they come from. And, also, the things that get me mad really fast and should make you mad too is people saying that diversity, equity, and inclusion only means people of color and women and only means lowering your standards.

While these demographics can often benefit the most obviously from an inclusive culture, diversity means so much more than that. Veterans, people with different physical abilities, people with different cognitive abilities, people from non traditional educational backgrounds, people who are late career transitioners, all of these people can benefit from inclusive cultures, and in turn, they are going to bring benefit to your company.

And, again, it reflects back on the business. I have included and will release this slide deck, I'm sure, and we have included the receipts to these studies that show these things. Right? You will make more money as a company. You will be more innovative as a company. You will be more successful as a company with an inclusive culture that supports a diverse employee work base and in particular overlaps heavily with everything that we know about what makes engineers and software developers successful. There's no reason not to do this, politics aside. It just makes good business sense. Best leaders harness the value of include inclusion and leverage it for the benefit of everyone. I believe it. I've seen it, and I hope you can too.