Building diversity & inclusion into product for sustainable growth

Dani Hart: My name is Danny Hart and I’m a mentor and the mentor Ambassador here at growth mentor. I’m also a digital strategist at the American battlefield trust and writer at a turnover. I’m joined here today with Enrique who knows who’s also a fellow growth mentor and the head of marketing at Pexels, one of the largest and best free photo libraries. Looking through and re gaze reviews from the calls with mentees, it’s clear that our community find some newbie friendly patient easy to talk to motivating, insightful and encouraging. So this leads me to believe that we’re going to have a great conversation here today. Welcome, Enrique.

Enrique Hoyos: Thanks for having me.

Dani Hart: Absolutely, I, you know, I’m so excited to talk to you today. And before we dive in, I want to give some context to our conversation. So I saw Enrique was a growth mentor and also working at Pexels. And I reached out to him to share that I had actually added some photos to Pexels myself with the goal to provide some more diverse photos to the platform. I got the idea from a co working space in Berlin, co women who took a bunch of women in tech photos and added them to the platform. Their idea to add these photos I thought was brilliant. It led to newspapers, magazines, and all kinds of articles, publishing their photos across the world. Their whole premise was to get more women represented at the table and saw adding stock photos as an opportunity to create more diversity and stock photos while also showing off their co working space. So after founding women in growth, I wanted to test out the idea. And prior to COVID, myself and two of the other founders of limiting growth got together for a photoshoot. And we added those photos to Pexels, which included multiple races, which is great. And so I reached out to Enrique with that. And his response really surprised me because he was working from a completely different angle to bring more diversity and inclusion into the Pexels product itself. So I really wanted to bring this conversation to the birth venture community because I think it’s such an important topic, how do we create more diverse and inclusive products. So now Enrique, I’d love for you to share a little bit more, if you could just start with what the project entailed and how you decided to get started with it, that’d be great.

Enrique Hoyos: I’d be happy to. So before even explaining what the project is, I think that it’d be great to take a bit of a step back to understand the impact that the imagery can can have. And just to give you like some quick numbers, for example, we have over 30 million sessions per month commit to pixels, and millions of people searching photos downloading photos throughout the month. And not only that the number of people who come to the platform, but where these photos and where this imagery is being used. So this gets us anywhere from the New York Times, Forbes all the way to nonprofits, and even teachers use images that they find on Pexels, or any other tough form, to be able to tell a story to communicate a message in, if you think about your day, and what you do, like imagery, everywhere that we go, it’s surrounding us and their phones and the digital way, if in the times that we could travel and we could do things like it would be at the airport to be in bus stations. And what imagery can do is really normalize or showcase what a culture is, and help define cultures. So we see a spectacle to one of the biggest platforms where people come and use imagery for free, we see that we have quite an important mission a quite an important impact that we can make in the world. And when this project started, this started earlier before I even started Pexels was how do we bring diversity into the platform? How do we bring not only what people are uploading? And how do we get that, to have more diversity in every sense that we talk about race, we talk about gender, we talk about how you identify as we talk about cultures, all the way to like food and what really showcases human experience. And then the one that I think I shared with you was the PRI campaign that we did a we did a year ago, where we started noticing that whenever we searched for turns like couple love marriage, in our platform and our competitive platforms, the only things that you would see was heterosexual couples in the results. So for anyone who wanted to use homosexual couples or same same sex couple, they would have had to type specifically homosexual couple or like gay couple of lesbian, whatever you want it to do. But we know that 90% of people who come to Pexels and come to these platforms is not to say that they’re lazy, but It’s the first term that you would search, the one that you end up kind of using for. So we don’t show that diversity in the first page, or the first thing that they search, those things are never going to come up to surface. And the sad thing about algorithms is that algorithms work based on historical data. And if every time that, like someone searches something, like, let’s say, like, business or or something like that, and all they get shown is like white people in a boardroom, or all people in a boardroom. And there’s kind of what you’re saying, no women, no diversity, no anything. But people click on it, because it’s what served it that is telling the algorithm once again, that people are thinking, this is the right thing. So the algorithm is going to find things that are more like that, and start pushing those up. So again, we’re kind of telling the algorithm by just clicking on things, that this is more of what we want to be served, and whatever is not served, right, there doesn’t matter. So this, this, for us was a big problem, how to how to attack this in a way that we would be able to showcase diversity in every search that we have. And it was it was quite complex, because again, like the algorithm, especially with AI, you don’t exactly know what it’s learning from, like, it’s not super defined on how to affect that. So one of the things that we decided to do, instead of just tackling the algorithm, in terms of technology, is how do we add a human touch to it. So at Pexels, we have a 14, but it’s the curation team. If you ever dropped their homepage, they’re the team who selects exactly what photo goes in what order accepts, like the photos for photographers upload makes collections out of them. And what they did is they started for each one of the search terms that we identified that we wanted to improve. And we have a huge list of that. And so working through that is that they would handpick exactly which photos, we want it to showcase on the top. And for the diversity campaign. Again, we kind of use the terms like couple marriage wedding, in started adding with the human touch, what were the photos that we want to showcase that had that diversity, immediately after we were showing those, we started to see increases on the number of people who download those photos, like the photo used to be downloaded, say like a couple 1000 times in a month. And now it’s downloaded over 100,000 times just because it was shown in the result. So this simply proves that people are not selecting necessarily the photo because it’s exactly what they want to use with the imagery because exactly what they want to use, but is what it was served to them. So if through our platform, we can help diversity, we can showcase more options, more people more reality of what the world is, it’s more likely that people will use it. And then that grows into like, wherever you start. So like if you use it in your blog, is not only you who downloaded the photo, who gets the benefit of this, but as your hundreds of readers or 1000s of readers who are going to be able to see that and relate to that. So yeah, that’s that’s kind of where the project went to. And like I said, like, it’s it’s very hard for us like it’s an ongoing project, it’s going to be I think that it’s going to be happening for the next couple of years. Because it’s it’s a bit of the menial work of like, how do we identify each one of those terms that we want to impact and want to add that level of diversity and realness to it not only English, but the different languages. So we really try to, to using their data to keep keep tabs on that. But we also rely on people telling us like, on the search terms that don’t look good, like how can we improve that? And then we can connect with our community photographers to be like, what is it that we can do, whether it’s a challenge or promoting them to be able to get more of that photography that can help us again, little by little improve the world and just normalizing diversity, normalizing cultures? And making us all a little bit better?

Dani Hart: Yeah, and what I really like to hear you have a multi prong approach, right, because obviously, changing the AI is not an easy task within an organization. Like as you said, it’s very difficult to understand what is in control and having that ability to span across different departments with the same goal of how do we make this happen, I think, you know, allowed the Pexels team to come up with a lot of different strategies to meet that mission and have that impact. So I imagine there had to be some challenges with that, you know, just managing the, the amount of, I guess, shareholders that were involved in that conversation. So do you mind if Explaining, like some of the challenges that you’ve ran up against and how you overcame those.

Enrique Hoyos: Yeah, I mean, in terms of people, I couldn’t speak higher of everyone seems to be honest. Like, as soon as we mentioned this, and this was brought up in, in a team call, and that’s kind of a little bit how we decide on what projects to go with. Everyone was like, all in into that. So there was no convincing that had to be done with anyone, there was no kind of fighting of like, where the direction should go, it was more how can we all do kind of in our own space and like, our own expertise? How can we enhance this experience? in the best way possible? Like I had nothing to do personally with, like, how did the algorithm work? Or how do we improve the VI because like, that’s way over my head, the curation team chose the photos, I also didn’t play a role with that. But what I decided to do with the marketing team is how do we potentially get this out there in, in the sense of a campaign. So we also push, for example, other of the competitors, to see that, like, if we’re doing this, they should also be doing that. So like, that little bit of a push for other people to do that was part of this whole equation. So everyone kind of played a different role? I can’t super speak on the on the on the tech side of things, because again, like, it’s not my, my core expertise, but I know that like, our developers were like, super hard, like, especially back in, in the ones who manage the algorithm, we’re trying to see what were the best ways that we can do this in a technical way. So it’s not only there right now of like, how do we boost those photos to be on the top? But also, if people are clicking on those? How do we get the algorithm to learn faster, that that is also the type of content that people want? and identifying what other tags within the photos it can pull to make the search? Even better? to do that? So the technical side was was complex. But I can’t Yeah, I can’t super speak to that, to be honest.

Dani Hart: That’s fair, I think that that really speaks highly of the culture of Pexels. Because, you know, especially being in growth in general, it’s it’s hard to get everybody rolling in the same direction. But to see that everybody kind of stood up and said, Yes, this is important to us, I think speaks that your culture at Pexels is diverse and inclusive, and creates that space for people to express that. So I just want to applaud the Pexels teams, or you know, founding team or whoever is a managing the culture there, because it sounds like they’ve created a really great environment for this type of work to happen.

Enrique Hoyos: I agree. In the end, it’s, it’s great that it’s part of the brand is not an effort to, to, you know, mean, like a lot of the PR campaigns or efforts to kind of like take advantage of momentum and things like that. But like, this was more of a not an external thing, but more internal for the team, like how do we do better? And we all Pexels recognize that as a platform where people come in? I mean, it’s hard to quantify, like millions, there’s a lot of people that come and use the imagery and how much impact that can have, I think that we all have a very high awareness on that. And yeah, like you mentioned, the culture simply makes it easier to do these kinds of things.

Dani Hart: Yeah, and I think you touched on this already a little bit by saying that, you know, pexels is really being the Trailblazer here and encouraging the competitors to step up and do the same thing. So besides being an example, like, how else can you encourage companies and other products to take a similar stance on this? I mean, I know that there’s just not a one size fits all, but what are your thoughts on that?

Enrique Hoyos: Yeah, 100% I think that there’s, there’s the kind of what you mentioned, trying to be the Trailblazer like, showcasing that this is something not only that we care, but like the reactions and the amount of press that we got out of that. It tells other companies the importance of it, and hopefully it pushes them into into high gear and how do they improve their own their own algorithms and their own photo libraries to to be better. And I think that this would have seen where like, not only the media, but like the support that we were getting on on social media just to Twitter, like people just loving the campaign and actually tweeting back and like some of the other you know, the websites being like, why don’t you do this, like comparing the results. I think that that’s that’s a huge push. And then the other the other side of things is on the consumer and like the user, trying to educate people on the impact that the images that they select can Have that whenever you select something with diversity whenever you select something that is different, or that, that it helps normalize something that should be normal. You mean like, I’m not saying that it isn’t normal, but like in people’s mind, some things are still not know, in simply by having that imagery in your websites or in different types of ads, you’re aligning with people who identify with the windows values, helping you as a brand, but also helping normalize culture and shift our world into a more diverse and accepting world instead of just seeing the same things that we keep seeing in the media all the time.

Dani Hart: Absolutely. And, you know, thinking back about the photos that we took out women and growth, I mean, that we wanted them for our own purpose, whenever I would search for, you know, when I was managing the growth, hackers conference, you know, speakers or you know, any kind of imagery before we had our own collateral abuse, you know, it was all men speaking and all the panels looked very uniform. And it’s unfortunate, because we would get a lot of people that would, they would sign up, they would say, hey, I want to speak. But those all those people all looked the same, right? And they told very similar stories. But when we started being intentional about, hey, we want to make a more diverse stage. And we understand that we’re not going to get there overnight, but we do have that intention of growing in that direction, then, you know, the imagery becomes very important. We need to have images that show women that show people of color that show every you know, culture, anything that we can add, it’s it’s going to then attract those people to say, hey, I want to speak at that event. Or at least say, Hey, you know, if we are if we’re doing the outreach, then they see okay, well, other people like me have spoken in the past, so I feel more empowered to do so. So I yeah, intention, right, I think that’s the word that a lot of it comes down to is how intentional is your organization? Or is your initiative to include a more diverse and inclusive voices.

Enrique Hoyos:  Where you said, it’s important is the identity that people have like, when you, you don’t identify or leave, it’s much harder to identify with, just copy versus identify with an image. You mean, like, it’s much quicker to understand what trigger disease. So like, what you’re saying, like, if I see myself in an image, without having to read a paragraph, a copy, it makes me more likely to feel like part of that community or feel like part of that, that I can apply to be the speaker in that scenario. So yeah.

Dani Hart: I think that’s a good segue into our next question. So why is diversity inclusion important to you, and I know that this is a little bit more personal. So feel free to open up.

Enrique Hoyos: Feel free to open up. Um, listen, I come from I live in Canada, but I’m originally from Colombia. So I am not going to say that I’ve experienced like, any type of racism or anything at all, but I’ve seen it happen in different things. And I, I personally don’t love when people get judged for like, who they are, where they come from, because we’ll come with their own with her own story that has sometimes nothing to do with our identity. So that’s kind of where like, for me, it’s it’s important that like, everyone has the same options in life, whether it comes from a diversity of where you’re at, or like, what do you believe in, or what you look like. And, And that, to me is, it’s important because I’ve, I’ve had, I’ve been lucky to live the way that I live without the judgment, but I know that some people aren’t as lucky. And I recognize that, and I have seen it in my own country happening. So that’s why it’s important for the, for the world to be a better place.

Dani Hart: Yeah, I agree. And I think that, you know, when we think about diversity inclusion, it comes down to personality, too, right? Like, we need diverse personalities, that there’s a reason why, you know, personality assessments exist, you know, like the ocean and Hexaco frameworks. They are basically saying, what makes humans humans, what are the attributes that stand people apart from one another? And what it comes down to is we need all of us, right? Like, there, there are strengths. Sure, there are weaknesses with every personality, but those strengths are what make us ourselves, but also help us contribute to a better society, right? Like, we can’t just have one or the other. And the same thing goes with culture and ethnicity, everything, like we all play a part in this world. So if the voices aren’t equal, and we can see that as people that are, you know, privileged and have been very lucky, then, you know, for me, equality is one of my core values. So I understand why these things are so near and dear to my heart, it’s because it’s true to who I am is, you know, creating an equitable place. Now, I’m not going to say we’re going to get there tomorrow. I’m realistic, right. But I try as best as I can to listen to other voices. So I appreciate you opening up about that. And the, the world would be such a boring place if we were all the same. Yeah, really would. So how, how else can someone support diversity and inclusion? Right? We’ve talked about creating a product and making changes within the product. But what is it like day to day? How do you do it?

Enrique Hoyos: I mean, yeah, that’s a that’s a big question. I get I think it goes back to intention. And it’s, it’s very interesting, because you talk about your values, and also understand your values help you be, have an intention of how to do things, and have the filters of like, whenever I do something, on my doing it in a way that is aligned with my values, and where I want to be. So when it comes to again, I go back to the imagery, but like when it comes to imagery, like, just have an intention of like, how you want to showcase the world to other people, not just having a pretty photo or something, but like, how do you tell a better story, how you help people identify with your brand, and with you by having more more diversity in your imagery and how you use it.

Dani Hart: Yeah, that makes sense. Awesome. Well, this has been a jam packed conversation, but I do want to leave us with a couple of questions. Growth and marketing roles are very demanding these days, right? There’s acquisition channels changing by the day, and always having to keep up with what’s new and best and keeping value, you know, consistently going to customers. So I’d love to hear how do you take time for yourself and relax, because I think that’s a really important part of the equation.

Enrique Hoyos: To be completely, I’m really bad at taking time time off. For some reason, I’m always thinking about work. And it’s partially because it is one of my values is one something that I, I connect really closely to, but I do the one thing that I do is I play sports quite a lot. So for me, it’s super important to like, at least played like hockey or soccer, or something once or twice a week. That is one of the things that gets me in flow. And I stopped thinking about anything else. And I just focus on. I mean, it’s competitive, but focused on winning and like, in having fun in that in that specific sport. So for me sports and exercise that get me out of the out, like gives me that balance and that health, mental health I think.

Dani Hart: Yeah, and I think what you said, right, your work is tied to your values. I think that that makes a big difference where maybe the work doesn’t necessarily feel like work if it’s something that enriches you on all levels. So that makes sense. And yes, sports, what better way to be mindful than having a ball coming or a hockey puck coming flying at your face. Right? You there’s no time for that. All right, so our last question, is there anything else that you’d like to share with the community?

Enrique Hoyos: Tough? No, I don’t know. I mean, the intention of what you do I think that that’s kind of the through this conversation where where my mind and key takeaway was?

Dani Hart: Awesome. Well, thank so much for your time. And we are both available as mentors on the growth mentor platform. So if either of us sparked your mind, please book a call with us. We would love to hear from you. And we’d love to chat about how we can you know, help you bring more diversity and inclusion projects into the work that you do. So, thank you so much for your time and reggae. Thank you community for listening and we look forward to hearing from you soon.