Agile by Harvard Business Review

Author:Harvard Business Review
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
Published: 2020-04-21T00:00:00+00:00

The Response

Agile teams benefit from different perspectives, skills, and expertise, so the cofounders assembled a small, diverse team to tackle the issue. Members included product head Maryam Mohit, communications director Kelsey Grady, a product manager, a designer, a data scientist, and later a software engineer.

As for the data, much of Nextdoor’s data here was unstructured text. Especially at first, this sort of data doesn’t lend itself to the type of easy analysis that its structured equivalent does. This goes double when trying to deal with a thorny issue such as racial profiling. Five employees were assigned to read through thousands of user posts.

The outcome was a three-pronged solution: diversity training for Nextdoor’s neighborhood operations team; an update to Nextdoor’s community guidelines and an accompanying blog post; and a redesign of the app. This last step proved to be the thorniest.

Nextdoor had long allowed people to flag inappropriate posts, by either content or location. For instance, commercial posts didn’t belong in noncommercial areas of the site. Nextdoor realized that a binary (re: flagged or not flagged) was no longer sufficient. Its first attempt at fixing the problem was simply to add a report racial profiling button. But many users didn’t understand the new feature. “Nextdoor members began reporting all kinds of unrelated slights as racial profiling. ‘Somebody reported her neighbor for writing mean things about pit bulls,’ Mohit recall[ed].”3

The team responded by developing six different variants of its app and testing them. Doing so helped the company answer key questions such as:

If the app alerted users about the potential for racial bias before they posted, would it change user behavior?

Characterizing a person isn’t easy. How does an application prompt its users for descriptions of others that are full and fair, rather than based exclusively on race?

In describing a suspicious person, how many attributes are enough? Which specific attributes are more important than others?

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