SaaS ecosystem stakeholders collaborate to build greater equality.
In December, 2018, Tidal Equality (then called Women’s Work Institute) facilitated an equality-focused Wave (then called a #solveathon) with attendees at our inaugural SaaS-E[quality] Pop-Up Unconference in Toronto, Ontario.
Close to 100 SaaS sector stakeholders, including business, technical, VC and diversity and inclusion leaders, gathered at our event which we designed to be a provocative, solution-focused, collaborative day intended to build greater equality in the SaaS ecosystem. The locus of the day was the Tidal Equality Wave.
Our Wave is a strategic-design process that engages the voices and perspectives of far more people than are usually consulted when creating strategic and collective action. The first step in any Wave is to engage the target group (in this case, stakeholders in the SaaS sector) in a qualitative, anecdotal Insights Questionnaire. This questionnaire is designed to help us listen to and learn from the lived experiences of people in regards to the equality-related challenges they face.
In this case, we learned about three key challenges in SaaS:
SaaS products have bias embedded in their design.
There is little diversity and few women in technical roles.
Most leaders in SaaS do not consider inequality a business problem.
Ultimately, at the SAAS-E Wave, attendees voted to design solutions for one of the three primary challenges. They were asked to consider which problem needed to be solved first in order to lay the foundation for solving the other two problems. The attendees chose challenge #3.
The Wave methodology equipped attendees to co-design three strategic solutions and six tactics per solution.
During the Wave, attendees also imagined the impact that their proposed solutions could have on the world if implemented successfully, as well as identified values they believe should inform the design and delivery of solutions, as well as inspire the impact of solutions in the sector.
(The full Insights Report can be downloaded HERE.)