Editor's Note: We're presenting Q&As with the team behind Accelerate.withgoogle.com, which is made up of many 20%ers across the company. Google's 20% Time policy has led to some of the company's most successful products, such as AdSense and Gmail. Here's our latest installment. 

Preeti Upadhyaya is senior editor for Accelerate with Google and a program manager on the Google Cloud product marketing team. Preeti has been dedicated to making meaningful progress around diversity, equity, and inclusion in the technology industry for much of her career. Prior to joining Google, she worked as a content marketing manager for the Grace Hopper Celebration, the world's largest gathering of women in tech. She also covered the gender and diversity gap in technology as a reporter for the Silicon Valley Business Journal. A native of Los Angeles, Preeti now lives and works in San Francisco, California. I sat down with Preeti to discuss how Accelerate with Google serves as a platform to share her passion for diversity and inclusion.

What made you want to be a part of Accelerate with Google?

My career has always had a focus on diversity and inclusion through writing and researching the tech space. Before Google, I was a reporter for news outlets with a focus on diversity in tech, and I wrote during the time when women in Silicon Valley were starting to build a tech movement to advocate for better inclusion. After that, I joined AnitaB.org, non-profit that puts on the Grace Hopper Celebration

I knew I wanted to stay involved in diversity and inclusion efforts when I joined Google, and I was looking for an opportunity to use my skills as an editor to shape stories. I was excited to come across the opportunity to work with Accelerate with Google because I believe diversity and inclusion stories are most impactful when personal and written from a profile-driven angle. I love the team and Reena is such a great leader!

What do the concepts of product and business inclusion mean to you?

For me, product and business inclusion means building products and technology with a singular focus on the user – not just the average, highly tech-savvy Silicon Valley-based user, but users all over the world who have different needs, abilities, and access. Google's mission to organize the world's information and make it universally useful and accessible to everyone really encompasses this idea of product and business inclusion. 

It's worth noting that it is very difficult to achieve. ll humans have biases, many unintended, to create what serves ourselves, because it's normal to create based on  what you know.

Therefore, you need both the vision and the execution to make  inclusion happen. You need to have the vision to create for everyone. You need to execute by bringing together the right voices and varying perspectives to ensure they are taken into account; it's hard to eliminate gaps in our data set without diverse input.

What is your favorite part about working on the Accelerate with Google team?

My favorite part is having the opportunity to elevate these voices within and around the Google community because it's vital that these voices are heard. There is so much talk about diversity and inclusion that it can almost become an abstract concept that's difficult to wrap one's mind around. Shining the spotlight on people whose communities may currently be underrepresented in the tech industry, and getting into the details of programs and products that support these communities, helps ground the elements of product and business inclusion into concrete examples. 

I also love being on a team of passionate people who are excited to tell these stories. It's truly remarkable that this site is run by 20%ers!