Historically, product innovation has focused on the majority, often leaving the many behind. This has created a continuous cycle where a select few identify gaps in the market, develop a product based on their interpretation of said gaps, and over time add new features to attract the expected majority. While this cycle may be viewed as successful, the reality is that it has left people behind, creating and exacerbating challenges for those who are unable to access digital products for financial, geographic, mental, physical or emotional reasons.
Recently Data It shows that 73% of Gen Z purchase or advocate brands based on their beliefs and values, indicating that companies are holding themselves to higher standards to create products that work for everyone. In order to succeed in today’s market, companies must build on profit margins and expand to include more – this is the new path to rapid, comprehensive product innovation.
Building more equitable experiences not only leads to more products that can be used by more people, but it can also lead to greater business impact through developments that address unique challenges and help build brand trust.
Building a path to product equity
Organizations that intentionally create products for the full range of human differences mean that they are working to achieve justice, taking into account those who have historically been excluded from the process. This can help improve the way products are built within the company and across the industry over time. Product engagement teams are known to engage, support, and educate others throughout the product and company development process, helping teams make decisions that take into account gender, race, age, ethnicity, ability, culture, and all other human variables.
The full power of emerging technology cannot be realized without a variety of perceptions fueling it.
Most companies have adopted inclusive design practices, working to uncover who has historically been included and left out of the product development process to ensure a diverse group of people have seats at the table. However, equity thinks across the full spectrum, which includes inclusive design practices, while also measuring accountability, understanding nuance, and systems of interpretation and questioning. This defines a practice that takes into account all forms of human diversity and difference during the product design and development process.
Building fair products is not just about altruism. Exploring possibilities for new customers and new markets, while continuing to leverage the needs and experiences of existing customers, creates opportunities for market expansion, penetration, and growth. With this, I wanted to share my top five essential strategies for those starting out on the path to building fair products and tools.
1. Enforce product ownership rights from inception onwards
When products are built with equity in mind, teams can launch products faster, to broader audiences, with greater success and less risk. Often times, quick fixes for digital products create risks ranging from major bugs to greater user accessibility challenges. Whether it’s accessibility, inclusive design, or other unique use cases, these processes should be implemented at the beginning of product development lifecycles, rather than installed after products ship—which can ultimately drive up costs for the organization. By leveraging the expertise of product equity teams, organizations can leverage their support to help ensure that historically underinvested communities are not only included in the product development process, but that teams, organizations, and companies are also held accountable for the results.
2. Prioritize equality throughout the organization
To help product teams build equity into the development process, organizations will need to make equity a priority across every aspect of their products, services, and company culture. This will help product teams deliver real results for people – and leverage our shared thinking and goals to create frameworks, mechanisms and approaches so equity is prioritized across the board. To do this, organizations first need to evaluate their goals and principles to examine how teams are driving products forward, and whether they are building fair products and experiences. If not, organizations should look to restructure their principles to guide them when building more equitable processes across the product lifecycle. This needs to be designed across the board – from accessibility to inclusive design onwards.
For example, at Adobe, we recently re-evaluated our approach to accessibility, creating new principles that align with our core values and form the foundation of what we believe in – that everyone should be able to create, interact and interact with digital experiences. Three principles – partnership, transparency and innovation – serve as our guideposts as we thoughtfully build inclusive technology that makes a difference in people’s lives. Guided by our new accessibility principles, we formed the Adobe Accessibility Board to set strategy, review progress, and oversee our commitment to supporting people with disabilities. I sit on the Board of Directors, which includes Adobe leaders from diverse backgrounds and functional roles — and with their perspectives and insights, we will drive important initiatives to better prepare Adobe for the future.
3. Building mutual and creative community relationships
Today, interpreting qualitative insights is often a multidimensional challenge as researchers create themes based on their understanding of participants’ comments. These insights are then passed on to product owners and designers who filter participants’ goals, experiences, and challenges through their own interpretations, focusing on data that is perceived as achievable, desirable, or conducive to pre-defined outcomes. This process of collecting ideas is insufficient. Even intentional inclusion of race/ethnicity, gender, age, ability status, and geographic diversity in the selection of research participants is usually inadequate. To succeed, product teams must deliver a co-creative process in which they engage with communities and experts to leverage their lived experiences. Representation is vital to identifying opportunities we may have missed before.
4. Re-evaluate success
Reevaluating success is also a conversation about power; Ability to influence policies, metrics, goals and outcomes. It’s a question: “Are we willing to feel pain?” This pain is metaphorical, but it is a provocation to interrogate leaders’ ability to articulate what barriers exist, to be clear about how much risk they are willing to take when balancing potential metric loss to societal gain. Loss metric is a fear closely linked to a business culture that emphasizes short-term gains and market gains over long-term impact. When considering the long-term impact of these approaches, leaders should consider benefits such as increased brand trust and legitimacy, increased market penetration, new market segments, as well as efficiency and cost reduction. While they cannot be measured easily or immediately, each is a direct result of focusing on previously overlooked communities and building digital products with those communities involved.
5. Build for one, scale for many
Design for the many – Most digital product teams focus on this group of people who have no problem accessing and using digital products. What remains on the margins are people who are skeptical of the product and those who cannot access the product due to mental, physical, emotional or geographic limitations. This target group of people is often where real innovation lies. Building on margins is essential for both product innovation and achieving equitable outcomes for people who use digital products. The full power of emerging technology cannot be realized without a variety of perceptions fueling it.
Companies should take into account Targeted global, a concept developed by John A. Powell, director of the Institute of Afterlife and Belonging at UC Berkeley, through which policies are developed with a universal goal, but the approach to achieving that goal varies based on specific social identities. In product development, Targeted Globalism focuses on the intersectional identities of the most marginalized people among marginalized people to develop strategies that help and will help these groups achieve a global goal. For example, this global goal might be to create a bank account, get in a car, or post content. Product teams can work to understand the needs and limitations of the most marginalized customers and co-create strategies to help achieve this goal.
Looking to the future of digital products
This overview only scratches the surface. Our goal is to set a new standard for how the technology industry builds products by creating more equitable processes around all aspects of product research, design, and development. Although ongoing work will be required across the entire organization, we will be able to create a framework that ensures historically underinvested communities are considered, reflected and respected in the product development process and in accountability mechanisms. With advocacy, structure, goals, and a little optimism, the potential for influence and innovation is endless—and greater equity can be achieved.