How can Product Innovation professionals create inclusive products?

The best design teams make intentional efforts to get outside their own operating paradigms - they know they are limited by their own perspectives. One of the best ways to understand how various audiences use products is to engage in ethnographic research. Go to customers' homes. Just observe. How do they store your product? How did they use it? Did they even look at your instructions? Did they add ingredients or use it in ways you never intended? After the ethnographies you may need to quantify behaviors with a diary panel or other appropriate inquires. The resulting data may lead you to rethink label instructions, to innovate product attributes, or even to launch line extensions that meet niche needs.

Understand the user, the IDEO way, means becoming part of his/her community to start the innovation process from the inside. Living the restricitions of our users is more than reading studies and analyzing trends. Let us close our eyes (to mimic visual impairment) or cover our ears (to mimic audition impairment) to then try to interact with our environment the way our target users usually do. We will learn a bunch by replicating their behavior, which will surely influence positively the development of our UX/UI abilities.

To create inclusive products, Product professionals need to focus on the below: 1) Building a deep understanding of target customers 2) Need-driven personalization 3) From Engagement to Equity Deep understanding of target customers need expertise 'Problem Solving' skills to understand the actual needs...once delivered, do reflect the inclusiveness. If any gaps, do improve the product to reach the targeted inclusive users

Are we expecting people with disabilities to be part of our Scrum staff? Are we planning to invite executives from our target users to join our CXO board? Governance should be regarded as a comprehensive effort, meaning that not only principles but policies, standards and processes (methodologies) have to be ready to adopt inclusion as part of our company culture. By doing this, our people, processes and technology will be supporting not just admitting inclusiveness.

Advocate to get inclusive design principles baked in to your design system so it isn't a choice when designing - it so often gets overlooked when deciding on an MVP.

How to evaluate and improve your product, will go with an example... One of the famous company released a product that is meant to all, however they observed one part of the country like South part is sales are very low, that means there is an issue in reaching these customers, so inclusive principle is missing. These reflection helped that company to revisit the product features, positioning etc to overcome the challenge and make the product truly for all.

Discussing wireframes of design and trialing prototypes with users are essential. Observation of how users interact with the product/service can validate/invalidate design assumptions and help towards making the design inclusive.

In my experience, most inclusive design ideas aren’t executed right as a designer’s freedom drastically reduces when something has to be taken to market. The actual product/service that gets to see the light of day is often a compromised version of the original thought. It is important here to think in systems. Designers need to drop that mindset of “user-centricity” alone as it skews the system and introduces a bias. Design has to do justice to all the stakeholders involved, including the users, the business, the environment and other relevant stakeholders in the particular reference frame. Designers play a key role in shaping the future and this way of thinking in systems and shifting from user-centric to harmony-centric is key.

By removing the hope of a frictionless product experience and designing for a meaningfully different frictionless experience from the start. Taking a wide contextual lens to ensure you cover all the frictions. Finally by translating this into actionable product design ideas built from the ground up vs tweaks to existing products as your immediate go to solution.

To build an inclusive innovation with a product its a journey of years, decades. It always starts from a cool idea that make sense and that have a huge market impact. Taking from there you have to be personally committed on a life long journey where you iterate and learn daily with the healthy obession to solve an impossible problem that has nothing to say with save the world or going to Mars, but a very practical problem that no one wanted or was able to solve till you do it. While the world care about the next fashion bullshit, you keep on working on solving the same problem with thousands iterations and hundreds pivots.

In order to realize the vision of inclusiveness, it is essential for both facets of Product Management—the Problem space and the Solution space—to collaborate seamlessly, operating in unison with a shared mindset.