Inclusive Product Design Best Practices and Suggestions for Early Career Product Managers

This is the third excerpt from my paper, "Inclusive Product Management: Navigating Barriers & Embracing Opportunities," written as a special Honors project associated with MKTG 454: Strategic Product Management taught by Professor Jeffrey Shulman at the Michael G. Foster School of Business at the University of Washington. You can read the first article here and the second here.

This excerpt focuses on the best practices and suggestions the interviewees had as methods of overcoming the barriers discussed in the previous article.

Given that there aren’t any standardized frameworks for product inclusion or generally accepted principles, I’ve synthesized advice and pro tips from the product managers I interviewed as a starting point for early career product managers looking to be proactive about inclusive product management.?

Building/Joining Diverse Teams

One of the first steps in being more aware and educated on inclusive practices is to build and/or be a part of a diverse team. The more diverse your team is, the more identities, values, and experiences will be represented throughout the product development process. Having a more diverse team will allow for easier incorporation of inclusive design and a wider range of checks and balances for inclusive design initiatives. Having a diverse team to start with will allow for easier solution idea generation as well, as many team members’ creativity can be considered.?

Kalyanashis Chakraborty , a product manager with a decade of experience in the SaaS and analytics spaces, said “if you fix the people, processes are automatically going to get fixed,” referencing how starting with promoting inclusivity within a team can have a trickle-down effect on the rest of your product development process.? Likewise, Dave Bodmer shared, “It is really difficult to not hear and think about yourself and your own life experiences when you’re building products,” a concept he calls the “echo chamber.” “The best thing is to have a diverse team,” he said, adding that goes out of his way to seek diverse individuals for his teams, as he’s seen firsthand the effectiveness this has.

We discussed earlier how there can be issues with the assumption that incorporating product inclusivity into general DEI practices can be problematic. While this is true, general DEI practices can have the benefit of creating a more diverse workforce, which helps to combat biases and the common pitfall of product managers designing products for themselves— having more diverse people working together ensures that they won’t be designing for one specific customer, but a target user with a wider range of needs.?

Seeking Feedback from Diverse Users

The easiest way to know what problems and needs users have is to simply ask them. At every stage of development, having research or feedback from real users of the product can 1) give direction on what user inclusivity problems to focus on and 2) provide support and justification on why these inclusive initiatives are needed when met with pushback.?

Constantly involving users in the product development process minimizes any oversight by the product development team. Understanding real user problems and avoiding the “echo chamber” effect Bodmer spoke of can be imperative to addressing user pain points in inclusivity. Most product managers cited surveys and usability testing as common ways to involve users at different stages of product development and an easy way to identify additional problems users may experience. Fikay A. meets with so many customers in fact, that when I signed up for an interview with him, he had me use his “User Call” Calendly link. He said that understanding what population is served and just chatting with customers can shed a lot of light on the product even without a formal usability test. “Sometimes you don’t know the right question to ask to bring out that special group or to address something,” he noted, “You just have to listen.”?

Note that these surveys and testing phases are most effective when presented to a variety of users from different backgrounds and use cases. Similar to assembling a diverse team, seeking frequent feedback from diverse groups of users allows for full coverage and discovery of pain points. There is no point in surveying a group of users that fits the same demographics and experiences as the product team as it perpetuates the earlier-mentioned “echo chamber” effect. Presenting new features or proposing inclusion initiatives to a variety of users who may have different needs allows for a greater chance of discovery and understanding.?

Mathangi Ramanathan qualified that user research, surveys, and testing alone are not the most effective ways of concluding user experiences. “Qualitative findings should be validated and supplemented with quantitative data from targeted research methods” that have a more representative sample, she says. These can help connect product inclusion back to the business needs when proposing different inclusion initiatives and provide a deeper understanding of user needs from multiple perspectives.??

Engaging with the Product Management Community

One of the ways the product managers suggested other product managers can stay informed and educated on various inclusion topics is through engaging with other product managers in the community, whether that’s through industry discussions, formal research materials, newsletters, or networking opportunities. Since there are no formal guidelines or frameworks for product inclusion, the best way to find a consensus with other product managers is to talk with them. Reading about or discussing recent research or the latest tools— like Pendo.io and Amplitude, two tools recommended to me by Chakraborty— can help keep a product manager up-to-date on various inclusion-based topics. Joung recommended Fable as an accessibility testing tool and that product managers look into the Aspen Institute’s Tech Accountability Coalition. Experiential learning can be key for a product manager, and being able to share or learn about different ways to successfully incorporate inclusion into your product can be beneficial.?

Having a Growth Mindset and Openness to Learning

Given the nature of inclusivity and the product management process, it’s imperative for product managers to be very open to learning and receiving feedback. Without this resiliency and growth mindset, product managers might find it difficult to take feedback from users or other stakeholders regarding inclusion improvements and find ways to effectively act on it. Being humble enough to accept feedback that might be scathing, given how personal and vulnerable inclusion can be to people, is an important way for product managers to adapt and improve their products more and more.?

Bodmer said that one challenge for his team is that the “bar for what is acceptable keeps rising and changing.” Since it is such an ongoing process, he emphasized the importance of keeping inclusion at the top of his and his team’s minds and building empathy into the process so feedback isn’t taken personally. Baig said the key to continuous learning as a product manager is to receive feedback at every stage of the product’s lifecycle and see everything from an inclusivity lens and mentality. As previously mentioned, Fikay A. likes to have meetings with users where they just describe to them how they use the product and what they like or dislike about it— he emphasized listening to users first is what challenges him to grow more in his role. Brandon W. said that “good PMs need to be insatiably curious.” Continuous learning and growth mindsets might look different for different product managers in different stages of their careers, but overall, the consensus seems to be that it’s important, period.?

Implementing Inclusive Design Processes

While product managers might be tempted to create inclusivity-centered OKRs, Chakraborty said that treating inclusivity as a goal can be problematic— he said that it should not be a goal to be inclusive, but a necessity— “[Inclusivity] should be from your design process, not an OKR.” Other product managers agreed that implementing inclusivity into every stage of the product’s development process is the best way to ensure that it is not an afterthought but a priority.?

Ramanathan added that having an inclusive discovery process can be the key to getting started in the right direction—?avoiding assumptions, conducting user research with a diverse sample of individuals, and considering demographic factors in addition to the more regularly considered impairments and accessibility factors as well.? “Constantly collect that feedback,” she said. Systematically implementing inclusivity into development and design processes will allow for inclusivity to become a regular practice over a special priority or consideration.

General Advice

The product managers also shared general advice on how to be successful as an aspiring product manager, particularly when considering inclusion. “Always be curious,” Joung advised, “Understand your own bias and break the system down, dig into why it doesn’t work.”?

Shah B. , while discussing business buy-in to inclusivity called for product managers to not get discouraged if their organization does not prioritize inclusivity. “If you prioritize it for yourself,” he said, “it will be well-received.” He further explained that since ignorance can be a big barrier to inclusivity, advocating for it often leads to others embracing inclusive initiatives, rather than pushing back against it. The organization might not prioritize inclusivity, but if you as the product manager prioritize it, inclusivity will be implemented in the product’s development process no matter what.?

Brandon W. explained that “the language of business is human relationships” and that a product manager’s job is “to make people understand.” He said that a product manager often has to translate between technical teams like product engineers, business teams like executives and marketing teams, and also customers/users. Being able to communicate clearly why a certain product is designed a certain way or why a certain decision was made is a part of the product manager’s role in the development process, but the focus should never leave the human-centered intention behind the product. “Be authentic,” he said, “be human.”

All individuals named in this article consented to be mentioned and quoted. Some names have been partially hidden to protect the individual's privacy at their request. Any statements made by any individual were made in their personal capacity and not on behalf of their employers or associations. Any mentions of online services or tools are not sponsored and purely recommended by the interviewees. No commission or monetary compensation being received for mentioning them here.