Lack of diversity is ruining your product

Building product teams with diverse lived experiences creates the opportunity for more dissonance, discourse, innovation and ultimately—untold competitive advantage.

Nearly half of all people killed in passenger vehicle accidents, aren’t wearing a seatbelt, and yet when we think about product design—few of us consider that some people can’t wear them, for example, a standard seat belt won’t fit 62% of third-trimester pregnant women. And, until recently—crash test dummies were overwhelmingly too tall and large to be representative. Examples of product design like this are why increasingly diverse teams do not just create safer, better products, but can also help operate as a moat to create a competitive advantage.

I’ve seen a great deal of discussion recently talking about how to develop products, and how that needs to evolve. Now more than ever, understanding the needs for diverse thinking in your product development process, is a topic that warrants discussion.

When we traditionally think of diversity, we think of race, age, gender and nationality. These are all important facets of identity, but there are many more, and the broader the diversities in your product team, the more opportunity you have to be able to understand the lived experiences of a broader range of people in your audience.

Traditional product development is built around a central problem or a value denial that exists in the world—this has become easier with the advent of computer and internet technologies, which can leverage software at scale, and reach more people than before.

Here’s how it traditionally looks:

1. Identify a need

2. Gather quantitative insight and qualitative data

3. Categorize and synthesize

4. Develop a roadmap

5. Test and refine

We did this when we were building NME.com, Synkio, or on product teams at Sky and the BBC. It’s common. New CEOs or product managers will often use something akin to human centered design to put together an ideation process for something net-new by focusing in on a central insight and trying to avoid confirmation bias to ensure that you’re building something useful, then get it out into the market.

At the BBC we were building a product designed for youth audiences, but we expressly built a team with a broad range of age, gender, sexual orientation, race and ability to ensure we better understood the needs of our audience.

But, despite some effort in this space, this is a process that is constantly evolving and needs to evolve again, in fact it’s a huge opportunity.

If you intend to succeed, there are studies that prove that a group of diverse problem solvers can outperform traditional ‘high-ability’ teams.

As product leaders build teams, you’ll unlock incredible value if you look to synthesize information gathered to find wholly new epiphanies from ‘unknown unknowns’. Broadening the use cases that you design and build for, can actually have unintended positive benefits for use cases you didn’t anticipate, check out the ‘curb-cut’ effect.

I’d suggest there are multiple things to look out for when you build teams, here are a few of them:

• The beginner’s mind — who truly knows nothing about the problem and can bring that to bear?

• The subject matter expert — who can bring a wealth and depth of experience of the vertical you are working in?

• The broad range of lived experiences — who in your team represents lived experiences that you don’t as a leader? This can mean a broad range of abilities: people who use wheelchairs, people who use screen-readers, for example and a broad range of personal experiences—actively engaging with diversities of all kinds, including race, gender and sexual orientation will all broaden the team’s range in unforeseen ways.

• Code-switching thinkers — look for somebody who has lived in more than one culture and had to traverse them both. This can be through background, immigration or just having had to exist as an underrepresented minority.

• Get sh*t done people — ensuring somebody on your team is going to act as a catalyst to move the work along is key to ensuring you don’t pontificate forever.

This is not a checklist, you’re going to need to continue to build diversity—and won’t be able to solve it rationally. The more a diverse team can come together, the more chance you have of creating the alchemy you’re looking for. That alchemy will create better conversations, more innovative outcomes and competitive advantages.

Relying on data isn’t enough. You’ll need to be highly intentional, and start to recognize your own bias, and the systemic bias inherent in our daily lives. In her book, Invisible Women, Caroline Criado Perez deftly explains that because so much data treats men as the default and women as atypical, bias and discrimination is just baked into many data sets—it’s easy to see how treating any data set as atypical is likely to create problems for groups which are literally underrepresented in the data.

Bringing teams together requires inclusive leadership. This has been written about a great deal—and warrants a whole post on its own, but needless to say, being intentional about how to ensure everybody on the team is empowered to have a voice and thrive is a key leadership skill, and even more important if you want to create equity on your team and to use the products you are building to contribute to a more equitable society.

What’s more, diverse, inclusive teams generate better discourse—this breadth of criticism often leads to more informed decisions.

It’s important as a leader to encourage the discourse and to create the kind of psychological safety and resilience as a team that leads to healthy, robust, candid, safe conversations—perhaps this also warrants its own post. But here’s my first three tips for how to ensure new, key hires get the best start:

1. Set up a series of 1:1s with people they will need as mentors to navigate your organization, and your work. “Pitch” your new hire to their mentors.

2. Create a really clear set of expectations for a new hire—make the physics of their work really clear.

3. Seek to understand all the elements of your own identity, and encourage your team members to actively bring their identities, when they choose to, to work.

Building better products, and a competitive advantage, requires more than just an understanding of visible attributes—but building teams, and products with just a bunch of highly educated people with common lived experiences and schools of thought is fast becoming a path to failure, one way to build a moat—is through a diverse, empowered team.

One final point, which I’ve saved for last because I’d love to invite comments: I think this applies to any kind of team. As a leader, the time has come to ensure that you field more diverse, powerful teams, the benefits far outweigh the extra work required to assemble them. How will other teams benefit from the power of diversity?

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Links throughout where relevant but some further reading:

• The Diversity Bonus: How Great Teams Pay Off in the Knowledge Economy by Scott Page

• Invisible Women, by Caroline Criado Perez

• The End of Average, by Todd Rose

• Meltdown, by András Tilcsik and Chris Clearfield

• Rebel Ideas, by Matthew Syed

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Thanks to @jnjoiner, @katyt, @karanortman, @scottlucas, @avikkghose, @upe, @gabemcdonough, @mikebutcher, @charlesubaghs and many others for the feedback which made this post better.

In the spirit of learning I love to read comments, builds and suggestions that will make these more useful—and would love to hear from you, please do drop comments in on to the post on Substack, or get in touch—and if you like this, please feel free to share /fwd it.