Inclusive Product Design - There Are Two Kinds of People…

Let’s start with a very old joke among software engineers:

There are 10 kinds of people; those who understand binary and those who don’t.

I hear this sentence a lot lately — not the joke, the ‘there are two kinds of people…’ part. With political and social discourse increasingly polarizing, people reach for the old “There are two kinds of people…” more and more. I will definitively prove that this is nonsense. There are groups of people, sure. But when you are designing a product, it’s important to design it inclusively.

In product management, it’s important to remember too. When you’re thinking about user groups, personas, feature prioritization, commercial opportunities, or resource allocation — it’s easy to get to a thinking pattern of absolutes. Thinking in absolutes is the enemy of inclusive product design.

• “We have the resources to do project x or y, but not both.”
• “This persona always behaves like this in the app.”
• “This feature is more important than that feature, it will bring in more customers.”

However…

• Maybe we can chase a subset of outcomes from both projects and slim them down.
• Maybe we can get this persona to behave differently…