At our company, we don’t just talk about our core values — we live them every day. “We are inclusive” — that is the first core value at my organization. It is a topic close to my heart, being a member of our PwD+A (People with Disability and Allies) council.

I was, therefore, thrilled to have received the 2024 Hackathon award in the #DEI category. For the hackathon, a young engineer and I partnered to show how generative AI could be used to remove mundane tasks that are part of DEI compliance, and achieve significant business outcomes. Tasks such as detecting color contrasts, finding non-inclusive language, lack of keyboard support, availability of alt-text can all be detected and a DEI score provided as a reference barometer.

But why does this matter so much? Why should we integrate DEI efforts not just into our company culture but also into our product development, documentation, and discovery phases?

Here’s list of possible implications:

1. Affecting User Experience: Without DEI at the core of our processes, we risk alienating sections of our target audience — particularly those who are disabled or need accessibility support. This can lead to a negative user experience for some, which reflects poorly on us as a company. Take an example of a dispatcher persona. An experienced dispatcher Old Bob is a 60 year old veteran at the job, while new-hire dispatcher Young Joe is a 30 year old millenial. The way both of them operate the same dispatching application is completely different. Dispatcher Old Bob would go through a well-defined folder structure to locate a file. Dispatcher Young Joe would use a search utility to find the same file. On the same note, accessibility has to be considered for a dispatcher with color-blindness and has difficulty in gauging color contrasts on a page. This type of generational diversity is also to be addressed when developing a standard out-of-the-box solution.
2. Loss of Revenue: Many contracts and business opportunities hinge on our ability to meet diversity and accessibility requirements. Failing to comply with Requests for Proposals (RFPs) that include accessibility standards could mean losing out on contracts. Many times, public-safety vendors are expected to provide a Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) as part of their contract compliance evidence. The VPAT is a standardized document to assess the accessibility of a product or service. Filling up the VPAT is a considerable effort, and forces organizations to firm up their accessibility policies.
3. Lack of Competitive Differentiation: In today’s market, being inclusive isn’t just a moral imperative; it’s also a strategic one. Companies that don’t prioritize accessibility and inclusion miss out on a key differentiator that could set them apart from competitors.
4. Legal Risks: Non-compliance with accessibility standards can result in costly lawsuits. For example, in 2022 alone, approximately 2,500 digital accessibility lawsuits were filed in the US against companies whose websites failed to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
5. Insurance costs: Out of a large degree of trepidation, most companies sign up for legal insurance to protect themselves from the legal costs or liabilities in cases, where they have willingly or unwillingly not followed the law related to discrimination

Accessibility isn’t something we can treat as an afterthought. It’s not a “one-and-done” project. Much like ensuring product quality, accessibility is an ongoing process that needs to be baked into every stage of development, from ideation and discovery to final delivery.

As a product lead, it’s my responsibility to incorporate DEI considerations early in the process, particularly during the discovery phase. Digital inclusion — the act of making web and digital technologies barrier-free for all targeted personas — should be a deliberate effort for product managers. Unfortunately, many organizations treat accessibility as a compliance checkbox, rather they need to bake DEI discovery in their discovery and requirements phase. They add it in as an afterthought, instead of baking it into their planning process.

That’s where our DEI Checker comes in. The DEI Checker is a tool designed to scan for compliance with the globally recognized Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). It’s capable of testing websites and documents in real-time, providing instant reports on their DEI score. With this tool, we not only ensure that we are upholding our core value of inclusivity, but we also protect our business from the costs and reputational damage of non-compliance.

Ultimately, our commitment to inclusivity is about more than just following the rules — it’s about creating a digital experience that works for everyone. And by integrating DEI into every aspect of our work, we’re not just doing the right thing — we’re doing the smart thing for our business.

The Flywheel effect

In order for any business to sustain on it’s own merit (i.e product-led growth), you need to generate the Flywheel effect. The coinage of the term can be found online (and is commonly associated with Netflix and Amazon), but essentially speaks to the force that is applied to the flywheel gradually and through efforts, until the breakthrough moment arrives, and the flywheel generates enough momentum to sustain it’s own spin. When translated to business, it means that the individual forces (i.e people, product, marketing, supply chain, pricing etc) applied to the business start to develop a self-contained spin effect, and the business becomes a catalyst to it’s own growth.

Hello Fresh’s own Flywheel

I have explained here how the the Flywheel effect is triggered at Hello Fresh. The low cost structure (for example — working directly with the farmers/vendor suppliers, efficiencies in packaging) enables a lower pricing, that drives customer activation and subscriptions to their site, which further fuels more supply chain synergies (for example — automation, sustainability initiatives), this causes an ever increasing assortment of options, whether those be in the modular options, side-options, RTE additions. All of these measures fuel user engagement, and generate the flywheel effect.

How Hello Fresh operationalized this flywheel

The organization has undertaken initiatives and objectives that individually deliver the “forces” to start the spinning. The broad themes are TAM Expansion/Conversions, TAM Penetrations, Monetization, Sustainability and Supply chain. Each of these themes is very expansive and likely the responsibility of a large set of tribes within the company. Therefore, these themes are individually associated with a North Star to provide direction and motivation to the teams.

The TAM Expansion theme, for example, would have a YoY Rolling average of activations as it’s North Star. The business objectives related to this North Star would include all organic and inorganic measures to expand the TAM. Acquisitions (Factor with it’s RTE), new GTM (Sweden, Denmark, Australia), adding adjacencies (Market) — all are strategies that go to meet these business objectives. Each of these business objectives have a KR and Health metric. Taking an example — if the business objective is to enter a new vertical (let’s say RTE category), a KR could be the revenue increase attributed to this category, or the %increase in the number of paying subs. The HM to watch out for can be the SG&A expenses.

Increasing virality

As a product person, one naturally looks at additional outcomes to increase stickiness to your solutions. Below is an additional pillar theme that can lead to delta increments in meeting the vision. Here I have looked at Community being an additional pillar for growth. Community is a broad term to not only indicate the audience that is consuming your primary service, but can also be used to indicate stakeholders such as vendors, regulators, social media influencers, channel partners, distributors and others. Assuming this is a growth theme that is identified, various opportunities that could be identified might be

1. Loyalty programs
2. Online attachment
3. Offline attachment
4. ……

Teams could then draw up various experiments to satisfy these opportunities.

Conclusion

What I have presented here is just a brief insight into my analysis. I hope this provides the reader a bit of an understanding into this business from a product management standpoint.

All the information/metrics/initiatives mentioned above represent my understanding as a product person, and do not necessarily represent the company views.

Inquisitive — The intent at this stage is enquiry and curiosity, a desire to just understand the current attachment that so many around us have.

Participating — At this time, one is testing the waters with limited interaction, maybe a single or multiple social media channels

Associating — The user is one with the flow, absorbing the experiences that come with all the engagements.

Aspiring– The user wishes to emulate the influencers, the travellers, the fashion trends, the Youtubers, the Instagrammers.

Primal — At this stage, the user has a deep attachment, a thriving virtual life that overtakes the physical one for a large proportion of their active cognitive daily life. The social media profile is now their mirror into their lives.

EFFECT ON CHILDREN

As one can see all around, children and teens are already at the aspirational and even primal levels of association with social media. Reversing or slowing down this trend is not going to be possible. With newer technologies like virtual reality and AI, this level of association is going to be subconscious and will overtake human physical interaction soon. Social media will morph beyond the traditional entertainment value, and humans will involve their virtual selves increasingly in more meaningful areas such as education, training, sports, finance, music, events, shopping, travelling, relationships. The trend is already underway with the Metaverse. We need to therefore, look at supporting and aligning our children to the correct channels to enable Use and not Abuse.

To begin with, this needs the creation of an alternate Internet, a safe one. We can call this SecureNet. This would require tremendous investment, however would be a breeze for the Microsofts, Googles, Facebooks, Twitters or the Amazons of the world. These entities, with their cloud platform and XaaS utilities already provided the framework for most applications to operate within. Any ecosystem within this cloud can operate with authenticated, validated users. Such a community would have all the possible social media options therein, however with traceability. Imagine your child’s device performing a SSO(single sign-on) to SecureNet, where they have access to all applications they need regularly, whether its messaging, video, news, fashion, e-commerce, entertainment, banking, education and so on. It is an uninhibited environment within a controlled Internet. Parents would not have to be concerned with the ills of an unsafe online world. Malintentioned users can be identified and rooted out easily. The benefits to large players is immense owing to the variety of services offered, and the fact that there is a captive audience. The challenge here is to provide a sense of security, while maintaining a semblance of privacy.

Technology is moving fast, and it is a matter of time when such an ecosystem is available, with the user being in complete control of their content, with the necessary security tools that they could pick and choose.

The output of any organization is typically a product or a service aimed at generating revenue and increasing the topline of the company. All the various activities and operations within a company are raised with the single-minded focus of increasing this topline and raising shareholder value. In my current role as a product manager, we are similarly engaged in this endeavour. We set our North Star, define OKRs and execute on the same. This has been working quite effectively as a product management user manual. Product people however fail to appreciate that while there is an external product to be delivered, there is another product internally that needs a similar successful outcome. That product is “The Team“.

The Team has to be treated as a product in its own right. It has to have a structure, a design, an operation and an implementation. In short, it’s own rhythm. Leaders are expected to create a well-running engine, i.e the team, that in simple words, delivers. The Team understands each other, complements each other, almost reads each other’s thoughts, and knows who is best suited for which task. When such a team is formed, the power of compounding comes into play. Your Agile ceremonies becoming effortless, the deliveries are consistent, estimations are increasingly accurate. This is a utopian state for a software leader. You see wonderful examples of servant leadership, collaboration and harmony at play. Why wouldn’t then leaders not focus on the Team more in that case? It gets assumed that the external motivators of salary, perks, promotions, work-from-home options, office parties and such would be enough. This might make sense for most organizations, and it would typically cut it. The path from good to great (teams) requires substantial time, investment and energy on the part of leaders. That means moving beyond the traditional trajectory. To do this, requires the additional 3 pillars of Stabilize, Innovate and Bridge. These pillars were introduced to me by a software leader to be applied to the product per se, I have taken the liberty to extend this model.

Stabilize
This pillar represents the measures taken to ensure that the organization teams (engineering and product) work in a rhythm. What this requires is a dedicated investment in the team to ensure that unnecessary distractions, policies and unexplained changes are brought to a minimum. If there are such, then there is transparency over thoughts and actions. Sure there will always be the changes brought about due to attrition, budget changes, re-organizations. However this cannot be the norm, rather the exception. Teams prefer stability over excitement in my experience. Other measures to ensure stability include communicating fast and often, building trust, fast feedback, focusing on quality, transparency and pay-for-performance. Implementing these measures is by no means an easy walk and requires a complete top-down commitment.

Innovation
By innovation, this does not mean IPR or patents, rather actions to address personnel constraints. Reducing personnel constraints does not mean providing access to tech conferences or promotions. Even product or process innovation aids the life of an engineer. Paying down technical debt, tools simplification, easier upgrades/installs, workflow simplifications, analytics, easier access to information, quicker feedback cycles, automated environments — all that make your delivery cycles more meaningful, efficient and effective. Many of these would otherwise distract and cause teams to spend time on non-creation activities, thus causing them not to hone their craft and consequently less engagement.

Bridge
This is the short- to mid-term vision into the future. Bridging to the future requires organizations and teams to know where they are headed to in the 6–12 month cycle. It makes teams and other internal stakeholders (and ofcourse customers) believe that the team has a role to play in the future of the organization, thereby also providing the side-benefit of aligning the team to the vision. Upskilling during this time, and bringing teams in contact with the customer supports this bridge.

Each team crafts it’s own song, however incorporating the ideas of Stabilitze, Innovate and Bridge successfully determines whether the song turns out melodious or not.

This theory does not hypothesize that those with longer-worded names do not rise to the top, it just means that there is a small X-factor that plays an advantage in their career progression.

OKRs help to make tactical — what the org wishes to implement in order to move the progress the North Star. For a software team, OKRs would cause each Agile team or department to create their own initiatives and Epics/Features/User Stories. For a marketing team, the KRs would be to generate enough sales leads or community engagement or audience buzz, to move the NSM. For a customer support team, the KRs would be tied to faster order fulfilment, quicker processing of returns, superior help/chatbot support. OKRs are great when they are simple, measurable, clear goals, and there is no ambiguity in measurement. When a KR requires an algorithm to measure or it’s complicated, it is usually not an effective KR. Even in an agile team, the velocity is a KR that helps progress on a North star (which might be a delivery cadence or response time or similar).

As an example, consider a delivery app like DeliveryHero or Wolt. The mission of the company is to bring satisfaction to people’s lives by quick easy access to their needs without spending any effort. To accomplish this, the company is to provide access to the entire gamut of offerings available, using every logistic possibility within a threshold interval. So, the North Star of this company might be Completed user transactions. Progress on this would indicate the user’s increased engagement with the app, and consequently increase in revenue. Note, this North Star does not speak of revenue directly, rather motivates the organization to take steps to influence the user towards staying engaged with various aspects of the app, whether they be purchases, providing reviews, availing packages/bundles. The Objectives and Key Results line up to support this North Star, and directly influence it. See below table for how these might be created. A health metric is also created, to monitor any unhealthy practices.

As organizations move beyond a startup phase and start delivering, start scaling or expand customer base or operate from different geographies, using the NSM and OKRs are a very effective framework to adopt to move the organization to a different level. Imagine having the toolbox to boil the water in the ocean !!!