More on diversity

I’ve already written about diversity and why it is so important for product development. As a quick summary of that article, there are two main reasons that motivate building diverse product development teams:

• Diversity brings new points of view.
• Just as the customer group that uses your software is diverse, so should your team.

The second reason was discussed at length in my previous article and in many other articles about diversity on the internet, especially on gender diversity. For this reason, I’d like to go a bit deeper on the first reason.

Perspectives diversity

In my previous article, I explained that “having a more diverse product development team brings new insights and new ways of thinking, which will help you develop a better product. It is no wonder that the product development team is made up of software engineers, user experience designers, and product managers. Each one has a different perspective of what a good product is and these differences are what help create a better product when the differences are well worked out by the team.”

Some time ago I heard the following phrase:

The fact that two people disagree doesn’t necessarily mean that one of them is wrong.

It really made me think about the diversity of perspectives. This has to do with empathy, one of the 7 essential characteristics of a product manager. Empathy is the ability someone has to walk on someone else’s shoes in order to understand her aspirations, motivations, needs, and problems. What is her context? How does she see and hear things? What makes her understand things in that perspective?

There’s a nice tool called empathy map that has the purpose to help teams gain a deeper insight into their customers.

People have different backgrounds, different histories, different knowledge. We must recognize and respect these differences and understand that sometimes we won’t get to an agreement, but that is ok, as long as we respect each others perspective. Maybe we can create a third perspective from the two different ones. Maybe we can decide to try one of them, or both and see and compare the results.

As long as there are respect and empathy, diversity brings lots of good results for everyone.

Lean Product Secrets

The Lean Product Secrets brings together the hands-on experience of three successful digital products enthusiastic. Get to know their secrets for idealizing and evolving products, and their combined experience on Design Thinking, Lean Startup, and Product Lifecycle Management.

The thing is, two of these E-Books are in the way to their printed edition, so they won’t stay available as E-Books on LeanPub for much longer. For this reason, we decided to create a special bundle price to let you keep a copy of these E-Books.

We will keep updating the E-Books until they are officially released. This way you will have early access to their official first edition releases:

https://leanpub.com/b/leanproductsecrets

Enjoy!