Rethinking Product Discovery with Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in Mind

Teresa Torres argues that product teams should bring justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI) principles into continuous discovery, since products often encode existing social biases (e.g., pulse oximeters performing worse on darker skin, voice assistants with female names). She frames the shift from a 'designing for' to a 'designing with' mindset, drawing on design justice ideas. She then walks through her continuous discovery framework, suggesting better questions at each stage: outcome setting (satisficing and counter-metrics), weekly customer interviews (who is included, fair compensation, avoiding stereotype-driven personas), ideation (diverse participants and listening dynamics), and assumption testing (adding ethical assumptions and segment-level analysis). She explicitly positions herself as a beginner and offers questions rather than answers.

01Key takeaways

• Ask whether your primary outcome must be maximized or whether a good-enough option can serve underrepresented users.
• Pair every primary outcome with a counter-metric that reveals who your product might be leaving out.
• Make weekly interview recruitment more diverse over time through continuous improvement rather than waiting for a perfect sample.
• Compensate research participants fairly relative to the value of the insights they provide.
• Replace generalized personas with one-page snapshots of individual interviews to avoid falling back on stereotypes.
• Check A/B test results by segment, since an overall win can hide a loss for underrepresented groups.

02Key sections

Why design justice matters

Products frequently reproduce social biases, from medical devices to voice assistants and content platforms. Torres argues that teams have a responsibility to ask how their products affect equity.

Designing with, not for

Drawing on the book Design Justice, she contrasts a validation mindset with co-creation, where teams combine technical expertise with customers' knowledge of their own lives.

Setting an equitable outcome

Teams should ask whether they must maximize an outcome or can satisfice, and use counter-metrics to track who is being left out by a growth-focused goal.

Inclusive weekly customer touchpoints

Interview recruitment often mirrors the team's own demographics. Torres recommends asking who is included, compensating participants fairly, and replacing personas with per-interview snapshots.

Ideation and assumption testing

Diverse participants in ideation need to be heard, not just invited. Ethical assumptions belong alongside desirability, viability, feasibility, and usability, and A/B tests should be checked across segments.

03From the post

“Back in March, I spoke at ProductCamp Cascadia (an online conference hosted by ProductCamp Portland, ProductCamp Seattle, and ProductCamp Vancouver) exploring the topic of design justice. I refined the talk and gave it again yesterday at IndustryConf. You can either watch the recording above or read an edited transcript below.”

04Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.