Originally published on Forbes in Mar 2025. This article has been republished here.
Designing For All: Nine Ways To Achieve Accessible Product Development
In the name of innovation, today’s product development teams must focus on the latest trends and technology to push their brand ahead of the competition. However, for a product to truly succeed, it must be accessible and usable by everyone, including individuals with unique needs like neurodiversity, disabilities and other user requirements. This calls for a collaborative approach between design teams and business developers, where empathy, strategy and creativity intersect.
Here, nine leading professionals from Forbes Business Development Council provide insight on how design teams and biz developers can collaborate on smarter solutions to create usable and beneficial products for people from all walks of life and user needs.
1. Gather Insight From Real-World Users
Through a design thinking approach, design teams and business developers collaborate to create user-centric, innovative solutions that cater to diverse populations. By leveraging real-world user insights, AI-driven personalization and universal design principles, products become not only intuitive and accessible but also adaptive and inclusive, ensuring seamless experiences that empower every user. – Ali Faizan Rizvi, Mint Gateway
2. Develop Adaptable Products Everyone Can Use
The key is designing for adaptability, not just accessibility. Building modular interfaces that adjust to different needs is essential—for example, customizable layouts, sensory-friendly modes and voice and gesture controls. Business teams should fund real-world testing with diverse users, so design isn’t based on assumptions but on how people actually interact. The best products don’t just include, they evolve. – Angelica Kopec, She Knows Business
3. Take An Outside-In, End-User Approach
Business development teams should provide the outside-in and end-user perspective to design teams during product inception and development. It provides a better product-market fit. Human centricity needs to be a core tenet in product design. For instance, in the life insurance industry, a product should not only ensure healthy individuals but all those who are impaired and in dire need of insurance. – Sanket Das, Ernst & Young (EY)
4. Get Creative With Solution-Driven Customization
Design teams and business developers can collaborate to build adaptable products through a creative problem-solving approach and real-world feedback. By applying universal design principles and leveraging solution-driven customization, they create inclusive solutions that meet the needs of neurodiverse individuals, those with physical disabilities and users with nontraditional requirements. – Kiran Yelamaneni, TCS
5. Ask Your Target Audience To Engage In The Testing Process
True innovation happens when design teams and business developers break out of groupthink and engage diverse users from the start. Seeking guidance from neurodiverse individuals, those with physical disabilities and other underrepresented groups before development—then testing with them —ensures smarter, more inclusive solutions that genuinely meet their needs. – Alexander Masters, MBA, BIDA, Siemens
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6. Build A Cross-Functional POD Team
Business developers and design teams create magic when they utilize POD (product-oriented delivery) teams that also incorporate small focus groups. These cross-functional squad teams create pathways to deliver a product that best meets the needs of the target market. This innovative, consumer-centric approach involves potential buyers early in the design process, paving the way for a successful launch and measurable sales. – John Drumgoole Jr., USA Mortgage
7. Ensure Your Biz Dev Team Has A Seat At The Design Table
This may not be a completely popular opinion, but no other team understands customers and gets the real-time pulse of the market like biz dev, including marketing, so they should always be part of a company’s design team. Once you understand your customer fully at various levels and understand their challenges, only then are you able to design what will serve them, so this collaboration is a must. – Mustansir Paliwala, Zomara Group
8. Give Users The Ability To Add Or Remove Features As Needed
Think “adaptable core” rather than “universal design.” Based on my strategy work, the most successful collaborations happen when teams build products like LEGO sets—a robust foundation with modular features that users can add or remove based on their needs. One business app did this brilliantly by letting users “remix” their dashboard instead of forcing a one-size-fits-all solution. – Sidharth Ramsinghaney, Twilio
9. Launch A Pilot Program
To create inclusive products, design teams and biz developers should engage users early, during the vision phase, not just at the final product stage. Implement test-and-learn cycles and pilot programs to gather feedback. Many users have unique needs that may not occur to others, so design with, not for, diverse groups to ensure accessibility and long-term benefit for all. – Anna Jankowska, RTB House
