Building For Everyone

CHAPTER 5Adopting Product Inclusion Principles to Guide Your Work

Principles are fundamental truths or assumptions that form the foundation of a system of belief or behavior. For example, participants in every community have a set of shared principles that enable everyone to live peacefully together while pursuing their own individual happiness and fulfillment—principles such as equal justice for all, honesty is the best policy, and treat others as they would like to be treated.

Every business has certain principles in place to influence how people in the organization think about and perform their work. Examples of business principles include: the customer is always right; the bigger the risk, the bigger the reward; necessity is the mother of invention; and so forth. Sometimes, these principles are reflected in the organization's policies, practices, and mission statement.

Principles function as the North Star for organizations, teams, and individuals, providing everyone with unchanging guidance on how to think and act and insight into the reasons behind what the organization or team does and how. Principles also give work meaning, provide the means to hold people accountable, and serve as a source of inspiration.

In this chapter, I present some of the principles behind product inclusion, offer suggestions on how to develop your own product inclusion principles, and provide guidance on how to put principles into action along with an example of principles that govern Google's ...