Product managers play a key role in shaping the products and services we use today. With this comes the responsibility of designing products, services, programs and experiences that also meet the needs of women. This product framework was created to guide product managers actively embed a women-centric lens.

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The framework is broken into 4 steps and enhanced by our foundational tools.

  1. Understand the problem space and how well your existing product meets the needs of women
  2. Learn about the unique challenges women face in the space
  3. Build a solution that serves women needs
  4. Evaluate your solution with regards to how much it serves women and how feasible it is to implement.

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Step 1: Understand

We begin by understanding how the product serves / fails to serve women today. If the product is meant for all, how much does it meet women’s needs and how much does it serve women as equals? For this, we use the Women-Centric Eye, which comes with 4 quadrants and can help us evaluate product features with a women-centric lens.

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Step 2: Learn

In this phase, we design and conduct product research to learn about women’s needs and challenges. We do so by paying close attention to the Non-Negotiables, a tool comprising of six key themes that describe women’s often overlooked needs. As we conduct product research, we must actively and intentionally include the non-negotiables into our research materials and design.

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Step 3: Build

In the build phase, we brainstorm solutions and ideas based on insights from the learn phase, the design considerations, and levers from existing solutions that design well for the non-negotiables. Use the combination to set-up more effective and restrained ideation prompts to guide your brainstorming sessions.