Siloed expertise

1 minute read

As a product team grows, people start stepping on each other's toes.

So someone has the brilliant idea to group similar work into roles. Designers design. Developers code. Testers test.

It sounds efficient. It is.

But if you stop there, you're trading efficiency for effectiveness.

Overdo it and designers stop talking to developers. Developers dump work on testers. Designers and testers won't even acknowledge each other. Everyone optimises for their own output instead of what matters: the customer.

This is when accessibility suffers.

Designers think it's the dev's responsibility. Developers think testers need to handle it.

If everyone's responsible, no one's responsible. Someone needs to own accessibility.

So that same brilliant person brings in someone whose sole job is accessibility.

Now you've just created another silo. Someone checks boxes at the end while everyone else keeps building inaccessible shit, thinking it'll get fixed later.

The better solution is to make accessibility everyone's responsibility.

Someone still needs to own it strategically. Not do all the work. Just make sure it happens. They don't sit outside the process fixing things. They sit inside it, fixing thinking.

They make accessibility feel less like extra work and more like part of doing good work.

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