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Now that you mention it, I think there's a real lack of grandmas in tech... maybe I shouldn't be saying this publicly, but we don't have any at our company.

One of our product managers is a grandmother (she is actually taking an early retirement soon because her 4th grandchild is on the way).

We are in the B2B/B2EDU space so the "As a grandmother, I think..." line of thought does not apply. However, she has frequently had insights and observations that none of us would have come up with. Once implemented, they have been very successful/profitable.

So yes, absolutely, unless your company wants to be in a very specific niche, the lack of true diversity in your company is a drag on your success.

PS - my grandfather had a tech job in Sunnyvale. He passed away last year at the age of 92. Point is - everyone alive has lived in a world with pervasive technology and computing. "They're old and can't understand this stuff" is pure BS.

> One of our product managers is a grandmother

> However, she has frequently had insights and observations that none of us would have come up with

> So yes, absolutely, unless your company wants to be in a very specific niche, the lack of true diversity in your company is a drag on your success.

The conclusion you are drawing here, does not follow from your two observations above. The fact that your product manager has had insights, that nobody else had in team, does not mean a "lack of true diversity in your company is a drag on your success." Some diversity may help in certain situations and in others not. The above mentioned insights and observations might just be the result of competence and more experience of the product manager or incompetence of the rest of the team. There may be many other reasons. We don't know. We have one observation and should refrain from generalizing. That this is because of more diversity is just a speculation. A speculation that fits an often repeated narrative, but that doesn't make it a logical conclusion.

All these different groups your speaking of are called personas. Apple should have each of their personas identified based off their technical prowess, their life experiences, health, how they connect for user updates and whatever else may differentiate a group of users from one another and needs to be considered and accounted for.

Once you have that you create a user journey map for each of those personas - in this case they need a user journey map for updating. Your test teams then have to take each persona and run through testing with those constraints and capabilities in mind.

They don't have a high-speed network or are using a cellular network? One or more personas should have accounted for that. Color blind? One or more personas should have accounted for that and there's software available that can make your screen as it appears to those who are colorblind.

These personas should be corporate-wide - these are your customers after all. I would be shocked if Apple isn't doing something like this, but then again, after getting a glimpse at how the sausage is made I've come to the conclusion Big Tech isn't any better at creating and testing software (well, not that much better) than anyone else.

Of course, these groups are called personas in software engineering circles. I was answering to people who believe diversity will somehow fix all problems of this world. And they do not talk about personas. They talk about minorities, victims and races.

Before Apple or any other customer company describes personas, there is an explicit or implicit decision of which personas to consider and which not. But most consumer targeted companies hide which personas they consider and which not.

> They talk about minorities, victims and races.

When I mentioned diversity, what I actually had in mind was that all tech workers in California have wifi, and probably find this so normal to connect your phone to wifi that they expect any normal user will do this on a daily basis.

I'm not a grandma but I'm a tech worker with a very different life style. Like the person I was replying to's grandma, I have no wifi. Like her, I have to fake it from time to time so that my Android phone will backup photos, accept to download Google drive documents, etc.

So the diversity I had in mind is rather a diversity in location and lifestyle.

That's what I understood you to mean too. I just added in differently-abled people. I've never seen a persona based off minorities, "victims" (not sure what that means in this context?), or races. It's always been capabilities and life experiences.

Sometimes you need to accept you just aren’t the target audience of a product.

You may love cars. You might think Tesla’s are amazing. But if you live on a small island without an electrical grid, it might not be the car for you just because it doesn’t come with its own solar panels.

But what do you do when you realize you are neither the target sheep, ehh, customer, of iOS nor Android? But that is just the other side of the coin of what I wrote about the development teams. Sometimes, they just have to accept that diversity is not going to solve all problems.

Owning an iPhone with no other means of Internet connection makes one not the target market for an iPhone?