When communicating, I sometimes am just thinking about the person and forget about the disability. I always appreciate when the person reminds me, so I can make accommodations. I would never in a million years want to make communication hard for someone, but when I’m focused on a project, I just forget about other peoples’ disabilities sometimes. Just remind me.

Thank you for sharing your experience and recommendations John. Very helpful.

Best wishes,
Roman

Thanks for the reply. In terms of practical steps I think interaction with the dev’s is probably the easiest thing to tackle in so much as a lot of companies use Slack, Workplace, Jira, Confluence and the old favourite of e-mail all of which use text even though I know we encourage everyone to interact verbally these platforms can really help bridge the gap.

In some ways I’m lucky in that my deafness is prevalent in only one ear so I still have a good ear to help, but open plan offices can lead to a lot of background noise which is difficult when working with the dev team. As regards other internal stakeholders keep following things up with e-mails and documents making sure you’ve not missed anything.

I know we often deride e-mail or the number of different communication channels but a quick 5 minute e-mail confirming whats been discussed is a lifesaver.

As regards the most important people, the users, I’ve probably backed away (compared to my pre deafness) from one on one interaction and rely on the user researchers and observations in labs as well as recordings and transcripts. I also use heatmaps and screen recordings to pull a picture together of the users interaction. But by my own admission I feel less able to interact directly but I have some ideas around using my phone’s voice recorder to help back me up in those situations.

I’ve also been in a company where one of the developers was totally deaf and the company provided a sign language translator and ran sign language lessons. I’m not sure if that was part funded by the UK government but I know there are schemes and funding to help people with a range of disabilities get into work.

Its worth noting that 1 in 8 people in the UK of working age have some form of hearing loss but the employment rate is 65%. 41% of people with Hearing loss retired early as they struggled with communication at work.

If you or your readers are to take anything is that they need to be aware of the environment sometimes just stepping outside or into a vacant meeting room can make all the difference as well as following it up on slack or by e-mail.

Finally when socialising as a team again just be aware of the environment.

I think the sentiment of the article of being open is bang on the money its just some of the approaches do exclude people like me.

Hi John,

Thank you for your feedback. I am sorry that you felt excluded by my article. It was certainly not my intention to make anybody feel uneasy or discriminate anyone. Is there anything specific that I can change to make the article more inclusive for product people with a hearing impairment? Would it help to mention lip reading, for example? And could you tell me please which techniques you employ in your day-to-day work to converse with users, dev team members, and stakeholders?

Best regards,
Roman

I think the intent and the sentiment is great but as a Product Professional with a hearing impairment it does feel like a kick in the teeth especially coming from someone as highly respected and experiences as yourself.

I think opening yourself up and being observant of your stakeholders, devs and users is a key trait Product Professionals and reflecting their needs are key and that physical ability shouldn’t dictate how you perform.

I do understand that its not written to exclude or to downplay Product Owners and Managers with hearing impairments or any other disabilities but I do think we need to be aware and support members of the Product Professional family who do have disabilities as diversity only strengthens a profession.

I do love the work you do and will continue to read and reflect on the insights you provide in order to continually improve my practice.