The Podcast

Most companies still treat accessibility like compliance work. Kate makes the stronger case. It’s product strategy, market insight, and a better way to build. In this episode, she breaks down how Fable connects companies directly with people with disabilities so teams can test, learn, and generate ideas with the users most companies still design around instead of designing with. The result is a much more useful view of innovation: stop building for the fictional “average” user and start learning from the edges, because that’s where better products get found.

What makes this episode worth your time is that Kate doesn’t frame accessibility as charity, optics, or design restraint. She shows the mechanism. Teams that understand accessibility build for a wider market, catch usability problems earlier, and create products that work better under real-world conditions like fatigue, aging, cognitive load, and different physical needs. She also gets into the tension that actually matters right now: AI can expand access in powerful ways, but it can also flatten people into averages and miss the users who need the most thoughtful design. If you build products, lead innovation, or keep saying you want to be customer-centric, this episode gives you a better customer lens than most teams are using today.

Here’s a teaser…

Find Kate on Linkedin and at Fable.

What You Missed on Sunday

Here’s what we covered in Sunday’s newsletter edition…

I recently came across an interesting study on the effects of population on innovation capabilities. Bluet et al. describe the advantages that larger populations bring to innovation opportunities, but they also reveal that there is a point of diminishing returns.

That begs the question: if we view a company as a “population,” how does the size of the company impact innovation capability. Logically speaking, we might expect that a larger population (and therefore a larger company) increases the opportunities for innovation to occur. Which is true. But only to a point.

This week, I’m diving into the research alongside real-world examples of where headcount does and does not amplify innovation, and what the missing secret sauce is to ensure growth.

Here’s what you’ll find: