Red Hat
Digital Product Management
Role:
Product Management Intern
Company:
Red Hat Enterprise Accessibility
Tools:
Figma, NotebookLM, Excel
OVERVIEW
I was tasked with defining next steps and program requirements for Red Hat's Enterprise Accessibility program. I independently developed a research program: scoping, recruiting, and executing a 35-interview research initiative across more than five functional groups in three months. The findings produced a set of five recommendation action plans that were adopted across teams and used to continue developing the enterprise accessibility program once I completed my internship.
My recommendations were presented to 90+ stakeholders including Product Managers and key leadership at the VP level.
Additionally, I expanded my work to include development of accessibility technology as well as conducting accessibility reviews and working with other Product Managers to implement improvements.
HYPOTHESIS
The going-in hypothesis: teams lacked accessibility knowledge.
Thirty-five interviews disproved this. Teams understood the standards; what they lacked was a shared definition of what a compliant handoff looked like, and a process that enforced it regardless of who was on the team.
WHAT I FOUND
The failure was at the handoff, not the knowledge. Two designers on separate teams described a compliant handoff in incompatible terms: neither was wrong according to policy, because policy hadn't specified. The highest-frequency failure point in the organization had no owner and no definition.
The most effective intervention was invisible to leadership. Teams with the strongest outcomes had dedicated shared understandings regarding accessibility. However, this was informal, uncompensated, and entirely dependent on personal motivation and more effective than any formal policy in place. The recommendation was to stop depending on it being informal.
Manager priorities set the tone for the team. When managers scoped accessibility from the beginning of a project, teams would be able to deliver consistently. When treated as a final-step check, teams did the same regardless of what the formal policy said.
MAKING THE CASE
Some entered the process skeptical: unclear why accessibility should play a formal role in project work.
Firstly, accessibility is simply a necessity for millions of people navigating the web. It should always be a key consideration so that everyone has access to the same information and resources.
However, I also reframed the conversation in terms of metrics: accessibility improvements produce measurable SEO gains and improve AI crawling fidelity as LLM-based indexing grows as a share of traffic acquisition.
ADDITIONAL WORK
Alongside the research initiative, I prototyped an internal AI-powered alt-text generator with a mandatory human review step before any generated text was published. The design principle aimed to reduce accessibility errors while still requiring human input and accountability.
REFLECTION
Overall, I learned a lot about product management throughout this project, and I really appreciated the opportunity to work with a project spanning across several teams and products.