The Accessibility Deadline That Landed Mid-Roadmap
Meridian Insurance's 120,000 policyholders use an online claims portal built over eight years. A new accessibility regulation takes effect in 90 days. Compliance has identified 34 noncompliant screens; one team estimates 6–9 weeks to remediate. The portal roadmap is already committed to a broker portal and a mobile claims feature, and the sponsor wants both plus compliance. Two Scrum teams share one regression environment and a single accessibility specialist. Customer support reports that 14% of claims calls involve document upload failures, concentrated among older policyholders and screen-reader users. The product owner has 180 backlog items, no agreed product goal, and a steering committee that treats compliance as an IT checklist. The sponsor has suggested skipping regression testing to recover time. The deadline is fixed; the fine for noncompliance is €2m or 4% of turnover, whichever is higher.
1. How should the product owner reframe accessibility from a compliance checklist into product value and risk? Name specific analysis techniques and the output you would produce.
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Reframe the work as protecting a customer outcome and reducing business risk, not as an IT checklist. Start with a stakeholder and impact map: policyholders who use screen readers, older customers, claims agents, compliance, and the sponsor. Map the claims value stream from first notice of loss to payment; identify where the 34 noncompliant screens block document upload, status checks, or payment. Quantify cost of delay and exposure: regulatory fine, complaint volume, abandoned claims, and rework. Then create a one-page decision brief with three options - full remediation plus both roadmap items, minimum viable compliance plus one roadmap item, or compliance only - showing effort, risk, and expected outcome for each. Use a weighted shortest-job-first or cost-of-delay comparison only after the legal and customer-impact constraints are explicit. The output should be a product goal such as 'screen-reader users can submit and track a claim without assistance,' a sliced backlog by user journey, and agreed success measures. This gives the sponsor a real trade-off rather than an arbitrary date.
2. The sponsor wants to skip regression testing. What is your recommendation, and how do you present the trade-off?
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Recommend against skipping regression testing. The portal handles claims and payments; a regression defect could stop payments or corrupt claim data, creating a larger cost than the deadline slip. Treat quality as a constraint, not a negotiable scope item. Instead, propose a minimum viable compliance release: slice the 34 screens by risk and user journey, fix the highest-risk document upload and submission paths first, automate regression checks for those paths, and defer lower-risk cosmetic issues with a documented plan. Re-plan the broker portal and mobile claims explicitly; do not silently absorb them. Present the sponsor with dated options: compliance-only by the deadline, compliance plus one roadmap item with added test capacity, or both with accepted risk and a named decision owner. Record the decision and the residual risk. This preserves transparency and prevents the team from trading long-term product health for a short-term date.
3. What product goal and success measures would you set for the next 90 days?
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Set one outcome-oriented product goal for the 90 days: 'A screen-reader user can complete a claims document upload and submission without support, with no increase in claim processing errors.' Measures: task completion rate by assistive-technology users, document upload failure rate, support calls tagged accessibility, percentage of in-scope screens passing agreed WCAG checks, and regression defect escape rate. Add leading indicators such as usability-test completion and automated accessibility scan results, but do not use scans alone. Establish baselines in the first sprint, including the 14% upload-related call figure, and report trends weekly. Avoid story points or number of screens as the primary success measure; they show output, not value. Define a guardrail for claim processing accuracy and call handling time so the accessibility work does not shift cost to support. Finally, publish the goal and measures to the steering committee so scope decisions are judged against the outcome.