
Trust is a (Solvable) Product Management Problem
Technology companies have lost public trust. With new skills and tools, their product leaders can get it back.
No one intended for things to turn out this way. The general public was never meant to be increasingly concerned about technology companies, fueling fear of the “Silicon Valley mindset” and its effects. And the people building technology products were never meant to experience alarming misuse of their creations, fueling apprehension about unforeseen negative impacts of their efforts.
But here we are. And it’s all happening on a global scale with corresponding consequences.
Although the circumstances are strikingly complex, the problem is apparent. Trust — a fundamental mechanism of business and societal structures — is crumbling amongst all stakeholders: consumers, companies, company employees, and policymakers. In light of this, we can choose to focus on building defenses to mitigate damage or building solutions to heal what has been broken. Although the former has momentum right now, the latter is what the world needs. It is possible. And achievable if we set our goal as enhancing the exchange of value and shared benefits between stakeholders. But how? And, more importantly, who?
It was technology product leaders and teams that (unintentionally) got us into this mess. These same individuals can help get us out — but not by continuing to do things the same way.
Accomplishing this goal will involve undertaking new categories of problems, which means it won’t be enough to adjust measures of success or redefine solutions. Keeping the same processes and hiring and training for the same skills will, logically, achieve the same results. However, these challenges require new perspectives along with approaches, analogies, beliefs, norms, and frameworks, which means enhancing product management via new skills and tools.
Adding New Product Sense Skills
Traditional product skills focus on human behavior and how to direct actions using technology, often to the effect of manipulating states of psychological “flow.” These frameworks, like human-centered design and the Fogg Behavior Model, are powerful empathy tools. But none of them consider or guide thinking about the outcomes and effects of any given behavior. For example, if a user performs action X, what is the impact of X on the mental and physical well-being of the user? Or the influence of X on the strength of the user’s relationships and community? These questions go beyond behavior and assume a vision for human well-being and flourishing — what can a human be and do, and how do specific practices enhance or diminish these capabilities?
The core attributes of traditional Product Sense are empathy, domain knowledge, and creativity. To achieve the goal of increasing trust between stakeholders, we need to add the following skills: compassion, ethical framework knowledge, and moral imagination.
Compassion
Empathy alone is often an inadequate guide to reasoning about human effects. Using empathy alone results in products designed to maximize “eyes-on-screen” (Netflix) and habituate “swiping left and right” (Tinder), which are among countless examples of engagement at the cost of diminished human good. But compassion, paired with empathy, adds the weight of value and concern to the understanding of human physiology and psychology. Used together, they can help disrupt behavior manipulation for one-sided benefit.
Ethical Framework Knowledge
Ethics is not a singular theory or framework. When people think ethics is about binary right and wrong or policy checklists, they are referring to a small fragment of a rich domain. For example, human well-being is the domain of virtue theory, which identifies exceptional (i.e., virtuous) behaviors that correlate with characteristics of human flourishing. Ethics frameworks can be taught. And ethics practices can form tangible skills. For modern societal challenges, employing multiple types of ethical frameworks ensures that no one perspective dominates outcomes. (Case in point: we should remember that Uber’s legal team gave project Greyball the go-ahead. Oops.)
Moral Imagination
Applying frameworks to solve an ethical challenge requires the capability to envision a full range of possibilities in a particular situation. Imagining extreme outcomes, often in cases of excess or deficiency, is a skill needed to identify the quality and quantity of characteristics that correlate with well-being. Reading good science fiction through an ethical lens is an excellent way to practice imagining outcomes and evaluating their effects.
New Tools to Measure Ecosystem Impact
Traditional measurement tools assume a linear system and focus on product impact measures, which are critical performance indicators from the perspective of the company. But from the perspective of those using the product, personal and societal impact are the most vital performance indicators. Therefore, this is where trust and flourishing should be measured, which means characterizing the kinds and qualities of connections between individuals and communities. It is a transition from measuring isolated components of a system to measuring the characteristics of an ecosystem. Tools of this kind come from the domain of complex adaptive systems and network analysis.
These trust-ecosystems will each have unique, optimal “health” and structures. Product managers can establish respective baselines and monitor change over time.
To be clear, this is a new territory intersecting multiple disciplines. Future research and experimentation are needed. But there are initiatives underway that provide actionable next steps:
- The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) map out a “blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all.”
- The internal think tank at Mars Inc., Catalyst, has spent more than five decades developing new measurements for financial capital, human capital, social capital, and natural capital. Their goal is to enable businesses with mechanisms to increase trust and sustain optimal growth.
Integrating New Skills and Tools with the Current Product Process
These new product skills and measurement tools are practical. Here is an example of integration with existing product management frameworks:
Product Vision
The product vision must include shared value for all stakeholders. Current vision statements express a point of view about the product from the company’s perspective. The next step is to add a vision for human well-being and flourishing as a complement to the company’s benefits. An example of this would be adding an applicable objective from the UN SDGs.
Product Goal: Measuring and Assessing Success
Traditional goals measure business and product indicators. Missing, however, is a goal that provides a way to assess the success of the business and product goals. In the case of product success, what is the effect on end-users? Or within their community? Assessment requires establishing goals related to specific ecosystem attributes. For example, to achieve the vision for well-being, what characteristics should be developed or strengthened within the user? What measures indicate the ecosystem is optimal? These may be emotional measures like happiness, cognitive measures like reading aptitude, relational measures like community connectivity, or even physical health measures like resting heart rate.
Determining a specific indicator allows it to be baselined and monitored, establishing an optimal state. This process also provides a way to identify edge conditions relative to the optimal, e.g., excess or deficiency of a characteristic. Ecosystem anomaly detection is also made possible, helping protect the whole from unintended consequences of product success and abusive or illicit use.
Design Goal
Design and user experience traditionally serve the vision and goals of the company and the product. We can extend these product design goals by aligning with 1) the product vision for human well-being and 2) the success measures of ecosystem performance. Design can then focus on driving behaviors that correlate with forming these targeted characteristics. In her book Technology and the Virtues, Shannon Valor identifies a set of twelve practices that serve as a starting place.
Business ROI: The Ultimate Measure of Success
Most importantly, for this to work, it must result in real ROI for companies. We are harnessing the engine of business as a mechanism of change, and profit is its fuel. What are the real, long-term financial benefits of implementing these ethical skills and new measurements into products and processes? We have evidence to hypothesize a positive correlation. Still, there is hard work to be done toward demonstrating this is the case. It will require experimentation, iteration, and, of course, product management.
How will we know we are on the right track? At the very least, we are attempting to optimize performance outcomes shared between the company, its product teams, and the end-users of the products (including the communities to which they belong). If our initiative results in simultaneous performance improvements for all these stakeholders, it’s a good sign we are on the right track.
One thing we do know — the risk of staying the current course is growing far more expensive and increasingly tenuous. Policymakers are threatening additional heavy-handed regulation, while fines in the billions of dollars are the new normal. Both antitrust sentiment and activity are on the rise. Wall Street is scrutinizing technology business models via reduced valuations. And there is growing consumer advocacy regarding technology harms. So even if companies emerge relatively unscathed, they will have fought for a share in marketplaces of diminished value and costly regulation.
We may not yet know the full positive ROI of implementing change, but it’s a fair bet to assume it will be higher than the negative ROI of inaction.
