Your Product’s Ethical Stack
A mental model update for product teams to think about ethics
Technology products shape the world we live in. They define actions we can make and influence how we interpret the world. Even the most seemingly innocuous product — say Instagram, or Pinterest — affects our behaviour in ethically relevant ways.
Nevertheless, few product teams include ethics explicitly in their decision-making, nor are there shared frameworks for doing so. What’s missing is a conceptual bridge between product strategy and ethics. I’ll try to bridge that gap in this article.
Getting ethics on the agenda of product teams
With increasing societal scrutiny upon them, technology companies are becoming more alert to ethics. But this priority tends to live at a distance from the product teams who build the products.
Product teams make the day-to-day decisions about the business, design and technology elements comprising their products, and these decisions often have significant ethical implications.
Yet rarely do product teams talk about ethics, and seldom do these conversations influence product strategy and product design — except for…
