Product for Good – Thinking Out Loud [Product Management]

Product for Good – looking ahead to 2025

11/12/2024 No Comments

This blog seeks to provide an update on what’s been going on within the Product for Good Community.

Having done some priority work in one of our first sessions, as a group we’ve decided a key priority would be to codify a set of tech ethics that product managers can take into their organisations, products and ways of working. Our hope is that in doing so, we’ll be better placed to create products that go beyond ‘do no harm’ and veer into ‘do some good’.

We’ve been really blessed as a community to have Lisa Talia Moretti amongst our number. Lisa is a digital sociologist that has been researching the impact tech has on society for over ten years. As such, Lisa has been perfectly placed to help us organise ourselves around the mission of creating a set of tech ethics.

What we’ve done so far

Lisa shared some of the research and work she’s done so far in regards to ethics. The slides from which Lisa has been kind enough to share – you can find them on the Product for Good padlet.

Moving into action, we’ve mapped the unintended consequences (both positive and negative) of the products we work on, and having presented those back to each other, started to see where there is overlap amongst the various products we work on.

What’s next?

In 2025, the list of overlapping consequences is where we’ll be kicking off.

The list includes

Job losses
Environmental impacts and sustainability
Data privacy
Accessibility
Misinformation
Bias and discrimination
Digital exclusion

In 2025, we’ll seek to create a set of principles that product managers can bring to their teams, organisations and practices to ensure their work is not only aware of these potential consequences but are actively mitigating against them.

Want to get involved?

If this all sounds like your bag, fill out the Google Form to register your interest and hopefully we’ll be seeing you on the next call to be part of the action.

Product for Good, Product management

Product for Good – the first meet up, what happened and what’s happening next?

02/10/2024 No Comments

Firstly, what is Product for Good?

Product for Good is a community of product people that believe the product role affords us the agency to do societal good.

This idea had been knocking around my head for a while. I put an initial LinkedIn post out to test the water and see if there was any interest.

It turns out there was, so I created this blog post that outlined some of my rough thinking alongside a Google Form for those interested to sign up.

The result was we had twenty five socially-conscious product folk sign up and we put a date in for our first meeting.

This blog post seeks to publicise what we discussed in that meeting and outline what we want to achieve.

I want to do this for a few reasons.

To keep a record of what we talked about for those in the community that weren’t able to attend.

To work in the open to promote our work for those that haven’t come into contact with us but would like to be involved or aware.

What kind of people signed up for Product for Good?

Well, in short, a bunch of really good eggs.

Don’t believe me, take a look at some of the reasons people gave for wanting to be involved.

To be involved in influencing digital products to do better across the board.
Firmly believe that tech products have huge potential to deliver large scale good!
I would like to share knowledge on digital sustainability.
Product has huge capacity for good, but interested in how we can create action
As a product manager, I believe we have a unique opportunity and responsibility to drive meaningful change. Our role positions us at the intersection of innovation and impact, where we can champion ethical practices and create products that genuinely improve lives.

People came from a range of organisations including Marie Curie, The Open University, the BBC and DEFRA, to name a few.

What was discussed on the call?

The Google Form asked folk to say what topics they thought the group should cover – there was a lot of synergy in people’s answers.

Suggested topics to tackle broadly fitted into four categories..

Tech / Product Ethics
Sustainability
Protecting individuals / users
Putting a value on not-for-profit work

During the call we voted on which we’d like to focus on first and the group decided to, initially at least, focus on Tech and Product Ethics, followed by Sustainability. Awesome.

The group also talked about how they’d like the group to operate.

We decided we wanted to…

Bring like-minded people together to deliver impact, raise awareness of best practices, and do meaningful work as a collective.

That it was important to us to have clear goals, to commit to doing what we say we plan to do, to seek external connections and partnerships and to be respectful and open minded.

We decided we’d meet online on a four-week cadence, use Padlet to store our ideas / work / things to research, and that we’d communicate using a WhatsApp group in between our regular online calls.

What’s next?

On the call we outlined our immediate plans.

Firstly, we’d like to codify an actionable set of tech / product ethics that product managers, and subsequently their orgs, can use to improve their products and the lives of the users and ecosystems in which they exist.

We’d then like to do something similar in the sustainability space.

Luckily, a member of our budding collective has spent a considerable time conducting research on ethics in tech. We plan to learn from this person and see if we can use the Product for Good community as a vehicle to turn that research into meaningful action and change.

If this all sounds like your bag, fill out the Google Form to register your interest and hopefully we’ll be seeing you on the next call to be part of the action.

Product for Good

Product for Good – a call for product people to unite for societal impact!

03/08/2024 No Comments

Graffiti on a wall saying 'together we create'

This blog post is a call to arms for ethically-minded product people to unite, knowledge share, and up-skill so we can use the agency our role affords for the betterment of each other and society at large.

Get involved, here!

Does Product for Bad exist?

In 2021, Frances Haugen, a product person turned Facebook (now Meta) whistleblower, told us that she believed the company put profit before public safety and that the organisation was turning a blind eye to internal research that asserted the platform was contributing to..

The spread of misinformation
A rise in online hate and division
Poor teenage mental health

“The thing I saw at Facebook over and over again was there were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook. And Facebook, over and over again, chose to optimise for its own interests, like making more money,” she said.

This seems to be a rather nailed on example as product for bad (sorry to any Meta PMs).

If Frances is correct, it would seem Meta is happy “in the knowledge that its platform is causing harm to society, and actively avoiding fixing these issues due to a desire to turn greater profits.

So, what is the alternative?

I presume, maybe naively, that many of us opted to become product people based on a desire to create things, improve lives and change the world for the better as opposed to a pure profit motive.

I also suspect that many public sector product people avert the lure of the private sector dollar due to a commitment to public service whilst lots private sector product folk would love to be able to prioritise things that improved society rather than just turned a profit.

And whilst there are lots of amazing Tech for Good initiatives, I wonder if we could think more specifically as to what we as product folk can do to?

After all, as product people, we are the prioritisers – the ones tasked with influencing and challenging stakeholders. I believe this role provides us a unique opportunity to put things on roadmaps, or introduce ways of working that synergise an organisation’s goals with public good.

I firmly believe we can and should use our agency to ensure our teams and our organisations are building the right things in the right way – in ways that protect privacy, encourage inclusivity and aren’t causing unnecessary harm to the planet’s finite resources.

We have an opportunity to be forces for good but how?

How can we make changes to our individual practices and the habits within our organisations to drive ethical innovation?

Hopefully, in the right departments or companies the product work we do itself can benefit society.

But I wonder whether we can go further?

If the product community were to focus on upskilling itself with the skills and knowledge to create, manage, and scale tech products that truly make a difference, or to work within orgs in an ethical manner, what an impact could we make?

And what sort of things would we have to know and learn to leverage technology to drive positive societal impact?

Want to get involved?

This is just a kernel of an idea on a topic too big for a single person to do anything meaningful with.

Therefore, I’d like to see if others out there would like to join forces to start discussing how we can collectively make a difference.

As a starter for ten, I imagine we might start with a few discussions such as…

If there was a course on Product for Good, what topics would you want/expect it to cover?

If all public sector / private sector product people took this course early in their careers, what impacts can you imagine for society?

If this sounds like something you’d like to be a part of, fill out this Google Form and let’s see where the journey takes us.