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.
