I'd ask myself, “Is this in the best interest for our customer or is it not? Is it something that's only in line with the business? Are we trying to get people to take action in ways that might harm them over time?”
Show Notes
In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers a subscriber’s question about choice architecture and competing priorities between the business and the customer.
Q: How do you balance the ethics of choice architecture as a product manager who is responsible for satisfying possible divergent priorities between the business and the customer? What is our duty when priorities may conflict?
Hear Melissa talk about:
Choice architecture and dark patterns
What to do with your priorities conflict with each other
How ethics in product is vital to how you view your products
Resources Melissa Perri on LinkedIn | Twitter MelissaPerri.com
Episode Transcript
Hello, and welcome to an episode of Dear Melissa, from the Product Thinking Podcast. The lines are now open, and we're ready to answer your most pressing product questions. Which prioritization framework would you recommend and why? Hi, Melissa. Do you have any suggestions on developing a product strategy?
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. That's a lot of questions. All right, let's dive in. Hello, and welcome to another episode of Dear Melissa. Today, we're going to be answering questions about product ethics. And I only have one longer question to really go through today, so it's going to be a little bit of a shorter segment.
But this has been a topic that's pretty near and dear to my heart. I think as product managers, we have a lot of responsibility when it comes to creating a space where we are making ethical decisions. And I think we should be doing that in our day-to-day work.
So this is a great question. I'm excited to answer it, and it goes like this. Dear Melissa, the question I've had in my mind for a while now has to do with product ethics, specifically digital ethics and behavioral design. As product managers, we're taught to fall in love with the customer's problems, seeking ways to solve those problems in a way that is also viable for a business.
I've always come to a crossroads when it comes to choice architecture, specifically when balancing key behaviors I want my customers to take within the context of a product that I think will benefit everyone across the value stream. The question, how do you balance the ethics of choice architecture as a product manager who's responsible for satisfying possible divergent priorities between business and customer? What is our duty when priorities may conflict?
Thanks. That's a fantastic question, and I'm excited to answer it right after this message. All right, we're back, and we're talking about product ethics.
So in the question, you mentioned choice architecture, and I just want to talk about that a little bit for people who are not familiar with that term. So choice architecture is really the customer or the user's right to choose. It's about how do we actually nudge people to make different decisions or allow them to make their own choices across our products.
So there's a lot of ways that companies do this. You experience choice architecture all the time, right? If you are on Facebook, you know that they send you notifications about things. Your phone will nudge you all the time, telling you to go to all these different apps. Sometimes you're in an app, and it directs you to go do something, right?
It tells you, hey, you might want to go over here, check this out. All of these things are choice architecture decisions, and that's all decisions we make as a product manager when designing products, too. And the way that I think about choice architecture is kind of like this. If you're nudging people to make choices that are in their best interests, that's good, right?
That's what we are there for. But there are things that nudge people not in their best interest, only in the interest of what that business is actually running on. And those are called dark patterns. And dark patterns are design choices that we make that kind of make murky what we're trying to get out of it.
We're trying to get people to do things that they normally wouldn't do or may not be in their best interest. So, for example, the nudging I was talking about with Facebook and other social media, like that could be considered a dark pattern over time, because it's actually stealing people's attention from the stuff that they have to do. It's bothering them all the time.
So we have to be careful when we're looking at making these choices about how to nudge people in different directions. I'd ask myself, is this in the best interest for our customer, or is it not? Is it something that's only in line with our business, or we're trying to get people to take action in ways that might harm them over time?
And that really is how we think about ethics, right? Like there's a lot of interesting things in here about the ethics of these choices. I like to think about it as if you revealed how your product worked, if you take down the tarp or the veil or whatever of your product, and you're like, okay, this is what's under the hood.
Would your customers be mad? That's a really good way to think about it. Would they be mad? Would they be upset? Would they feel like you weren't acting in their best interests? And that's how we got into all of this stuff with like Cambridge Analytica and all that stuff. These companies were tracking people's data and then selling it, but that was not what they came to the product for.
And this is where you get all your GDPR regulations about selling emails, all of these things, because companies were acting in bad faith. They were not making good ethical decisions. And now we all are reaping the percussions of it. So if you're worried about, am I being ethical or not with my product?
That's a good place to start.
Would you feel bad if you revealed how your product worked to your customers? Like, would you be actually really open to talk about it on stage in front of all of them? Or would you think that they would throw things at you? Good way to start to think about that. But I think as product managers, right?
Part of this question was like, what's our duty when priorities may conflict? I think our duty is to be good to our customers. And that doesn't mean that we have to solve all of their problems. Like we get to choose which problems we want to solve as a business and how that manifests. But as product managers, we also get to figure out how that solution is going to happen and what we do with that.
And that's where I think ethics comes into play, like how your solutions manifest. And then also how they affect your customer and how they affect those around them. We have a really good podcast coming up next week with Kathy Pham talking all about product ethics. Kathy is fantastic at this. Like I just love hearing all of her stories.
She started at the U.S.
Digital Services back when, you know, it was a couple people. So she's been doing this in the government. She's been doing this with large companies. And she teaches at Harvard now about product ethics and product management to people who are making policy decisions. So I think that's really interesting.
She's bringing product management to the public sector. And some of the stories that she'll tell in that podcast will just blow your minds. But I think this topic is incredibly important. And especially now, we're faced with a lot of ethical decisions. There's a lot of things going on around how AI is biased, right?
And I hate when people are like, oh, it's the algorithm. That's the fault. You're like, no, somebody, a human made that algorithm. Algorithms are only as good as you train them. That's how technology works. So, you know, we've got those issues. And then we've got other issues, too, where I think people make choices, but they're not really sure what the ramifications might be.
One of the things that got me on this topic, thinking about product ethics, trying to think about how this all works, was really the situation that happened with Robinhood.
So if you weren't aware, there was a very young user, I believe he was 17 years old, of Robinhood, who did a very complicated trade, invested in it, and then saw that he lost a bunch of money, or so he perceived, in the app. And he took his own life because of it. And this was like $200,000 that he lost or something like that, which, you know, is a lot to a 17-year-old, 18-year-old.
And there's been a lot of debate about, is it Robinhood's fault or is it the user's fault for gambling? And I think this is interesting. It's an interesting debate because a product manager decided that we should show trades inside of Robinhood, and if they clear and all that wonderful stuff, the same way we would show it to an expert who's trading on the floor of Chase or Schwab or whatever.
You know, I worked with all the banks, right? Like, all these places. And I worked on a trading floor at one point. I did not trade. I made the software for it. And those are complicated things to understand.
I personally have been through tons of financial training while I was working with banks to understand how all these things work, and they still are murky to me. So how is a 17-year-old with no training, you know, no financial background going to be able to understand that? And the flip side of this debate, right, a lot of people will say is, hey, well, you know, he knew the risk.
Like, he took the risk. But Robinhood's whole vision, right, and their value and the mission is to democratize trading and make it accessible for individual people so the everyday people can get access to trading. So, okay, this is an everyday person. It's a 17-year-old who wants to get into trading.
Fantastic. But then they made it possible for him to do everything, but they didn't really know what the risk appetite is. Like, I signed up for Robinhood, and I got approved for, like, level four options trading within, like, two minutes, level three or level four, something like that.
But anyway, I did not know how to trade those options like that. And I'm sure there are a lot of people who do, and you should be approved for them if you know how to do it and you know the risks. But it was really easy. It was really simple to just say, like, answer these questions and have it be approved.
And there's some kind of magic in taking away the burden of those things. But then there's a question of what is our responsibility as product managers around those things? Like, if your mission is to bring trading to everyday people, are you setting them up for success to actually trade? I think those are the product management ethics decisions that we have to think about.
And I'm not saying, like, restrict trading to everybody or whatever. And that's not what I'm saying here. It's just that if I'm going to build a solution that's that ambitious, what could go wrong? That's the question that we have to ask ourselves. So when I started teaching this class at HBS, we started to teach this fault tree analysis method, which is basically where you just look at what could go wrong and then how could we cause that to go wrong?
For example, if we show the graphs in Robinhood on those trades and we don't explain that, hey, it takes actually 24 hours for this to clear, that could make somebody confused and understand it, make them not panic and go down this whole rabbit hole of what actually happened, right?
That's this exercise called fault tree analysis. And I think we need to do that as product managers all the time. And I think we need to do it more often than we are. I work with a lot of companies and I don't see them, especially companies that impact not necessarily just like workplace tools, but things that impact us socially or environmentally or anything like that.
I think it's important for us to be questioning that, to be like, are we making the right choices here? What could go wrong? What would be the worst that would happen? Those are all questions we should be asking on a day-to-day basis. Now, if you can't ask those questions in a company, then you have to ask yourself, like, am I at the right company?
Is this the place I really want to be? And do I believe in the ethics of this company? I believe ethics starts at the top. They start with management. They start with the board. They start with how you are building your company. And if the leadership is not on the same page as you, there's a good question about whether you want to be there.
But then there's smaller ethical decisions that are not like, the whole company doesn't have to be corrupt. These are day-to-day things, right?
About am I making my product accessible for other people? Am I thinking about the repercussions of like nudging somebody too much? Am I making decisions in the best interest of my customer to help them succeed in the ways that they actually want to succeed? Those are everyday design decisions that we make as product managers on teams.
And I think we need to bring that same ethical thinking into those that we would leave for higher level problems as well. You don't have to work in the public sector. You don't have to work in government. You don't have to work for social good to think about ethics. Ethics really impacts us everywhere.
The concept of ethics needs to be baked into how we build all of our products. So when it's our duty, what's our duty when our priorities may conflict between the business and the customer? I think we take care of our customers and I think that's how we build great businesses. And you know what? We might not get the windfall of all the money right now.
And that would be sad, but if we take care of our customers, the money should come.
That's how I like to think about it. And this has got little to do with like pricing and packaging and all these things, but it's really the ethos of like how we do stuff, right? It's how we think about our customers and how we make good decisions that help them. And I think that's why we got into product management because we want to help people.
At least that's why I did. I like building stuff for other people and solving their problems. So if you love solving people's problems, you just got to do it in a way that is good for them. So we have a lot of responsibility on our shoulders as product managers. Software is not ending today. It's not going anywhere.
It's only going to take over more and more of our lives. So the more that we can have these conversations, the more we can think about ethics in our day-to-day work, the better the software is going to turn out. So I encourage you to start these conversations at your company. Look at what you're doing.
And even if it's innocuous and it seems like we're not doing anything important over here, it's good to just question it. Like, could this impact people around us?
How might people abuse my product? How do I make sure that's not going to happen? Those are good conversations to have. So I hope you will join me in starting those conversations, having them at your company and with your friends as well so that we can make better products for a better world. Let's put it that way.
So thanks so much for listening and definitely tune in next week for our episode with Kathy. It's going to be fantastic. Lots and lots of stories, things that just kind of blew my mind where I went, Oh, wow. I never even thought that was like an ethical consideration. I never knew that could be a thing.
And let me tell you, it is a thing. So definitely tune in and join us for that conversation next week. And if you have any questions for me to answer, please submit them to DearMelissa.com. I love taking your questions. It's been really fun to read them all and see what's on your mind. Thanks and see you next time.
