Can Product Management Change the World?
Product managers have enormous influence over the complexion of the world that’s being created, but are they always making good product decisions?
Products Do Change the World
We know it intuitively. Products can make a big difference to peoples’ lives and the way they relate to their world. Just think about how different life is, now that people have smartphones and Google search. There is almost no comparison with how life used to be lived, for better or worse.
In the best cases, products can greatly increase the quality of life, but this isn’t all they do. Sometimes, the product that gets thrust upon an unwitting populace is not a net positive for either humanity, or the living world (or both). In those cases, we’d be better off without them.
Historically, the fact that they have attracted funding is no guarantor of net product benefit. If product managers had a framework to evaluate whether products helped or hindered, in aggregate, they could make better decisions about their products.
In this article, I am going to propose one. It’s an interesting checklist, because it reveals that a lot of the products we think of as innovative, or get excited about, are net negative. They are making everything worse for everybody, without anybody initially noticing. However, over their product lifecycle, they are parasitic. They bleed the quality of life out of the society we live in.
The Big Picture Problems
A lot of discussion takes place, among product development professionals, about problems worth solving. There are some that say everything innovative has already been done and that most new products reduce to variations on already successful themes. Pitches often reduce to “Uber for dogs”, or “Airbnb for allotments”, or “WeWork for people that actually own their buildings”. It’s as if there is nothing worthwhile or meaningful left to solve.
Yet, that can’t be true. We know that the world is currently facing some human emergencies, for which few practical, workable solutions have yet been proposed. Why are product managers failing to grapple with these big problems? Why can’t they tell a workable solution from a poor one? It’s an important question. Why are they wasting their time and resources on yet another streaming service, or social media platform, or “something” sharing app?
If we enumerate the big picture problems that are pressing on us all urgently, then that can give us some indication of what true innovations are needed and which products will potentially be of net benefit, rather than deleterious to the quality of life. So, what are they?
There is growing, credible evidence that we are facing a climate emergency. While some disbelieve, the evidence is nevertheless compelling, irrespective of political views. We also face widespread habitat loss and loss of diversity in the living world. Species extinctions are accelerating, mostly due to habitat loss. The loss of these is mainly because, until it’s harvested and turned into cash, we value the unmolested living world at precisely zero — the same as we value people that are not in productive employment.
The weaponisation of misinformation has become a feature of modern life, leading to an erosion of democracy. We seem to be engaged in perpetual “forever wars”, that never seem to end. Misinformation keeps these wars running because of their amplification of racism and bigotry. War is also highly profitable for the suppliers of war materiel, even though warfare destroys value. Organised trolling on social media and weaponised misinformation has led to a negative impact on general mental health. The corresponding despair associated with living in the modern world has also fuelled obesity and opioid crises of epic proportions. Life expectancy is falling, particularly among young adults.
Thanks to surveillance capitalism, privacy and human rights have been severely compromised, because private data has been monetised. A loss of agency has also accompanied many of the developments in the modern world. Humans are increasingly commodified and undervalued for their unique skills and talents, leading to widespread underemployment and downward pressure on real wages. Health crises can bankrupt most Americans. Imprisonment is primarily for private profit, rather than social justice.
Our economies have become so financialised, that the lack of connection to real productive activities, markets and people is now a feature of huge flows of money. Complex derivatives and side bets now dwarf the tangible economy of goods and services. Financialisaton has tended to encourage extractive, rent seeking behaviours, over the creation of real value.
The ascendency of the finance, insurance and real estate speculation sectors of the economy has fuelled unprecedented wealth, social and opportunity inequalities, exacerbating the historical legacy of colonialism and imperialism. Wealth accrued from interest grows faster than returns on productive activity and debt is growing much faster than the economy is growing.
Because of these recent economic phenomena, at scale, we have seen an alarming rise in counter-productive government austerity measures and the rise of authoritarianism. Nobody finds it worthwhile to invest in people, their well being or the living world, under current circumstances.
What is at the Root of These Problems?
What do these problems have in common? The thread that links them all is rather simple. They do not nurture the living world. Instead, they cause death and/or destruction, leading to immiseration and loss of rights. They do not help living things to thrive.
This is because nurturing life and helping it to thrive has not been a priority and killing it off has been arbitrarily defined as profitable, even though we cannot survive without the living world.
Put succinctly, we have purpose-built our societies, institutions and systems, overs hundreds of years, to value conquest, domination, rape of the Earth, killing for profit, dog-eat-dog competition and greed above all else. Why shouldn’t we expect it to kill living things, human beings included, off.
The problem is that we’ve reached the limits. The living world can no longer withstand it. If we don’t change the products that define our everyday activities, we’ll invite extinction — possibly much sooner than we can imagine.
What Can Product Managers Do About It?
Wow! How can product managers change any of that?
Surprisingly, perhaps, product managers can make a lot of difference to how the world works, because they define and produce many of the things that dictate how our experience of everyday life will be.
Yes, they are constrained by capitalism and politics, but from their desks, they can make either humane or inhumane decisions. Sadly, product managers make egregious errors of judgement daily, without even being fully aware of the downstream impacts of their product decisions.
With a checklist of both desirable and undesirable product characteristics and a little bit of honest reflection, they can ask themselves and their stakeholders some crucial questions, before they develop the product in question. If the product under development provides an overwhelmingly net negative impact on living systems, the only ethical thing to do is to change the product until it’s positive or stop developing it all together. It’s a test of their humanity.
A Go / No Go Checklist
Here is a proposed framework for evaluating product management decisions. It consists of a series of checklist questions, of both negative things to avoid and positive things to incorporate in the design of any product. The questions evaluate to what extent the product is consonant with the goal of nurturing living systems and helping life to thrive. They’re worth asking.
Bad things to avoid:
· Does the product consume energy needlessly or wastefully, or increase the carbon footprint?
· Does the product contribute to the destruction of habitats?
· Does the product bake in the assumption that nobody and nothing has intrinsic worth?
· Does it undermine human dignity?
· Does the product build-in obsolescence and material waste?
· Does the product produce toxic waste at any stage of its lifecycle?
· Are components or raw materials sourced ethically and sustainably?
· Does it injure humans, or pace their work unrealistically or unsustainably?
· Does the product prey on people in any way?
· Does the product deceive people or provide opportunities for others to do so without restraint?
· Does it promote war?
· Does it disempower people?
· Does it erode their personal sovereignty?
· Does it invade their privacy?
· Does it sell people out?
· Does it tend to treat people as disposable or interchangeable?
· Does it undermine or erode social justice?
· Does the product merely collect rents or otherwise extract value?
· Does it rely on creating information asymmetries to make money?
· Does it create artificial scarcities to profit from?
· Does it increase economic inequality?
· Does it impoverish or immiserate anybody?
· Does it grow indebtedness?
· Does it increase the level of user frustration, confusion and anger?
· Does it in any way evade or override local laws and customs?
· Does it erode democracy or the democratic process?
· Does it reduce transparency and the accountability of its maker?
· Does it empower authoritarians or tyrants?
· Does the product exploit people or the living world?
· Does it enable and empower criminal activity, without restraint or oversight?
· Does it reduce diversity and respect for uniqueness?
· Does it or can it kill anyone or any living thing?
Good things to encourage:
· Does the product help life to thrive?
· Is the product sustainable, maintainable, repairable, recyclable or repurposable?
· Does it enhance people’s imagination?
· Does it help people be more inventive?
· Does it help people control who uses their data, for what purposes and for how long?
· Does it inspire humanity to a higher quality of thought?
· Does it aid creativity?
· Does it enlighten or educate the user?
· Does it help the user tell truth from lies in any way?
· Does it encourage people?
· Does it edify human and other life?
· Does it enhance human health and the health of the biosphere?
· Does it foster genuine generosity and collaboration, fairly?
· Does the product provide care, comfort or solace?
· Does it help people live better lives or help them to enrich their life experience?
· Does it create eudaimonia?
· Does it work to prevent species extinction?
· Does it limit or reduce energy consumption?
Why Bother?
Making products that conform to these criteria, avoiding the negative impacts and deliberately including the positive aspects, is no easy task. In fact, it’s really, really hard, but very much worth doing, because we use products every day. They define us.
If we use products that make a net positive contribution to life on Earth, we move toward a sustainable, but high quality of life. There will never be existence without products, at this stage of human evolution. On the other hand, products that rely on increasing human suffering or the reduction of human (or other) life and its freedoms can only be foist upon the population by force and fear. Using products with a net negative impact on living systems is indistinguishable from choosing a slow, but inevitable death.
Only the very best product managers will be able to steer products in a net positive direction. Most products that are currently attracting investment, and development talent and resources, are problematic, in relation to the checklist proposed above. The hard truth is that we would all be better off without products that make the urgent problems we face worse.
On the other hand, why would you work hard, make sacrifices and devote your blood, sweat and tears to make “scam with an app” products that make the world incrementally worse? Is that what you would like your product management legacy to be?
Inevitably, some product managers will answer that they only make products to feed their families, to earn a living. To those, I would ask how will they spend their money, in the hellscape they contribute to creating? They’re no more immune to the consequences of poor product decisions than anybody else. Also, why have they organised and acquiesced to an economic system that requires everybody to work, on no matter on what heinous product, just to survive?
Even the most misanthropic, self-declared, “self-made” billionaire will not be able to buy their way out of the hellscape of their own making, simply because there is no solution available to buy. The reality is that they couldn’t survive in splendid isolation, because they depend utterly on thousands of other people to exist at all. Were they to buy their way out of humanity, they would fare no better than Thurston Howell III, on Gilligan’s Island. Escape to Mars or the Moon is futile, as it exchanges one hellscape for another. You can be assured that Elon Musk will never single-handedly sow, raise and harvest a crop of potatoes on another planet. The weirdest trend is that those entrepreneurs characterised by a “nothing is impossible” mindset don’t feel that the Earth can be saved from themselves. Contradictions don’t come much more marked.
If you’re a product manager, you can change the world by simply choosing what to bring into the world or not. If product managers don’t step up to own the problem, who else is going to be the gatekeeper?
About the author
Michael Topic is a freelance Product Manager with over thirty years experience delivering products that didn’t exist before. He welcomes contract enquiries to define new, competitive products, design them and deliver them. His speciality is software-based products.
Disclaimer
The opinions offered in this article are intended to describe common scenarios that sometimes occur in general product management practice. They are in no way intended to be read as referring to any particular employer, past or present.
