Are tech products becoming unethical?

Welcome dear product people to another episode. This is Christian speaking and I'm here with my co-host Alex today. Hi Alex. Hi Christian. How are you feeling today? It's great. It's raining in Berlin. Gives me a little bit of this melancholic mood. I see there is a beautiful dog lying in your background. Do you have another visitor at your place again? Yes, so maybe here a shout out to my services as a dog sitter for friends and family who are using my service way too much lately. But yeah, as long as I have the time, I don't have the time to get a dog for myself. So I'm always happy to have these furry friends in the back. So in case you hear some barking or... Someone might be hungry. But you know, there are studies showing that your life quality increases with a dog. Productivity increases with a dog. Is that the case? I don't know. Yeah. At least if you listen to those people who want a dog policy for their office. Alex, talking about dog policy, I think we are touching a little bit a topic you want to talk about, which goes in the direction of ethics. How do we get started? I'm not sure how ethical dogs are. Is it ethical enough to have a policy to need to have dogs? Or what if someone is allergic? A lot, a lot of questions. But yeah, the topic is slightly different. I hope we don't lose anyone who's like maybe a cat person or not interested in dogs. And it's mainly because like last week, you shared about a one thing book. And I've recently read a lot of books in the space of like ethics and design. And I think like one of them, and we can obviously put them also in the notes. I mean, I was reading like Technically Wrong from Sarah Butcher. I'm not sure if I pronounce her name the right way. And currently I'm also on Ruined by Design from like Monterio. And I think like what they generally have like in common is that they raise a certain level of critique on the whole tech work in terms of generally speaking, especially if we look overseas, places like Silicon Valley, it feels like you have a quite non diverse mess of people who work in the tech industry. You have a massive bunch of white guys coming from the same universities, having some great ideas, getting their capital, like from another bunch of white guys, a lot of testosterone in the room, and they build products, and the products are successful. But obviously like by not having any sort of diversity in the room, you might miss out on a lot of like important things. Coming down to what are like the features that you develop, like how you develop them, like even the very small things of looking at minorities when you design a form field. This is now the most obvious example, right? Like where you have this ticker and you're like, okay, is this a miss? Is it a mister? So obviously there is a lot going on in that space. At the same time, you can also raise some critique on how much like big tech companies, like it's with the Twitter, it's the Facebooks, how they not saying promote, but generally speaking, allow also that like a certain level of harassment is going on the platform. And I think like a lot of these topics are topics that I see raising more and more. I think nowadays there is so many people working in tech and it's still a very unregulated space. And I think the question is like, how do you control it? How do you control it also as an employee? How do you control it as an entrepreneur or someone who starts a company? And also what implication does it have like on how you develop your product or how you should think about your product? And I think this is simply something like where, yeah, I wanted to have a little bit of a open conversation also with you Christian I love that you brought up the topic because it's definitely something we haven't talked about yet in our podcast. And I believe nowadays this whole topic of diversity, ethics, equality is more prominent than ever. And I'm super happy that the awareness is raising because as you mentioned, there are this, and I'm making it maybe worse than it is, or maybe not. We have white guys founding a company, hiring just guys, getting money from investors who are white. And we can go on for hours. So you see certain patterns in behaviors and also how actually the world is ticking. People start realizing this and they are asking for change in different ways. So there are, in my opinion, great ways, but there are also terrible ways. I like actually a lot that people are more and more thinking about how do I design a product for a minority? Or I should not only hire men in my company because women, other people, other genders, whatever, bring different point of views to the culture, to the product as well. So that's really great. But on the other hand, something that I'm struggling with is the whole discussion around terminologies. These days you have for everything a certain word, a certain opinion. I think it's going a little bit in a direction of becoming too extreme from my point of view. So I would love to see, I would literally love to see more harmony in this whole discussion, because if we want to change the world, we should try to approach it from a friendly and peaceful point of view instead of being too aggressive. But I'm also realizing that it's generally not easy to talk about. So these are things that I might brain dump on that, but I'm happy to hear where you're coming from. And the thing is obviously it's, and I feel like it's very hard for us to have such a conversation because we don't fall under minorities. It's also very hard to feel it, but I think that's, again, like where having a certain level of diversity also in your teams and in your organization can help you better understand also the nuances and the different levels of it. But I think maybe one thing that's interesting to discuss without going too much like in the area of diversity or terminology and all these sort of things is like also how we develop things. Because one thing that I've seen is we're moving more and more in a direction where we try to be fast. You can look like even at statements from companies where they say move fast, break things. And I think this is important when we talk about an agile environment, but this also means that sometimes we launch products that might not be ready. We launch products that might not think about all the different use cases that different people have. And this is like where, at least when I think about my day to day work, it gets tricky. Like where should I draw the line and what's the compromise also in terms of staying inclusive and designing products that work for everyone so that I don't exclude people. And I think this is like a really challenging discussion. And I think it's also a little bit the question of who should own it. Is it like the product manager and the designer who should stand up and fight actually like for the users? To some extent it is, right? I think it's the definition of our roles that we think about the user, that we put the user in the center. It's about user centric design, but oftentimes it stays in contrast or it stands in contrast to what the company wants or what the company is also asking you to do. Sometimes you might have goals that interfere ethically with what's best for the user. How do you balance that in an organization? I think that's a very good question. And I believe the wrong way is to put it down on the product people, for example, or on the engineering team, but by blaming the people who are building the product. Because when we look at the pure business point of view, the vast majority are maybe, if you are in the European market, white people. So why should you not build the product for, let's say, people who are disabled, who are blind or who need voiceover functionality, etc. So from a business point of view, your MVP will very likely cover the 80 or 90%, which means the 10% will always fall down and eventually never get their features. If you look at it from a pure business point of view. But I believe here comes something in that we hopefully will see more often. And that's also something you touched upon in one of our previous episodes, which is the product and design principles. And the principles should stay above those business goals. If our principle is to build a product that is accessible for every human being, I'm just going very broad, that should be always reflected in the product roadmap. That doesn't necessarily mean that it needs to be part of the very first version, but it should be there at some point. And at some point means that the second and the third and the fourth version have to follow, no matter what. That's my point of view. And I believe principles for culture, for product, for design are more relevant than ever. And thinking about it is not only good for minorities. It's generally good for your product because you know where you want to go. And with that, you also foster the mindset of the teams and the people to not exclude certain decisions or certain things that need to be part of the product. And it's on the team to decide what those principles are and to stand for them. Because I think that's where sometimes it gets tricky. Depending on also maturity of different teams, people might feel that they are more executing on certain ideas and so on. And I can see that it's tough to speak up or to really fight for a certain idea or to really say no to a specific feature where you as a person think it's ethically wrong. And I think this is something that Mike Monterio pointed out also in his book of the responsibility that you actually have in such an organization. And even the responsibility that you will long-term also or that you long-term could also have legally. And I think this is something to just put there. Tech is currently not yet very regulated. It might become more regulated. It might not be that certain companies like the Ubers, with the excuse that they're a tax company and not a transportation company, that they can do whatever they want and that they can go around loss. And if we think about extreme cases like the scandal that Volkswagen had, there is people that are being made responsible for that. Simply because your superior is asking you to do something that might ethically be wrong and you're executing it, you're still responsible because that's also a little bit like your job description, right? The question I'm asking myself is, are regulations the solution? The thing is, as you mentioned, I know how tough it is to say no. And I've been there many times. But if you feel that something shouldn't be done as it's planned to be done, and let's take Volkswagen, which is a very extreme example, but also a very good one. If you are acquiescing to it and even supporting it, you cannot complain afterwards. It's also up to the people to strengthen their common sense and say no. And I'm talking about both parties, the employees, but also the people who are consuming the products. So if you disagree, if you fundamentally disagree with the way Volkswagen is approaching their policies and the way they are polluting the environment, then you should not buy or drive any more Volkswagen. I know a car is very expensive and it's not easy, but you have to make a decision. It's hard if a company, and now just like staying on a Volkswagen case, is like on purpose hiding the facts. Because you don't know it, right? You can sabotage a company. You can sabotage Twitter if you think that their general rules of moderation are not right. But you cannot sabotage someone who is hiding the facts. And I think that's where it gets tricky. And especially if you're building a product that's made for the mass, you should also think about it, that nobody from the mass that's using it gets harmed. And that's where I think it's like you as a company and you as an employee who's responsible for that, it's like simply stop using it. It's also some sort of discrimination, right? I would disagree here. I think it's a discrimination if you stop using a product because you don't agree with the way they're handling certain things. But here's the thing, we need to distinguish between the things that are happening in the background versus the obvious things. Yeah, but let's stay on the example, for example, of Twitter. And like I'm one by one using the example that's also referred to in the book. So if you want to see the details or also the references. So Twitter is very open with when it comes to not banning people who might have like very radical opinions. And so allowing people on a platform that are far right, that are racists, if there is bullism on a platform, and you as a company allow it with the excuse of, yeah, if they feel bullied, they can stop using it. That's discrimination. Like you need to stop the bully and not give them a platform where they can actually harm people. Yeah, yeah. I would say both things are right. I think on one hand, doing things that are hurting other people's right should have consequences. But on the other hand, if you are in an environment where this happens, it's your option to leave. For example, let's take a look at Facebook and the way to handle data. I don't like this anymore. And I'm going to stop using Facebook. I'm going to stop using Instagram. I'm going to stop using WhatsApp step by step because I don't want to support it anymore. And that's my personal decision. And I know all my friends are there, but my life and my world will continue rotating even without Facebook and even without WhatsApp. So I'm still there yet, but I'm making the transition at the moment. And it's my choice. And I believe the only way to make an impact is if people start not acquiescing to big companies selling the data, for example. Yeah, and this is exactly like where this article discussion gets very complicated. So generally speaking, I'm happy to get everyone's feedback. So make sure to drop it in the comments or drop us a line. I think we can have a deep dive session on it. So also, if you know someone who's very passionate about this topic, I would love to get more details here. And I hope we can follow up on that. Absolutely. And no matter which opinion you have, we have or others have, I believe these days it's more important to also accept and tolerate other people's opinion and stay friendly and peaceful. With that said, make sure to check out our social media channels. Follow us for the latest episodes and share with your colleagues and friends. Great Alex. Have a great day. Bye bye everybody. Bye. Bye.