Skip to content
Book summaries
  • Pages
    • Index
      • Radical product thinking
        • Introduction. A Repeatable Model for Building World-Changing Products
        • Part I. Innovating Smarter Requires a New Mindset
          • Chapter 1. Why we Need Radical Product Thinking
          • Chapter 2. Product diseases
        • Part II. The five elements of radical product thinking
          • Chapter 3. Vision
          • Chapter 4. Strategy
          • Chapter 5. Prioritization
          • Chapter 6. Execution and measurement
          • Chapter 7. Culture
        • Part III. Making our world a little more like the one we want to live in
          • Chapter 8. Digital pollution
          • icon picker
            Chapter 9. Ethics
          • Conclusion
      • Escaping the build trap (WIP)
        • Preface
        • Part I. The build trap
          • 1. The Value Exchange System
          • 2. Constraints on the value exchange system
          • 3. Projects versus products versus services
          • 4. The product-led organisation
          • 5. What we know and what we don't
      • Strategize (To do)
      • UX strategy (To do)
      • Product roadmaps relaunched (To do)
Book summaries
/
/
Chapter 9. Ethics
Share
Explore

Chapter 9. Ethics

The Hippocratic oath of Product
Technologies in the last 50 years touch more lives and faster than they did in the previous 50 years. The increasing rate of technological adoption fuels an increasing page at which entities are able to build a scale of influence.
In building products, we need a Hippocratic oath as much as doctors do. As a society, we’re beginning to realize that as with a doctor’s work, ethics questions continuously permeate even simple decisions.
We measure the success of our products by popular financial metrics including revenue and the lifetime value of a customer. The result is that prioritizing profitability over user well-being, and accepting this collateral damage to society, is the norm.
The mindset of “If I don’t do it, someone else will” maximizes individual gains at the expense of our well-being as a society. And in the process, it destabilizes society by increasing inequality, polarization, and misinformation—in the long run it creates a suboptimal outcome for all.
The payoff matrix for building products looks very similar to Prisoners’ Dilemma. We could all choose to maximize individual gains and find local maxima (Uncontrolled Digital Pollution quadrant), or we could embrace the responsibility that comes with building products and maximize the collective benefit to society by finding the global maximum (Sustainable Growth quadrant).
⁠
image.png
⁠
⁠
If we all optimize for profits while knowing that others are doing the same and rationalize our actions by saying, “If I don’t build it, someone else will,” we’re heading toward the Nash Equilibrium in the Uncontrolled Digital Pollution quadrant. In this quadrant we maximize individual gains but generate a suboptimal situation for everyone in the long run.
The free-market ideology is often offered as a panacea: “If you trade off customers’ well-being, they’ll vote with their dollars.” The belief is that markets are efficient and will resolve this problem. Unfortunately, the important underlying assumption of the free-market argument is that information is transparently available so users can make informed decisions. This fundamental assumption has been proven false.
To embrace the Hippocratic Oath of Product, we must shift our mindset from shareholder primacy to stakeholder capitalism. More specifically, here are five things you can do to embrace the Hippocratic Oath of Product at every step of building your product:
Vision: Center your vision on your user. The template for the Radical Vision Statement helps you write your statement such that your vision is not about your aspirations for yourself or your company but is centered on the problem that you want to see solved for a group of people.
Strategy: Craft your RDCL strategy to align your business model with your users’ needs.
Prioritization: Ensure that your values and ethical considerations affect your priorities and decision-making.
Execution and measurement: Reevaluate the way you measure success.
Culture: Infuse a purpose beyond profit-naking in your organisational culture.
Gallery
 
Want to print your doc?
This is not the way.
Try clicking the ⋯ next to your doc name or using a keyboard shortcut (
CtrlP
) instead.