Explore Potential Harm

One area that product teams often overlook is ethical assumptions. Now, if you work at a nuclear power plant or on autonomous vehicles, safety is probably a daily conversation. But for the rest of us, it’s an easy factor to forget. To uncover ethical assumptions, I encourage teams to ask, “What’s the potential harm in offering this solution?”

Some teams struggle to come up with anything. But all products have some potential harm. Many products run into ethical dilemmas around their data practices. Here are some questions to ask:

• What data do you plan to collect?
• Do your customers understand that you’ll be collecting that data?
• Do your customers understand how you’ll be using that data?
• Are you planning to share that data with third parties?
• If yes, how are those third parties planning to use that data?
• If your customers fully understood how you planned to use their data, would they be okay with it?

But ethical assumptions aren’t limited to how we use data. We might ask:

• Does our product have the potential to become addictive? Many product teams consider this a good thing. But is it good for your end-user?
• Are there people who are being left out? Are you designing for one demographic and leaving out an under-represented population?
• Are you assuming that your end-users have money, free time, a roof over their head, access to the internet? If so, who does this leave out? What are the implications of that?
• Does this solution contribute to society’s inequalities? Or does it help to mitigate the inequalities?
• Are we exposing someone’s identity who might need anonymity for their own safety?
• Is there a potential to harm relationships between our end-users?
• How might Internet trolls abuse this?⁵¹

Some solutions can cause harm to our business. We might consider:

• Will this solution help or hurt our brand?
• Can we meet customers’ expectations, or will we leave them disappointed?
• Are we spending time building the wrong stuff, therefore losing out on more compelling opportunities?

One of my favorite questions to ask teams is, “If the New York Times/Wall Street Journal/BBC (or insert your favorite news organization) ran a front-page story about this solution that included your internal conversations about how the solution would work, what data you collected, how you used it, and how different players in the ecosystem benefited or didn’t, would that be a good thing? If not, why not?” This is a great way to uncover ethical assumptions.