Virtuous Product Management

Product work is thinking work. We ponder priorities, outcomes, markets, teams. We weigh usability, viability, feasibility. We question; we consider; we muse. And when your brain starts to steam from all that action, here’s another idea for your product thinking menu: virtue.

Virtue? Isn’t that a concept from Philosophy 101? Exactly. Call it a theory of goodness, a moral framework, even just a way of working toward the good. Without it, we can’t build products that truly improve how people live, act, and treat each other.

Now you’re probably asking, “Is working toward the good really the job of a product professional?” To which I say: “you’re darn right it is.” This doesn’t mean that we should only commit ourselves to products that rescue puppies or dole out hugs. But we can use the virtue of wisdom to make an accountant’s workflow easier; we can use the virtue of compassion to help a patient find the best source for her medications; we can use the virtue of courage to enable a journalist to tell a story from a conflict zone.

To start, check out historical frameworks for how people should best operate in a complicated society. How about Plato? Here is what Socrates enumerates as the four cardinal virtues, in Plato’s Republic (feat. Socrates): Wisdom, Courage, Justice, and Moderation. These eventually became the virtues of the Stoics, too. I think we can trace these straight to a product manager’s responsibilities.

Those Socratic virtues are just one system; there are of dozens of others, originating from wisdom traditions across geography and time. These include Saint Thomas Aquinas’s notion of a good operative habit; Buddhism’s Four Immeasurable states of mind, or Ben Franklin’s Thirteen Virtues. A fellow named Scott Jeffrey has created a helpful, easy-to-read digest of virtue frameworks in List of Virtues: A Master List from Ancient Traditions.

This month’s Pollinator features thinking from other product design and dev pros on these lofty and ancient ideas of virtue and ethics. Perhaps it can help our community get more comfortable thinking and talking about this stuff. After all, technical product work has moral weight. A product is how a company or other organization puts their mission and values into the world and serves the people they want to serve. Done right, that can inspire a virtuous upward spiral of sensing and responding, with value as its vortex. So rescue a puppy. Give someone a hug. Do it through your product.

On to the Garden,

Around the Garden

Design Ethics

Check it out: Ethical Considerations in UX Design, by the team at Design Lab

Design Lab is a product design and user experience initiative that helps train new product designers to enter the discipline. Design Lab maintains this excellent guide on ethical factors that designers should consider in their work on products. It’s more surface-level overview than in-depth analysis, but it’s a great introduction to the topic. It includes brief explanations, examples, and key takeaways to help designers make ethical decisions. Here’s an excerpt.

We also love that the Design Lab guidelines recommend Microsoft’s phenomenal inclusive design toolkit.

Note: Tip o’ the hat to SDG User Experience design consultant Allison Lorenzo for recommending this. And no, I’m not sure that a beekeeper’s hat is actually tippable.

Coders are virtuous, too

Check it out: Seven code virtues explained, by Tim Ottinger, Industrial Logic

Here long-time software developer Tim Ottinger outlines seven virtues for code. His list is rooted in his deep experience as a developer, not ancient wisdom traditions. (Socrates or Confucious are nowhere to be found.) But he does acknowledge that the number seven aligns nicely with classic virtue frameworks. Product managers and developers will find Ottinger’s explanations comprehensive and accessible. Here are his seven code virtues:

Thou shalt share the Pollinator far and wide

Check it out: Eight Commandments for AI: A Consumer's Perspective, by Mickey Muldoon, The Other Mickey Wiki.

I appreciate writers on contemporary issues in technology who approach A.I. with nuance and sensitivity, instead of just saying “this tech is magical!” or, conversely, “this tech will destroy us all!”

Here a product practitioner named Mickey Muldoon lays out eight “commandments” for A.I. technology. His thesis: we need to be thoughtful about how we incorporate Artificial Intelligence in our products and our daily lives, lest we degrade human experience. He also seems to dig bicycles, and in my experience, people who dig bicycles tend to be bright and interesting.

Anyway, my favorites of Muldoon’s list are:

• Thou Shalt Not Allow AI To Make Thee Dumber. (His first commandment.)
• Thou Shalt Protect the Future from the Generative Content Downward Spiral. (His third commandment.)
• Thou Shalt Not Allow AI to Write on Thy Behalf. (His seventh commandment.)

We had a nice little discussion on SDG’s Slack about that “writing on thy behalf” commandment. Personally, I’m something of an A.I.-writing-skeptic. My rationale: the purpose of writing is to work out what you think about something, and A.I. skips that whole step. But my wise colleagues argue, convincingly, that commodity-grade “text generation” can be performed well by A.I. tools. Maybe the answer is transparency: make it clear to readers whether the text was written by a person or by A.I. I hope we all agree that we shouldn’t pretend a poem or opinion essay or bee-themed product newsletter was human-written, if it wasn’t.

Note: Tip o’ the beekeeper’s hat to SDG Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning consultant Cameron Lis Marcott for his insights.

Consider the dark side

Check it out: 8 Examples of ethical issues in software development, by George Lawton, on techtarget.com

In this essay, London-based technology journalist George Lawton inspects notions of virtue and ethics in software products from the opposite direction: by considering pitfalls or anti-patterns to avoid.

He enumerates eight categories of ethical issues.

• Addictive design.

• Corporate ownership of personal data.

• Algorithmic bias.

• Weak cybersecurity and personally identifiable information (PII) protection.

• Overemphasis on features.

• Lack of transparency.

• Environmental impact.

• Human rights impact.

At SDG, we occasionally lead our customers through “painstorming” exercises to imagine what might go wrong with a custom software development initiative. Lawton’s list is a great way to structure such an exercise.

More blossoms

Product Managers are about to get their jobs back, by Alicia Drinkwater, in Bootcamp

Here product manager Alicia Drinkwater offers hopeful news for Product Managers whose roles have been overtaken by Artificial Intelligence tools. She has a wonderfully optimistic perspective: since A.I. can handle the “feature factory” tasks of product management, now product managers can worry about empathy, value, human impact, and integrated systems—which is what attracted many of us to the discipline in the first place. Bookmark this one.

Applying Virtue Design to Build a High-Performing Product Design Team, by T.J. Nelson

Product manager and designer T.J. Nelson tackles virtue head on. The gist of his argument is that avoiding virtue in product design principles is a “massive oversight.” He then describes how he has used classical virtues in his product design projects, with many great examples from his professional portfolio.

Design Principles in Leadership: Postel’s Law, by Andy Chan, in The Human Business

Andy Chan provides a nice introduction to the Robustness Principle, also known as Postel’s law. It’s one of my favorites of the many “laws” that we run into in business and technology. (The eponymous Jon Postel was a pioneer in developing internet and networking protocols, by the way.) It states that to build an effective (or “robust”) and interoperable system, you should be “conservative in what you send, and liberal in what you accept.” That seems like a good and virtuous guideline for lots of things beyond software, too.

Outside the Box

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy is an incredibly comprehensive but also accessible resource on everything associated with the noble discipline of academic philosophy. I found it pretty useful for preparing this issue of the Pollinator. It’s an initiative housed at the Philosophy department at the University of Tennessee-Martin.

Check it out at https://iep.utm.edu.

About the Pollinator

• The Pollinator is a free publication from the Product practice at Solution Design Group (SDG). Each issue features an opening reflection and a curated digest of noteworthy content and articles from across the internet’s vast product community.

• Solution Design Group (SDG) is an employee-owned digital product innovation and custom software development consultancy. Our team of over 200 consultants and other technology and business professionals includes experienced software engineers, technical architects, user experience designers, and product and innovation strategists. We serve companies across industries to discover promising business opportunities, build high-quality technology solutions, and improve the effectiveness of digital product teams.

• The Pollinator's editor is Jason Scherschligt, SDG's Head of Product. Please direct complaints, suggestions, and especially praise to Jason at [email protected].

• Why The Pollinator? Jason often says that as he works with leaders and teams across companies and industries, he feels like a honeybee in a garden, spending time on one flower, moving to another, collecting experiences and insights, and distributing them like pollen, so an entire garden blooms. How lovely.