Building Responsible Products with Kathy Pham

Melissa Perri’s guest on this week’s Product Thinking Podcast is Kathy Pham. Kathy is a computer scientist, a product management executive, and co-leads the Ethics and Responsible Tech at Mozilla. She also co-founded the Mozilla Fix the Internet Incubator, as well as the Product and Society at Mozilla, which focuses on product management, ethics, and the public interest. Kathy joins Melissa to discuss product ethics. Here are some key points you’ll hear Melissa and Kathy talk about in this episode: Interesting details about the product management class Kathy teaches at Harvard. [00:47] Kathy’s experiences working at The White House, Harvard, and in product management. [5:52] Ethics and its implications for product management. [12:58] Accessibility and security are important and need to be integrated into a product from the very beginning. [15:48] When designing products for an inclusive audience, you have to take into consideration the team culture that is in place and build out those personas to be as inclusive as possible. “I think it's important to build into the culture knowing that the moment something is built it's really hard to reverse,” Kathy tells Melissa.[19:35] How to respond to changes or challenges with your product platform when it happens in another country where no member of your team is from. [23:34] As product managers, we need to be listening to our users, and that includes listening to those users who are telling us what we don’t want to hear. It means not condemning or shutting down their feedback by telling them they’re wrong. [28:34] Having diverse perspectives within our product teams is very important for the decision-making process. It ensures that the concerns of the target audience are heard and are taken into account. [30:32] When the people building our program algorithms make terrible assumptions or have blind spots, they bake into them issues that already exist in the world and just propagate them through code. [38:50] Resources Kathy Pham | LinkedIn | Twitter