Amazon Sr. Product Lead on Building Products for Risk Management

How can product leaders build products that mitigate risk? In this video, Amazon Sr. Product Lead Sneha Sivakumar shares insights on the essential elements of building products to manage business risk, from financial to tech risk. She covers essential elements of building conviction, validating your idea, getting creative and growing iteratively, and provides a framework to transform your insights into unwavering conviction.

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Webinar Notes:

1. Amazon Senior Product Lead Sneha Sivakumar shares insights on building products for risk management.
2. Sneha discusses her career journey in risk management, from KPMG to Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing.
3. Product managers must consider potential risks to mature or launched products, such as market shifts or customer dissatisfaction.
4. Sneha highlights potential risks to businesses, including fraud, fake information, and lost trust among customers and vendors.
5. There is a risk of product removal due to social media traction.
6. In mature products, a dedicated risk function is typically needed to manage regulations and compliance.
7. As a product grows and expands into new countries, building products for risk management becomes crucial.
8. Content risk is any content that can pose a challenge or have a negative consequence to a brand.
9. Unmoderated content can lead to fake news or misinformation spreading through a product or platform. This can result in issues with customer experience and compliance with regulations.
10. Content risk and moderation are prevalent, especially with publicly viewable content.
11. Solutions include consulting legal/compliance, building frameworks, and using preventative/detective measures to address content that may violate policies.
12. Sneha suggests building or outsourcing content risk moderation frameworks to address content that doesn’t meet policies or standards.
13. Sneha discusses content and financial risks in product management, including inadvertent bias, language/country considerations, and product abuse/fraud.
14. Sneha identifies two common fraud patterns in the product space: return/refund abuse and artificially inflating popularity through likes/comments.
15. It’s important to acknowledge the issue and keep calm to take control of the situation.
16. Assessing the size of the incident, prioritizing root cause analysis, and communicating with stakeholders to address the problem are crucial steps.
17. Key performance indicators (KPIs) for measuring risks include detecting fraudulent accounts, addressing escalations, and monitoring low prevalence, high severity issues.
18. To detect low prevalence, high severity issues, it’s important to understand the business and its risks and have a framework in place to detect and react to them.
19. B2B risks are more controlled due to fewer users, but financial and technical risks are still important.
20. New technologies like generative AI create new risks, such as content generated without human oversight.