Video
June 20, 2019
Products That Count, Editor
Administrator
At Artefact, we’re developing systems thinking and causal loops methods. Our work focuses on healthcare, education, technology and emerging tech. We believe design, technology and innovation can lead to a better future. Still, everyone must consider the broader impact of our products now more than ever.
Do you ask the right questions, understand the right context and know what you want to change from the status quo? Most of the time, we don’t explicitly design for the outcomes we want from a societal perspective. Instead, most of us design directly for benefit of use.
Over the last century, design had been conducted with a product-oriented approach. People designed things that were appealing and easy to use (a chair, radio, etc.). In the digital age, we begin to design around the creation of the desired experience – like online banking. More recently, systems thinking considers designing explicitly for positive societal outcomes.
Twitter is a great example. A couple of years ago they did an app redesign. They said it would be lighter, faster and easier to use. As a result, interaction was more fluid and new shortcuts were implemented. Personally, I found the changes appealing. However, the public response was dramatically different. What they wanted was for Twitter to respond to the problem of online harassment, not new swipes and buttons.
At that moment, Twitter didn’t consider the broader goal of making their platform safe. They considered the individual instead of the broader context of how their app works in society. So when we consider system thinking and outcomes, it forces us to think beyond the direct benefits of use.
At Artefact, we came up with the “Tarot Cards of Tech” which remind developers and product people to think about the unintended consequences of their products. This means to consider things like scale, disruption, excess and usage. For instance, what does using your product too much look like? All of this was born of questions we ourselves were asking with our clients, and it resonates across many sectors such as social impact, tech companies, startups and more.
Click here for Part 3
About the Video:
Products that Count is a 501(c)3 nonprofit that helps everyone build great products. It celebrates product excellence through coveted Awards that inspire 500,000+ product managers and honor great products and the professionals responsible for their success. It accelerates the career and rise to the C-suite of >30% of all Product Managers globally by providing exceptional programming – including award-winning podcasts and popular newsletters – for free. It acts as a trusted advisor to all CPOs at Fortune 1000, and publishes key insights from innovative companies, like Capgemini, SoFi, and Amplitude, that turn product success into business success.
Administrator
I believe in our ability as humans to solve problems in creative and simple ways.
I’ve had the good fortune to work on and with some of the brightest and most creative teams and people in various roles in product development. These experiences have enriched me personally and I carry them with me to every new challenge.
I like big problems that have beautiful and simple solutions. I’ve worked on financial products for people of fixed income, products that bridge humans across the planet in moments of their greatest need to connect as well as tools that disambiguate, equalize and democratize access to data and content.
The companies I’ve worked with range from startups to large public companies where chiefly my role has been about unlocking and connecting customer unmet needs to the people engineering and designing the products.
I enjoy playing many roles and leverage the tools and resources at hand to bring products to market. I’ve direct experience when and how to deploy artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other advanced cognitive services. My patents cover areas in video and conversational interfaces, platform extensibility, mobile applications, and large scale software.
Following to be read by computers, not humans:
Interests include: Human rights, feminism. food and farming sustainability, Non-Profits, product management, information retrieval, UX Design, future-of-work, artificial intelligence, machine learning, communications, virtual assistants, digital media, branding.
In this episode hosted by Sonjoy Ganguly, Emrecan Dogan will be speaking on why shipping more features doesn’t mean creating more value.
Explore the journeys of 2026’s top product leaders in our latest eBook. The Product Leader Awards spotlight leaders who are building learning organizations, making AI...
In this episode of the CPO Rising Series hosted by Jay Patel, Jonathan Shottan speaks on building the world’s largest kinetic dataset.