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Product development is not a neutral activity. Your personal values, viewpoints, and biases are inherently built into the products you create. This makes having teams representative of the user base critical for building ethical and accessible products.

Related Insights

The core PM drive to maximize value for the largest addressable market (TAM) inherently leads to excluding edge cases and marginalized users, which is the root cause of bias and irresponsibility in AI systems.

As AI lowers the barrier to building, product teams spend less time on execution ('how') and more on strategy and ethics ('should we'). This shift elevates the conversation to focus on consequences, bias, and building the right thing, making product taste a shared responsibility across the entire team.

To produce work that authentically reflects your brand, you must hire people who inherently embody its ethos. A brand aiming to be a "bold disruptor," for example, cannot achieve its goals by hiring conservative people. Your hiring process is a direct extension and critical reinforcement of your brand identity.

Don't design solely for the user. The best product opportunities lie at the nexus of what users truly need (not what they say they want), the company's established product principles, and its core business objectives.

AI tools are dramatically lowering the cost of implementation and "rote building." The value shifts, making the most expensive and critical part of product creation the design phase: deeply understanding the user pain point, exercising good judgment, and having product taste.

Instead of contorting to fit a market, build something that is 'you pushed out.' The most resonant products are often a natural extension of the founder's obsessions and personality. This authenticity makes the work feel effortless and creates a product that clicks with a specific audience.

Shift the AI development process by starting with workshops for the people who will live with the system, not just those who pay for it. The primary goal is to translate their stories and needs into tangible checks for fairness and feedback before focusing on technical metrics like accuracy and speed.

To scale a high-performing product team, hire individuals who exhibit the same level of ownership and love for the product as the original founders. This means prioritizing a blend of deep curiosity, leadership potential, and an unwavering commitment to execution over a simple skills checklist.

AI can generate designs but fundamentally lacks human empathy. This creates risks of bias and generic solutions. "Designing consciously" requires keeping humans in the loop to validate insights, double-check sources, and ensure the final product truly serves user needs.

Instead of trying to empathize with an abstract customer, Ather's philosophy is to 'build products for us'. They believe relying on artificial empathy will eventually fail. For new categories, their team is sent on courses and trips to develop a genuine user's taste before building begins.

Every Product Built Is an Inherent Reflection of its Creator's Personal Values | RiffOn