This Week in Product – Dec. 14, 2018

Making Friends with Marketing

A lot of times you hear founders talk about their companies emerging from a pain point they experienced in their work. Often, it’s a tool they really needed and couldn’t find, so they decided to build it themselves. Zest is such a platform, for content marketers, and their founder often waxes poetic on the subject. This post was particularly interesting for product folks, though, because it speaks directly about the incredibly important collaboration that needs to happen between product and marketing. Specifically, if you’re siloed from your marketing folks, and seeing them spinning their wheels, you might want to print this one out and walk over to their pod. Besides, many of Yam Regev’s seven pillars (later in the post) are just as applicable for product folks – so even if your collaboration with marketing is thriving, this one is worth clipping and saving.

Yes, Probably

Eliminating “friction” — the name given to any quality that makes a product more difficult to use — has become a obsession of the tech industry. But could some of our biggest technological challenges be solved by making things slightly less simple? https://t.co/mGFDgOfA7l

— NYTimes Tech (@nytimestech) December 13, 2018

You know we love a good piece on ethics in product, and this week in product is really this week in product ethics. The question of artificially introducing more friction into product design in order to help consumers and citizens make “better” choices is a heavy one, and this is definitely a topic that we’ll keep hearing about as digital products mature out of adolescence. In case you missed it, we love this interview with Nir Eyal on the topic, and this recap of Mariah Hay’s talk from this year’s MTPCon.

And While We’re on the Topic…

Have you seen the news about Salesforce hiring their first Chief Ethical and Humane Use Officer? Paula Goldman will head Salesforce’s office, and says:

“We understand that we have a broader responsibility to society, and aspire to create technology that not only drives the success of our customers, but also drives positive social change and benefits humanity.”

Sure, you could argue that businesses use this type of language to deflect from certain practices, or from the simple fact that their needs are purely fiscal, but what would happen if we could truly ask how our product can benefit humanity. I think most PMs are already asking this question, just on a smaller scale.