Responsible Product Management: Minimize harm & inequity while Maximizing customer value
A 8 step process based on Microsoft's Harms Modelling
Congratulations! You have worked months building an amazing product to create customer value. You anticipate thousands or even millions of customers using your products. But have you considered the possibility of your product unintentionally causing harm?
Definition of harm
Harm is anything that your product might do to hurt people in any way. Some examples of products that might have caused harm
Any product recalls made by car, food, or medical manufacturers are when they might have put a potentially dangerous product into the market
Misuse of a money transfer service to fund dangerous activities
Addictive nature of products that impact the health of people
How can we minimize Harm?
I first learned about Harms Modelling from Microsoft a couple of years ago during the creation of Justice Driven Product Design. We leveraged the Harms Modelling framework to create a Justice Modelling exercise. Before that, let’s understand how we can minimize harm.
If you typically do a pre-mortem, this exercise can be a part of it. If not, then try and run a separate exercise to minimize harm or any other kind of inequity. Ideally, this exercise is best done as a team of cross-functional folks working together on the product. If that is not possible, doing this individually by yourself is better than not doing it at all.
1. Define your “WHY”
The first thing to be grounded on is to understand why you are building the product in the first place. Document the following questions
👉 Why are you creating your product?
👉Who are you trying to build this product for?
👉 What problem are you trying to solve?
2. Identify all direct and indirect stakeholders
👉 Who are all the direct and indirect stakeholders? Project sponsors, product teams, etc.,
👉 Are there potentially marginalized populations that will interact with your products? These might be from any population that might be considered a minority or vulnerable like children, low-income populations, LGBTQ+ community, ethnic minorities, etc.,
3. Assess eligibility criteria
👉 Does your product require some minimum eligibility criteria?
👉 Are these criteria fair?
👉 Can you ensure unconscious bias doesn’t seep into your eligibility criteria?
👉 Do the eligibility criteria create exclusion of the marginalized populations you identified in previous steps?
4. Asses the impact of usage
👉 Does the use of your product cause exclusion of the marginalized population you have identified?
5. Identify categories of potential harm relevant for your product
It is critical to identify potential harms that might be caused by your product. Narrow down your categories of harm that might be relevant to your product. Some common types of hard are
❌ Physical Injury
❌ Financial loss/exclusion
❌ Emotional or psychological distress
❌ Opportunity loss
❌ Privacy loss
❌ Loss of reputation
❌ Loss of identity
❌ Feeling of alienation
❌ Increasing digital divide
❌ Impact on a whole community, families
A detailed list of potential harms is documented by Microsoft here
6. Evaluate the impact of harm
Evaluate the impact of your product on each of the relevant harm categories and fill in the grid below
A filled template could look like below
7. Create harm statements
Write down harm statements based on your exercise so far. You can use the following templates
Intended use: If [feature] was used for [use case], [stakeholder] could experience [harm description].
Unintended use: If [user] tried to use [feature] for [use case], [stakeholder] could experience [harm description].
System error: If [feature] failed to function properly when used for [use case], [stakeholder] could experience [harm description].
Misuse: [Malicious actor] could potentially use [feature], to cause [harm description] to [stakeholder].
Examples of Harm Statements
If the product was launched with the SSN requirement, marginalized communities or underserved communities who may not have SSN will face the loss of financial opportunity.
If learning about how Crypto works is based on articles and long-form content, customers who have reading/learning disabilities may not fully understand how the product works, and potentially experience financial harm or a sense of alienation/exclusion.
If the product was intended only for younger people (18-44 y), customers in older age groups could experience a sense of alienation and exclusion
8. Continuously Evaluate your products
Evaluate your products frequently against these harm statements to ensure you avoid creating harm intentionally or unintentionally
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