Introduction
So, I’ve already written a long chunk extolling the value and beauty of product management done well, ./about-product-management.md. However, I also think an awful lot about the seemingly dire fate of our digital world. This has been aptly coined as the “Enshittification” of the Internet by Cory Doctorow, which can be applied to most of the platforms, websites, softwares and digital experiences we now rely on. Ed Zitron has extended the concept of enshittification, by identifying how its drivers have become entrenched in the incentives of the tech industry, producing what he calls “The Rot Economy”. A huge amount of this economy is made up of software and software development. And therefore, if you take my aggrandising of Product leadership seriously, we must lay substantial blame for this enshittification at the feet of the world’s most influential Product leaders.
This conclusion is of course fairly naive. Although it’s tremendously fashionable to present your company as a mission-driven, product-focused, visionary enterprise, where business is just an unfortunate, grubby necessity, no one should seriously believe this is what motivates Big Tech. These are fundamentally Late Capitalist enterprises, and the factors that make decisions are always ultimately denominated in dollars.
For all my mythologising, a Product Manager spends just as much time ensuring that the vision they carry is going to drive the business’ success, and that the business’ bigwigs are properly convinced of this fact. The foundational texts on how to approach product management are written by alumni of Big Tech orthodoxy, and many of them take as a starting point that your job is to alchemise the needs of customers and of the business into a product that benefits everyone. What saddens me about polemics like Ed Zitron’s “The Rot Economy” is that I can so easily imagine the Product people behind these decisions earnestly convincing themselves that they’re still building a greater good.
I like to think about what the tech industry would look like if freed from the Rot Economy, and ideally freed from the pressures of Late Capitalism entirely. I try to imagine how we would organise all those brilliant designers and engineers, if we were to reorient our economy to properly serve our collective human wellbeing. I think for most people, corporate-nonsense job titles like “Product Managers” would be some of the first to go in this revolution, alongside the “Agile Coaches” and “Marketing Gurus”. But as I’ve said in other writing, I really believe there is part of the Product leader’s role which is essential to the fundamental creative enterprise of software, that shouldn’t be washed away in our co-operative, socialist utopia.
So, I want to try and envision what this profession should be, to serve that better economy. What has been missing from our principles and practices, to allow ourselves to become complicit in the enshittification of products we’re supposed to be the champions of?
An inspiration
The above has sat as an open question for quite some time, but at last a spark of a possible right answer arrived for me, in the form of this excellent talk from Andrew Kelley. He makes a key distinction, that software should always work for its end users - all of them. This shines a light on what I think is exactly the right hidden seam in Product rhetoric: the replacement of the user with the “consumer” or “customer” as object of study.
One always has various classes of users to consider; depending on your vogue-y design theory, you might call these personas, archetypes, user journeys or jobs-to-be-done. In design, their needs will often conflict: things that improve the experience of a buyer on eBay might make the experience of the seller more complex or onerous, for example. Sometimes there are more insidious power gaps between the classes of end users: the needs of an Amazon warehouse worker are likely to be treated very differently to the experience of the surveilling manager when designing the dashboards to monitor the distribution of piss breaks. In extreme cases, the privileged stakeholders may not even be users of the software - they may simply be managers procuring a software to require their staff to use.
In the “North Star”, “outcome-driven” model of Product leadership, we almost necessarily define the persona we will prefer when push comes to shove; I think this is healthy design thinking, clarity of core purpose. We also always have an implicit preference for the opinions of whatever party makes the decision to pay us vs a competitor; this is more corrupting, but hard to imagine eliminating without a much larger-scale revolution.
What Kelley’s comment makes me realise is that there must be a floor in the other direction, a level past which we will refuse to degrade the experience of any end user. Without this, an accumulation of rational decisions aligned to our positive incentives has no counter-vailing force, producing the wave of enshittification we see now.
This would be something like a Hippocratic oath for product builders: “First, do no harm”. There ought to be inalienable rights for the end user, and a broad commitment that the pursuit of design goals for one group cannot deny those rights for any other end user.