The most common explanation of product thinking includes 3 lens- business, tech and UX. And pretty much the entire product process is built around the same thinking- do customers love our products, are we able to continuously serve the customers and are we able to make enough revenue to keep the business going? Most of the product success metrics are also most defined around these commonly used angles. There has been one critical angle that has been so far all these years and been recently been getting some attention- the social impact angle. How does the product and the service you are offering affect the society or the environment. It’s a very interesting and an equally challenging lens to include in your product, specially if you are geared towards the product oxytocin of rapid delivery of value and seeing numbers grow.
So how do we get started on this new lens? The first crucial step is understanding of the problem space and awareness of the impact it creates. So this article is more focussed on how do we educate ourselves and wrap our head around the social impact problem?
So the very basic, what is social impact?
There are many definitions that exist, and I picked two that resonated best with me.
“Social impact is the effect on people and communities that happens as a result of an action or inaction, an activity, project, programme or policy”.
“A significant positive change that addresses a pressing social change”
We live in a big beautiful world with so many culturally diverse groups of people with different perspectives and ways of living influenced by different historical events like colonisation, religion, industrial revolution, exploitation, and many more factors. There are not enough products to address the needs of these different kinds of people and there is still a huge potential untapped because of this lack of cultural understanding.
Why is it so critical now?
If you truly connect all the dots of your product ecosystem, you would know that the services or the information our products offer does have an implicit effect in the society and the environment.With the steady exponential growth and adoption of technology, there is no doubt that more people from various cultural background are getting access to more digital products. With this steady digital adoption, the implicit impact multiplies exponentially.
Few easy ways to get started
Systems thinking of your product processes
- Start with understanding the entire supply chain of the product services you are building. If you take a step outside of your immediate business process and starting asking questions about the ecosystem that enables your business, you will know what to look for. Example, if you are in retail or digital e-commerce, do you understand enough about where your supply is sourced from and its manufacturing source and its impact on the concerned society and the environment involved, the carbon footprint it involves? If you are a digital services offering product like streaming, etc- do you understand the carbon footprint your services leave, are your data centres running on renewable energy resources? If you are in food delivery, do you understand the amount of plastic pollution that is resulting from your services? So if you start asking similar questions, you will find the trail to problem space to uncover. There are many documentaries that exist that explains different pieces of this puzzle and the impact it has on the local society and the culture. Self education is a good place to start.
Understanding the humans of your customer base
- Have you done a deep study of your customer base, going beyond the general demographic information and understanding the different cultural backgrounds, orientation, mental models, minorities, less privileged etc? If you don’t have enough understanding of diversity and what it means, start with understanding of the topic and why its critical.If you truly are aiming for a diverse and inclusive product, that starts with getting a better understanding of your customer base as a human with different life experiences. Based on this understanding, question yourself whether the product services you are rolling out are inclusive and doesn’t impact the minority or any of the groups adversely.
Self check for unconscious bias
- As humans, every single one of us have ingrained unconscious biases we carry, which was planted in our minds as part of the evolution that has happened over the last few centuries. This bias seems to find its way into the products we design and unconsciously propagates the existing social patterns. Talk to culturally different people, the minorities and the least represented and truly understand their perspectives with empathy. Educate yourself about the different kind of human cultures, their history, different orientations and other related topics that are in scope of your product consumer base. The same goes for understanding different kinds of markets and the local cultural behaviour. Learn about the various social problems that exist and the impact it has on the society. Once you’ve gained a truly humane understanding of different communities of people and the social problems, it’s easy to bring those various flavours of thinking into the product design and build.
Hope this gives you a good head start of kicking off the thought process around the new lens of product management.In my next follow up article, I will discuss more ideas on actionable steps we could start taking on how to approach the social impact lens of product management.
