In the dynamic landscape of product development, there’s a saying by Paul Virilio that has come to have deep meaning for me: “When you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck.” Maintaining an ethical compass can be challenging yet crucial when we are encouraged to grow, scale, and move fast. The Integrity Compass workshop, conceived by myself and Seijen Takamura, is designed to guide teams in starting projects with an integrity-first mindset, ensuring that inclusion, privacy, and safety are at the forefront of their craftsmanship. Let’s delve into what makes this workshop a great tool for product teams to start their work with. To jump right in, you can grab the FigJam template here.
Setting the Course: Why Use a Compass?
The Integrity Compass isn’t just another workshop; it’s a strategic initiative aimed at aligning product strategy and design with core ethical principles. The primary goal is to keep teams ahead of the curve regarding ethical and legal implications, reducing surprises and risks while building products that are inclusive and safe for all users. This proactive approach not only fosters a culture of integrity but also enhances the overall quality and trustworthiness of the product. During these times of heightened attention around the implications and safety of artificial intelligence, the need for this framework is more relevant than ever before.
Building a Strong Foundation
At the heart of the Integrity Compass is a commitment to elevating customer voices and promoting safe behavior by any actors in an ecosystem or platform. This comes from a vision that product design strategies should empower customers and users to take ownership of their safety and to design a platform that supports ethical and respectful interactions. This involves leveraging community wisdom through interviews, testing, and feedback, while implementing robust privacy settings and reporting measures to ensure users feel secure, in control, and able to communicate with us when something is off.
Workshop Mechanics: How It Works
The Integrity Compass workshop is structured to facilitate comprehensive discussions and collaborative problem-solving. Here’s a breakdown of the activity:
Problem Overview: Teams start with an overview of a specific problem or opportunity they are addressing.
Team Division: If the group is large, it’s divided into smaller teams to ensure effective participation.
Prompt Responses: Each team spends ten minutes responding to prompts focused on different integrity aspects.
Sharing Insights: Teams then share one memorable insight from each prompt area, fostering a collective learning experience.
The workshop requires participants to bring a customer or user-related problem they are working on, along with visual aids to illustrate their work. This hands-on approach ensures that the discussions are grounded in real-world scenarios, making the outcomes more actionable.
How the Workshop Runs: A Demo Problem
To illustrate the workshop’s practical application, consider a problem where users currently have basic ways to showcase their photos in a social app. The aim is to enhance this feature so users can add tags and annotations to their images, see what tags are popular, and engage in discussions about the tagged photos. The workshop would explore how this feature could potentially go wrong and devise strategies to mitigate risks while maximizing benefits.
In this demo, we can think about ways a bad actor might upload photos and author tags or posts that are inappropriate. The workshop also helps look through different lenses to consider various cultural, regional, or economic norms that could help the product improve in quality or support users in a more inclusive way. Additionally, we look at the different facets of data privacy and safety based on how the product works and what is exposed in good or unexpected ways.
Synthesis and Implementation: Bringing It All Together
After the activity, the workshop includes an optional synthesis deck to help teams close the loop by integrating insights from inclusion, privacy, and safety perspectives. This synthesis phase ensures that the final product directly addresses a conversation about product integrity and is intentionally designed to be safer and less risky.
A Commitment to Integrity
The Integrity Compass workshop is more than a procedural activity; it’s a commitment to embedding integrity into the fabric of product development. By fostering an environment where ethical considerations are paramount, you can ensure that your app, product, platform, or ecosystem is not only innovative but also trustworthy and inclusive. This workshop exemplifies how forward-thinking companies can navigate the complexities of product development with a clear, ethical compass guiding their way.
Hire Me: I'll come to you and run this workshop
If you or someone you know is interested in fortifying their product with an integrity-based approach, use the scheduling link below to setup a 30 minute intake call to better understand your needs, scope, and availabilities for a workshop.
