Technology Is Reversing Social Progress

Product Leadership

How do we build the products and the future we all deserve? Empathy is the key.

Technology can bring us together — we always knew that. But now we know that technology can also tear us apart.

As the tech industry, we make the choice. We design technology to be a superpower or a source of human frailty.​

At its best, building products is an expression of empathy. Empathy for everyone your product touches — the people that build it, and the people that use it.

Oxford defines empathy as “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.” Empathy is putting yourself in another’s place.

This is the product builder’s job. You must put yourself in the place of all your product’s users — not just a single user or persona.

It’s a failure of empathy to collapse all users into a single persona. This failure led to “filter bubbles” on Facebook and other content platforms. A filter bubble occurs when an experience is designed to show people only the content they agree with. The Facebook News Feed is a filter bubble. Fox News and MSNBC are filter bubbles.

Filter bubbles are great for engagement. People love to engage with content that validates their feelings — that justifies their perspective. But these filter bubbles are a failure of empathy on two levels.

First, filter bubbles fail to create empathy in a product’s users. It’s hard to see things from another person’s point of view when all you see is your own.

Second, filter bubbles are the by-product of homogenous teams. It’s hard to see a filter bubble from the inside. The product teams at large tech companies are majority white, male, and liberal. The average PM at Facebook sees a News Feed that reinforces his world view — so does the PM sitting next to him, and so on.

In 2016, controversy erupted at Facebook when an employee crossed out a “Black Lives Matter” poster and replaced it with “All Lives Matter”. Facebook prides itself on allyship and inclusion. The fact that someone in their midst acted differently was a shock to the system.

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