For the final meeting of the Service Design book club, we covered Chapter 9 and did an overall debrief of the book. This chapter was the least liked by the group. We could tell that it was written by a different author, making it feel disjointed from the rest of the book. The subject was also about assessing whether a service is ethical, which did not pertain much to our services.
However, the chapter got more relevance recently for me at the Mind The Product SF conference when Marty Cagan promoted adding “Ethical” as a new fourth dimension to a Product Manager’s values of Viable, Feasible, and Usable. He talked about how too often he’s seen Product Managers ignore the ethical nature of their products to pursue the latest fad in technology or profits. I agree that it’s a value to consider when designing a service or product, and when training a new Product Manager it’s an important discussion as often a new Product Manager has not been in a position to make decisions that could have wide-ranging ethical impacts. Rather than telling the new Product Manager if something is ethical or not, teach them how to talk about ethical attributes of their product with teams like Legal and Security to determine it for themselves. Since ethics can be subjective, it’s crucial for them to get feedback from others on tough decisions rather than assuming that they know best.
If you’d like discussion questions for Chapter 9 and an overall debrief for your own book club, here are some that I used:
- Did the triple-bottom line of economic, societal, and environmental impact resonate with you? How do you feel we perform in regards to these three measures?
- Which practices from this book would you like to try out?
- What’s your one take-away from this book?
And as this was the last session of the Service Design book club, here are links to the prior posts. If you decide to run your own, it’d be awesome to hear how it went for you and what types of conversations you had.