Building ML products the right way -Product Manager’s perspective.
This is my first blog on Medium. I hope I justify it.
As an engineer, I worked on some basic NLP and ML models to solve the problems. The pure intentions of using pre-build libraries were to get the job done, deliver an executable code that returns status code 200 upon running the unit test cases. Four years later, when I am pivoting into product management, I can see the machine learning superpower’s flip side. All thanks to professors at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), who helped me broaden my perspective and help me unlock second-order thinking.
Now when I look at how AI/ML helps business grow 100x, giving users information at one click, making the lives of developers easy with automation, I have a serious concern.
Nothing comes for free; what is the trade-off.
I will not dive into the political discussion on who is doing it right or doing it wrong.
But I will discuss that when highly intelligent data products are built, there are Product Managers, Engineers, and others who have the power to decide the future of everyone using them. So are PM’s making the right decision.
With this curiosity to ethically build the right data products, I am working on an independent study to understand how as a Product Manager, I should make the products right. I have asked these questions with many impactful people to pick their brains on the topic.
I had the fortune to ask this to Marty Cagan, who attended the Product Management course at CMU as a guest lecture; he responded that more people should be asking such questions and highly recommended reading intentional integrity by Rob Chestnut. He said (and I believe him) that PMs are the first to see ethical issues brewing with the products. Still, they unintentionally ignore them because businesses expect them to solve much larger challenging problems.
Further researching tools and techniques that PM can use while building AI/ML products, I encountered the concept of explainable AI, also popularly known as XAI. XAI means making models that can explain itself so that the final power of decision making remains with the human.
This is the beginning of my journey to be an aware Product Manager, and with this first blog, I intend to start the discussion.
Will keep you posted!
Some resources for likeminded people link
#ProductManagement #ML #EthicalAL. Big thanks to Marty Cagan for inspiring me and addressing my questions during the session.
