Ethics of �Human-centered �Product�Management

Wanheng Hu, Ph.D.

Embedded Ethics Fellow, Stanford

wanhenghu@stanford.edu

CS177, Fall 2025

2

Current Ethics Readings & Assignments

• Working for Ethically Complicated Organizations
• Fair Use or Piracy
• The Internet‘s Original Sin
• Disruptive Innovation

​

3

Managing Ethical Tensions

• Personal values vs. organizational goals
• Copyright/fair use vs. innovation and cost
• Ad-based business models vs. privacy and autonomy
• Tech progress vs. disruption/social consequences

​

4

Ethics of �Human-centered �Product�Management

5

Ethics of �Human-centered �Product�Management

Today’s Learning Goals for Ethics

• Understand how ethics and values are built into products
• Recognize design choices and their potential consequences
• Exert your own agency in shaping technology/products for good

​

6

Today’s Learning Goals for Ethics

• Two frameworks for thinking about product ethics
• The Politics of Artifacts
• The Social Construction of Technology (SCOT)

7

Do Products Have Politics or Ethics?

• “Politics” → power relations & struggles for power
• “Ethics” → what ought to be done, what’s right and moral
• Can these live inside artifacts and products?

8

Is it ethically neutral?

9

So, What Makes an Artifact Political or Ethical?

• Some artifacts just work differently depending on context
• Others require certain social arrangements or enforce them
• Design can express power (who can use, who’s excluded)
• Design can encode values (what counts as right, safe, efficient)

10

Langdon Winner: “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” (Daedalus,1980)

• Core claim: “The machines, structures, and systems of modern material culture can embody specific forms of power and authority.”
• Key idea: Technologies aren’t neutral tools. They can be political in themselves — not just because of how people use them, but because of how they are designed and arranged.

​

11

Langdon Winner (1944-)

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Two Ways Artifacts Have Politics

12

13

 Bridges on the way to Jones Beach, Long Island, NY

Production line of a 19-cent. cotton spinning mill

14

“Defensive designs” & “Hostile designs”

Why This Matters for Product Management

• Winner’s takeaway: Technological choices are like legislative acts — they establish frameworks of order that endure.
• PM implications:
• Design decisions stabilize certain values and behaviors.
• Once embedded in code, interfaces, and metrics, those values become hard to reverse.
• “Neutral” design choices can quietly structure who has agency, who benefits, and who gets excluded.

​

15

�Spotting Product Ethics

16

If technology can embody power and ethics, what kinds of political or ethical assumptions are built into the products you work on — even before users touch them?

Hint: Intentionally designed so? Unintentionally reinforce them? Require them? More compatible with them? Or in any other sense?

How do politics/ethics get into products?

17

One Answer: through social processes of problem definition, solution design, and debate closure, or the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT)

Trevor Pinch & Wiebe Bijker

“The Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts” (1984)

SCOT in a Nutshell

1. Interpretive flexibility: the same technology means different things to different social groups.
2. Relevant social groups (RSGs): identify who shapes and interprets the artifact (users, engineers, managers, regulators, investors, etc.).
3. Problem definition: each group defines what the technology is “for” — what problem it solves.
4. Closure: when one definition and design becomes dominant, the artifact stabilizes — and so do its embedded values and power relations.

18

The Case of the Bicycle

• A number of competing designs in bike history, esp. in the1880s

​

19

“Betty Bloomers”-1894

“Penny-farthings”-1870s

“Boneshakers”-1820s

Social Groups

• Producers
• Sport cyclists
• Tourist cyclists
• Women cyclists

20

Designs

• Brakes
• Air tires
• Spring frames
• Lower wheel

Problems

• Safety
• Speed
• Vibration
• Dresses

• Tall penny-farthing (high-wheel)
• Speed
• Elite

• Safety bicycle (chain and equal wheels)
• Safety
• Inclusive

21

Social Groups

• Producers
• Sport cyclists
• Tourist cyclists
• Women cyclists

22

Designs

• Brakes
• Air tires
• Spring frames
• Lower wheel

Problems

• Safety
• Speed
• Vibration
• Dresses

Closure

• Safety campaigns, mass adoption, and technical improvements.
• The safety bicycle became the “real” bicycle.
• Competing meanings faded; design stabilized.

TikTok and the Politics of the Feed

• The “For You” page uses AI to autonomously curate each user’s stream.
• Optimization goal: maximize engagement.
• The algorithm learns, acts, and adjusts continuously — not just reacting, but pursuing its own objectives.
• Raises questions of visibility, influence, and value.

​

23

A SCOT Lens at TikTok’s “For You” Algorithm

24

Closure: Engagement as the dominant value metric — other meanings (well-being, diversity, civic health) marginalized.

Stabilization: Infrastructure + culture make alternatives hard to imagine — “That’s just how algorithms work”

Your Agency in the Social Construction of Technology

• You’re part of the “relevant social groups.” The PM voice often defines “the problem.”
• Problem framing is political. It decides which users, harms, and benefits count.
• Closure isn’t neutral. When you ship, you stabilize one version of the world.
• Agency: You can broaden the frame — include marginalized users, redefine “success,” and reopen closure points.

​

25

No more boring things?

26

But who decides what’s boring and what’s meaningful?

• What perspectives or kinds of work are being left out or undervalued?
• How do such design assumptions reflect particular social, cultural, or economic values?
• What kind of human–AI division of labor is being imagined here — and for whose benefit?

27

From Managing Ethics to Building Ethics Into Products

• Technologies aren’t neutral: they embody power and values (Winner).
• Politics gets in through design: problem definitions, social groups, and closure (SCOT).
• Products make value choices material: optimization goals become infrastructures of power.
• PMs have agency: every metric, feature, and default stabilizes one version of the world.

28

29

Gather with your group project members, and reflect on the following questions:

1. Which “relevant social groups” are involved in your project?
2. How have your groups framed the design problem? How might it be framed differently?
3. How did you reach a consensus on the problem and its solutions?
4. Who does the product benefit and who might be left out?

�Unpacking Product Designs

30

References

​

• Winner, L. (1980). Do Artifacts Have Politics? Daedalus, 109(1), 121–136.
• Pinch, T. J., & Bijker, W. E. (1984). The Social Construction of Facts and Artefacts: Or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology might Benefit Each Other. Social Studies of Science, 14(3), 399–441.

​

wanhenghu@stanford.edu

Thank you!

Acknowledgements: Content created with assistance from Louie Ortiz and Emily Lindsay Tianshi.