把信任当作一项功能：Kathy Pham 在 Mind the Product Chicago 谈负责任地做产品

At Mind the Product Chicago 2026, we heard an insightful keynote on how to build the right thing when spinning up everything is so easy, from Harvard University’s Faculty and Senior Fellow of Product and Society, Kathy Pham.

Watch the video in full below or read on for Kathy’s key points:

Almost 20 years ago, in one of her first product jobs, Kathy’s team asked her a question that’s stayed with her ever since: “How much privacy will people give up for convenience?”

The answer mattered a great deal then, and it matters even more today. Throughout her career, Kathy has worked on physical products in aviation, at Google, in government, in nonprofits, and in healthcare—all industries where people give companies a lot of their trust and their data. One of the main lessons right off the bat is that when people willingly give us all of their privacy, we have a responsibility to take care of it. Kathy believes this also means we have a responsibility to build the right thing.

What building the right thing means

There are three main questions that can lead us to building the right thing:

• Will people use it?
• Is there market fit?
• And, finally, is it right? For people, and for society (the thing most people miss)

What often stops us from being able to clear all three questions, Kathy explains, is that ethics and responsibility take a backseat when everything is easy to build. Sprint cycles today can take hours or even minutes, and we have more of everything within easy reach: more code, more designs, more prototypes, more metrics. “Any tooling that makes building the right thing cheaper makes building the wrong thing cheaper too,” she adds.

While every era of technology brings more capability, including this one, with its AI agents and loops, that still isn’t the same as judgement.

Now more than ever, Kathy believes there are four pillars of ethical shipping product people should look out for:

1. Solve the right problem: What are users actually asking for? Look at the products nobody uses.
2. Make evals the new acceptance criteria: Do evals right with the proper tools and the human domain expertise as guardrails. Use evals to ask: is my approach right for these people, in this context?
3. Treat trust as a feature: We have to think about how our product affects everything. No product is an island.
4. Orchestrate the shift: Create new product and software lifecycles. Redefine roles and rethink how teams connect, to turn ideas into shipped products.

If in doubt, phone a friend

Kathy acknowledges all this can be a learning curve—for ourselves and our peers—so she encourages us to be a phone-a-friend, but also to have our own.

This means knowing the product, the users, and the domain well enough that anyone on the team can call you for a fast, trusted, and opinionated answer.

Conversely, having your own phone a friend, can mean having a trusted:

• Engineer
• Clinician
• Designer
• Or community member, who you can call when you need a reality check about a product decision.

This leads to Kathy’s final point: the hard question was never “can we build it?” but “should we?”. Is it right for the right communities? What do we do if it isn’t? Product Managers have to make lightning decisions across every part of the business, every single day, and although AI can help speed up that process, the final call is still ours.

We already know how to manage without authority, adjust to team needs, bring in the right people, and honour their expertise. But we also need to understand how to bring in AI at the right time, understand the landscape we build in, and pay attention to every part of the lifecycle, because shipping is just one aspect of it.

Four things to take back to your team

Recapping her main takeaways, Kathy encourages us to keep in mind these four things:

1. Solve the right problem
2. Make evals your acceptance criteria
3. Treat trust as a feature
4. Orchestrate the shift

Look out for more great product content from Mind the Product Chicago in the coming weeks. We’ll be publishing write-ups along with videos from all of our keynote speakers.