Infohygiene for Product
Here's what Data Governance looks like in Product Management: information hygiene prevents model collapse.
Lack of trust in data sources slows down execution, lets doubts creep in, and harms psychological safety of teams.
Product teams playing "hygiene theater" will only harm themselves.
Harmful Opinions
In the face of wicked problems, Product leadership starts with a vision, sense-making of a domain, and a principle of "do no harm."
“Being successful in the applied artificial intelligence domain has as much to do with philosophy as it has to do with possessing a technological acumen.” - Sylvain Pronovost
Per Avram Piltch of Tom's Hardware:
“Because it plagiarizes from other peoples’ content, Google [Search Generative Experience] doesn’t have any sense of proprietary, morality, or even logical consistency....Google is no longer acting as a librarian that curates content, but has turned itself into a publisher with a loud-mouthed opinion columnist it can’t control."
Ignorance Was a Choice
For a generation of Product practitioners, the combo of Google and Wikipedia made ignorance a choice for a long time.
Google's business was search and it's slogan was “Don't be evil."
But values and principles of the Information Age are changing in real-time and enshittification creeps into information platforms.
Put your critical-thinking cap on.
Information hygiene prevents model collapse.
As information ecosystems become polluted with more noise, it will become critical to maintain signal quality and trust.
Product excellence includes governance, stewardship, and quality efforts.
This is a strategy which enhances decision-making and competitive advantage.
The talking heads plagiarize. Talking points degrade.
It's as if the words in screenshots across five websites will be slightly altered during each copy/paste.
The result in teams asking "is this real?", "did that really happen?", "how biased is this?"
Product teams should operationalize data governance to maintain hygiene and a a sense of propriety over mental models, frameworks, and information sources.