How Do We Save the Good Internet from the Billionaires and Tech Bros? – with Petra Wille (Author of Strong Product People, Founder @ Product at Heart, Product Leadership Coach)

A Conversation About Mindset, Ethics, and Morality in Working on Digital Products in More Than Wild Times

Episode ten of the PRODUKTKRAFT Podcast. This time I talk to Petra Wille, and it gets political, because we both feel we’re living in stormy times: When we started working in and on the digital space in the early 2000s, we already sensed that digital products would have disruptive power. At the same time, though, we also saw their great potential to democratize and emancipate. Today, 25 years later, the current leaders of the biggest tech companies stand on stage with Donald Trump at his inauguration, while other billionaires such as Peter Thiel actively push an anti-democratic, right-libertarian agenda. The idealism of the early days has turned into its opposite.

What does this mean for our digital tech work? What can each of us do to stand up to this increasingly autocratic zeitgeist? What can I do as an individual? And what role does the unequal distribution of wealth play in all this?

To answer these questions, we both stepped a little outside our product management comfort zone. But we think it’s important to ask what we’re actually building and in what environment we’re doing it. Whether we managed that reflection, you can hear in the podcast.