🎁 Awkward Gifts
Your Product Teams Will (Reluctantly) Thank You - Repost from Linkedin
Maybe it's because I'm an Aquarius, or ENFJ, or Type 1, or I was dropped one too many times on my head as a kid - but I've always felt like an odd duck at work. Working in Trust & Safety these past few years have only amplified these feelings, and not without good cause. Here's an exchange I had this week with a product team I was working with to stress test their product:
Product: Our goal is to ensure our tooling is working properly, and that moderators can apply the right labels and trigger the right actions.
Me: Oh yeah, cool, cool. Why don't we upload standard T&S test content?
Product: That would be awesome!
Me: Perf, I'll throw up some porn - don't worry, I won't add any super weird stuff.
Product: ...
Me: ...
Me: Are beheadings better or...?
My product teams look at me like I've kicked their dog hundreds of times per week. Let me give you an example from a completely different group:
Product: Imagine we clustered content by similarity in a series of images so the mod only saw these clusters instead of individual photos. Might help with wellness?
Me: Love that energy. When reviewing potential CSAM, which is already pretty tricky to navigate, we might want to consider how that will affect moderators' ability to identify prepubescent or pubescent bodies.
Product: Wait - how do they do that today?
Me: Well, they look for things like muscle development, pubic hair, breast formation, sometimes zooming in -
Product: ...
Me: ...
Me: You know what, let's move on.
It's my job to only think about users who abuse products, which is sometimes super awkward for engineers or product managers to hear. I have found that product teams don't want to think about The Bad People on the Internet™️. In Slack, I sometimes joke that HR has entered the chat to provide some levity to what otherwise would be an awkward conversation between coworkers. Maybe that makes it weirder, but these little quips make me feel better about telling someone that I've filed X number of NCMEC reports this month from their product alone.
What does all of this mean? You are not alone if you feel awkward when engaging with teams outside of Trust & Safety or don't know how much detail is too much. When trying to navigate conversations, I think through these grounding questions:
1. What is the tone of my language? Is it clinical and matter-of-fact?
2. Could the New York Times publish what I'm saying without apologizing for the graphic detail?
3. Is this conversation too acronym-heavy for my partner to understand?
4. Is this person staring at me as if I have three arms?
We all overshare; it doesn't make us weird or bad people; it just means our worldviews have changed. At the end of the day, you keep your product team safe from The Bad People on the Internet™️ by having these conversations. It's the best, most awkward gift you can give them.