🫡 Are there alternatives to product leaders in product management? and more

Hiya 👋

We’re back with another edition of the digital pharmacist digest!

Here are this week's links that are worth your time.

Thanks for reading,
Kevin

🔎 Currently Reading: The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

📖 What I'm reading

Adopting and expanding ethical principles for generative artificial intelligence from military to healthcare
🤖 Artificial Intelligence and 🩺💻 Health informatics

"In 2020, the U.S. Department of Defense officially disclosed a set of ethical principles to guide the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies on future battlefields. Despite stark differences, there are core similarities between the military and medical service....

In an attempt to address these issues, we explore ethical principles from the military perspective and propose the “GREAT PLEA” ethical principles, namely Governability, Reliability, Equity, Accountability, Traceability, Privacy, Lawfulness, Empathy, and Autonomy for generative AI in healthcare...

Ultimately, we aim to proactively address the ethical dilemmas and challenges posed by the integration of generative AI into healthcare practice."

The Inside Story of Microsoft’s Partnership with OpenAI
🤖 Artificial Intelligence and 👨‍💻 Product management

"You had to be an optimist and a realist, she told me: “Sometimes people misunderstand optimism for, like, careless idealism. But it has to be really well considered and thought out, with lots of guardrails in place—otherwise, you’re taking massive risks...

“You have to experiment in public,” Scott told me. “You can’t try to find all the answers yourself and hope you get everything right. We have to learn how to use this stuff, together, or else none of us will figure it out.”

As Microsoft’s engineers designed how these Copilots would look and operate, they remembered the lessons of Clippy and Tay. The first conclusion from these fiascos was that it was essential to avoid anthropomorphizing A.I. Those earlier bots had failed, in part, because when they made mistakes they came across as stupid or malicious rather than as imperfect tools. For the Office Copilots, designers reminded users that they were interacting with a machine, not a person. There would be no googly eyes or perky names. Any Microsoft icon associated with a Copilot would consist of abstract shapes. The user interface would underscore A.I.’s propensity for missteps, by issuing warning messages and by advising users to scrutinize its outputs. Jaime Teevan, Microsoft’s chief scientist, helped oversee the Copilots’ development, and she told me that this approach “actually makes using the technology better,” adding, “Anthropomorphization limits our imagination. But if we’re pushed to think of this as a machine then it creates this blank slate in our minds, and we learn how to really use it.”

“A.I. is one of the most powerful things humans have ever invented for improving the quality of life of everyone,” Scott said. “But it will take time. It should take time.”

Alternatives To Product Leaders
👨‍💻 Product management

"for a company at scale, I don’t know of any real alternative to strong product leaders, because I haven’t seen any of these alternatives consistently work, in terms of generating the necessary business outcomes...

Product companies survive and thrive when they provide successful products and services to their customers. I’m not sure why so many companies resist the concept that a strong product company requires strong product leadership. I literally can’t think of a more essential competency for a product company....

If you’re a product company, especially a tech-powered product company, I argue this is the single most important thing for you to get right. Everything else, including marketing, sales, revenue, profit, and valuation, all directly or indirectly derive from this.

If you’re a startup, the goal is product/market fit. If you’re a more established company, then your goal is consistent innovation creating value for your customers and your company. The key in both cases is strong product leadership."

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