Hemant Taneja breaks down eight critical questions for founders and investors into two themes: mindset, which means understanding the full network of people affected by your product including second and third-order effects, and mechanisms, which means building concrete tools to detect unintended consequences, like algorithmic canaries that measure societal impact beyond immediate outcomes.
Chapters
In the piece for Harvard Business Review, you said there are eight questions that folks should ask. And I think you were speaking even to your VC community with that very directly saying these are the kind of questions more or less saying, look, this is what we're asking. Can you pick a couple of those eight? Because I do encourage everybody to go read that HBR piece. It's free on their site. But what are those two? Well, how about this one? You wrote it probably three years ago. Which two seem even more important today?
You know, I can say you can bucket those questions into two things, mindset and mechanisms. Right? And the mindset of the stakeholders that are working on the company, and that includes, you know, the founders, the product development team, the investors, everybody, Are they thinking enough about the systemic change they're about to go create? Do they really understand all the stakeholders that are involved that they touch? Right. And not sort of immediately, but second order and third order effects of as well their business? So that just brings intentionality to the whole body of work. And one example of a mechanism is are you looking for the unintended consequences that might be emerging from your innovation? So, so this goes back to what I have called algorithmic canaries. Are you measuring the second and third order effects of your products on society? Because every time the challenge is around, how do you make the right short term decisions for your business that are fundamentally aligned with the long term interests of society. So I think having that bigger picture and having that kind of a product development mindset probably are two important ones that you have to think about.
