How do people come to trust a product?

I have spent eight years asking that question in three very different settings. Each one answered it differently.

Setting · Consumer brands

Trust builds statistically, through thousands of small repeat purchases.

Brand management at Unilever, including a four-country digital relaunch and a supply and communications pivot through COVID that beat the category average.

Setting · Child safety

Feedback loops break when the person a product is failing cannot name what went wrong.

Four years of programme leadership in online child safety, including EU and UN policy consultations. Most recently, a product discovery assignment with Toca Boca on the balance between monetisation and player wellbeing.

Setting · Early-stage products

A product without a workable business model is a well-dressed hobby.

A solution in search of a problem is a product nobody asked for, discovery run to confirm a hypothesis usually confirms it, and what looks like a product problem is sometimes a distribution one. Learned at an AI ed-tech startup, and at Careem (now part of Uber) before that.

The pattern

Three settings, three answers, one question. What looks like range is closer to a method.

What I am building toward

Products where commercial goals and user wellbeing are treated as one problem, not a trade-off.

Background

A product discovery assignment with Toca Boca, product work at an AI ed-tech startup, four years in online child safety, brand management at Unilever, and product marketing at Careem (now part of Uber). BSc in Economics, MPA. Now completing Hyper Island's Product Manager programme in Stockholm.

Elsewhere

Case studies and writing are on their way here.