# Decentralized Tech and Human-Centric Product Strategy

**Podcast:** All Things Product with Teresa and Petra
**Published:** 2026-05-26

## Transcript

Hi, folks.
This is All Things Product with Petra Wille.
And Teresa Korks.
And we're so happy you're here.
Petra, I'm going to ask you a tough question.
I've been wrestling with this for a while, and I have a feeling you do too.
And I think it's really swirling right now with AI, which is, do you think technology, and I want to get more specific, do you think like the internet generative AI?
modern day, like the industry that we work in is net positive?
Oh my God.
I'm glad that you brought an easy question.
I don't know if people know, but we're recording this in my evening hours.
So I'm not sure if my brain is still functioning well to answer such a broad meta question.
Yeah.
I'm thinking a lot about that as well from various angles.
I think the first time I started to talk about it publicly was two or three years ago at our product at heart opening and closing remarks, where I actually said like that I have, I think I hate it, but I think I have to admit that I was part of what has created some of the evil that we currently see in the world.
you know, Google had it in their, what was the don't be evil?
I think that was actually what they had on the post everywhere in their office, right?
So that's where we all came from.
We all came from democratizing technology and opening things up to more voices and bringing in more diverse perspectives to the entire conversation.
So there was the internet.
And then there was user-generated content and people had blogs and people could comment on things and people could actually help design the internet.
And more and more people were starting coding.
And that's what we're all coming from.
And that's what we helped building.
And that's what we all liked.
And then came social media.
And all of us thought it's a good idea.
I was working for Germany's biggest business social network for quite some time.
So I thought about all these early mechanisms of social media and about all the effects that it was having.
And we were having this idea that this could have a profound positive impact on the world and the society.
Now, turns out that was not true, at least not entirely true.
And the short answer of my short assessment to that is it.
has a lot to do with the combination of how we currently have designed capitalism or the stories that we tell ourselves about success and the wild accumulation of wealth in some pockets.
And all of that has supercharged developments that I don't like and that make me...
wanting to go into the woods and really considering how much I should expose my kid, for example, to technology.
I would rather prefer not to right now, which is not possible.
I know.
So I still, I'm still looking for the solution there.
So how long can I share?
She's eight and I'm pretty much shielding her from all the technology.
I know it sounds weird, but she's occasionally using an iPad.
Occasionally I showing her what I do at my computer, but we talk about.
few occasions.
What about you?
This is interesting.
So I like that you brought this up in the context of your daughter, because I was recently in San Diego visiting my aunt who I hadn't seen in years.
And she made a comment about she wished the internet had never happened.
And this floored me because like technology has been overwhelmingly positive in my life.
Or so I thought like on an individual personal level, it's been overwhelmingly positive.
I mean, I'm getting to the point where like, I don't really like LinkedIn.
I definitely have had my fair share of trolls.
Like it's not like all a hundred percent positive, but like it never, I never would have had the thought of like, what if the internet didn't exist?
Like, first of all, I would need a job.
That is what I was about to say.
We both have benefited from the internet.
A lot.
But I think this is becoming really visible right now because of AI.
Like a lot of people are not a fan.
And I think the backlash is totally valid.
And here's the thing, like I've embraced this technology.
I use it all day, every day.
And I still have reservations and I still worry, are we making the world worse?
And then there's another thing that happened that really started to make me wonder this.
Like I was in San Francisco not too long ago.
Here's what I'll share.
I live in a small town.
People still talk to each other.
People are extremely friendly to each other.
Everybody engages with everybody.
You don't walk by someone on the street and not talk to them.
Like, it's just, it's not the culture here.
And I was in San Francisco and I was really, oh, and I'll also say like in COVID, restaurants moved to like QR code menus because they were trying to do contactless and keep everybody safe.
But as soon as COVID ended.
Like I can't think of a single restaurant in my entire town that still uses that system.
And then I was in San Francisco and I saw that like 90% of coffee shop patrons order on their phone and pick up their coffee without talking to a human.
Almost every restaurant we went to had no staff.
They just used QR codes.
People ride in Waymos.
They don't even have to talk to a driver.
And it feels like we're using technology to isolate ourselves from each other.
And I think because I'm really fortunate in that I still live in a community that values community and like interacting with each other.
It was jarring.
Yeah.
And I don't, I don't like this world we're creating.
Yeah, but it has, I'm.
really convinced that, for example, why I continue to run product at heart with RNA is because it gives us a platform to share alternative narratives.
Because I think the future is not yet created.
And you and I were talking about thinking scenarios in one of our former episodes, right?
And I think we should do the exact same things.
I was just listening to a podcast today and we put it in the show note.
How to Save Democracy is basically the name of the podcast.
I forgot what the episode was all about.
It had to do with community and community spaces.
And the episode was all about...
How, even if we would, for example, make every house fit for a climate to be able to heat up like three degrees, we're currently not at 1.5 that everybody was hoping for.
We were heading towards three.
So how will people be able to survive in central London when you have like minus 10 degrees Celsius to plus 40 degrees Celsius?
So really cold, really hot.
So how do we make sure housing is still, yeah, is fit for that, is retrofit for that kind of scenario?
And then what they shared is that you cannot afford doing that.
You cannot afford every house to be equally heated, for example.
So maybe there might be shared communal spaces where it's really warm and people can go there and hang out.
And so these kind of conversations they were having.
And they had conversations about, positive narratives around AI as well.
And we're touching upon what things clearly AI is not good at, for example, providing care to people.
And yeah, in your San Francisco use case, people still might say like, yeah, but the robot can provide care to human being.
But you and I know it's not the same thing.
Skin to skin, human physical touch and empathy and these conversations, that's a different game.
I think we all can look for the more positive narratives around the future.
AI can still be a part of it.
Technology can still be a part of it.
I think it is not necessarily doomsday all the time.
And having these conversations really does make a difference because so often it seems to be a predominant operating model present right now.
But sometimes there needs to be a small seed, an idea coming along and then enough people liking it.
And then that becomes the major narrative.
Right.
So you never know what the conversations that you have will actually influence in the future.
So I would still encourage people to say, like, no, there can be a different narrative with AI.
And I have.
better days with that and worse days as well.
So sometimes I just want to go into the woods myself.
Yeah, I mean, I think both the internet and AI, they're tools and we can use the tools however we want.
I think what I'm wrestling with is it's harder for me to look back at the last 20 years and to confidently say as an industry, we've made the world better.
I can see a lot of ways we've made the world worse.
Yeah, I agree.
And I don't think it's all negative.
Don't, you know, I don't think it's all negative, but I see a lot of negative.
And I know people are starting to talk about this more.
And I think we can all choose to work with organizations and work on projects that create more good in the world.
So I don't think it's all doom, like doom and gloom.
But it has me really thinking about, like...
How do we be better responsible citizens in the tech industry?
How do we, I think all the layoffs have been a part of this for me of like, I think you named it with just the greed, like we're going through.
And I know enough about like history to know that these greed cycles are, they're cycles.
They're very cyclical.
Like we will eventually course correct.
But I think, especially here in the US, we are living through.
One of the most extreme periods of greed that I think we've gone through since the like railroad tycoon era.
And I don't, I think we're losing, I think we're forgetting who we are as humans.
We're forgetting what matters to humans.
Yeah.
And I think like, if we're all going to get sucked in to yet another new technology, like maybe we should be a little more thoughtful about how we do it this time.
Yeah.
And.
if we contribute, how much we contribute, with whom we're working with, with whom we're partnering, which we provide platform to.
So it's similar things that have been important in the past, but I think not enough people that can afford to think about these things do actually think about the things.
So I still see people joining companies where I would say like, oh, I would actually think twice about joining that company.
And maybe they have their reasons, but oftentimes they haven't even thought it through.
And this is actually something.
Yeah.
I do want to acknowledge, though, that I think like we are also in a tough economic climate.
Of course.
Like people don't always feel like they have a choice.
Some people are in more of a position to be picky than others.
I can even see an argument for instead of turning down that job.
Yeah, me too.
Yeah, me too.
If you do.
Yeah, I feel like these are like big, meaty, hard questions.
And I'm definitely not going to suggest there's a right answer.
I guess my plea would be talk to people that aren't in tech.
I cannot believe, like, it still blows my mind to think people think the internet is net negative.
Like, I don't know.
I can, I guess I can objectively see where, especially its impact on kids for sure.
And that was the context of the conversation.
But like, it feels overwhelmingly net positive to me.
And that tells me that I'm living in an echo chamber.
And I need to get out of that echo chamber and talk to more people.
And so I think like, that's a good starting point is like, how do we just, Yeah.
And people that aren't in this industry.
Yeah.
And plus look at, so I think different cultural backgrounds matter, how different countries are handling it.
So for example, we just had a very personal story now.
We just had, I don't know how this is called in English, by the way, in Germany, we call it Elternabend.
That's when all the parents go to the school and meet from one class to discuss certain topics.
How is that called, Teresa?
Is it like a parent meets with a teacher or is it all the parents get together?
No, it's parents meet with, but all the parents from one class meet with their teacher.
Oh, we don't do that here.
We do like one-on-one, like a parent meets with a teacher.
Ah, that's why there is no, huh?
I took Democracy 101.
So in Germany, we do that occasionally four times a year, I would say.
And that's what they share.
Yeah, it's cool.
They share a lot of information.
That's why I say, right, look at other countries, how they're doing it.
And it was not even my point.
So Elton Abend, now we learned a new word.
That's what we do.
And then I had a discussion about when the kids get their first mobile phones and stuff like that.
And I think five years ago, half of the class by now, by the way, all of these kids are eight, seven to eight year old.
So half of the class would have had their first mobile phone five years ago.
Now, all the parents are...
Like when they're three?
No, no, no, no, not five.
Oh, seven and eight-year-olds would have them.
Yes, exactly.
Five years ago, seven and eight-year-olds would have, half of the class would have had some.
And now all the parents were agreeing that like, oh, hopefully we can actually not hand them mobile phones, personal mobile phones until the age of 11 or 12.
And there was basic agreement.
So everybody was like, oh, glad we all agree on that.
So all parents were like, okay, we not even consider giving them mobile phones until that time.
And that is a wild change in perception over five years time.
Five years ago, a mobile phone was something helpful.
At least that's how parents perceived it.
It maybe still had, it's dangerous.
But now every parent is like, no freaking way that my kid gets a phone.
That's wild.
Yeah, that is wild.
Yeah, I worry a lot about like human loneliness.
This has been a narrative in the U.S.
for a long time.
Like there was a book called, I think it was called Bowling Alone.
It was right after the one of our big shootings in Columbine.
I am.
I remember.
I'm like so cynical about this.
I can't even keep them straight anymore.
It's pathetic.
But that like the premise was that the root of all of this is like, like a loneliness epidemic.
And I feel like this is where technology is having, it's like, it's weird to me.
Like in some ways, like we live halfway across the world from each other and we talk all the time and we have a good friendship and like, that's because of technology and that's awesome.
Yeah.
Otherwise we would have never met, right?
Yeah.
But at the same time, like.
It's so much better to be in person and to socialize in person.
And I think one can't come at the cost of the other.
Like they have to be additive.
And I think like the tech industry is really promoted one at the cost of the other.
And I'm like, it makes me think like, how do we use technology to foster real connection, not the social media crap?
And like, yeah, Meetup exists and I like Meetup, but it's not.
It's not what I mean.
I think there's got to be a way to do this at like a more just very human connection level.
Yeah, but so the challenge as always is the incentive system and the value system underneath.
And so far, I think most tech companies operated on this premise of we want to make people's lives better.
Currently, and you were pointing to greed already, right?
Currently.
The paradigm seems to shift to we want to extract as much value as in money from whatever we do for whoever we do it.
So no matter if the human beings suffer, we don't care about the human beings in the loop because AI will make them obsolete anyways.
And I'm not sure if this will be a clever narrative in the long run.
But currently, this is a tech bro narrative that some people are using.
And I already saw this on panels.
I was on a panel the other day where basically this is something a head of product said, I don't care about the gig workers that deliver the stuff that we actually want to deliver.
I don't care if they're out in the heat.
I don't care if they're shielded from the elements or something like that.
And I was so baffled that I was like, And thankfully, Ronny Varghese was with me on this panel and he was sharp in that moment and not only sitting there with his mouth wide open and he was really saying something and it was meaningful and helpful to frame the entire thing.
Shout out to Ronny here.
But still, there was a panel that I was on and that's something that I heard.
And I was a product leader that felt comfortable on saying something like that in front of a big audience.
Yeah.
So I don't even know what to say to that.
Like, I just I get it.
Like, if you look around the world right now, having a bajillion dollars gives you power.
And we've let that go unchecked for so long.
So I can see why people aspire to that because they want to win in life.
God, I hope that's not what most of us want.
You know, like, I hope that most of us still like at our core want to know our neighbors and want to contribute to our communities.
And actually.
Part of the reason why I'm so excited about AI is that I feel like the way software has historically gotten built is some startup raises a bajillion dollars from a VC, which puts them on a trajectory where they have to get giant.
They have to be this giant horizontal play.
We already know in product that when you get giant in your horizontal play, it only kind of works for most people.
but it works just enough that you take the market and you win.
And we end up with shitty software and we end up with greedy companies.
What I'm really hopeful of, I'm really enamored with this idea of mom and pop tech.
Like, why can't my neighbor build software that helps our neighborhood know each other?
Like, why do we need, maybe we don't need software for that.
Maybe like, it's literally as simple as like, we're going to have a community calendar that we get to build ourselves.
So it meets exactly what we need.
And people sign up for when we're going to do our neighborhood social happy hours.
Yeah.
That's a dumb example.
No, it's an amazing example.
But like, I love this idea of like, we can now build bespoke software for whatever it is we need.
We're not dependent on these big players to like half-ass meet our needs.
And I, like, I, my hope, this is why I frame it as mom and pop tech.
My, just like, I feel like when I go downtown in my town, it's not big box retailers and restaurants.
We actually, they're all local.
That's something that my community values.
And I love that.
I think technology can have the equivalent, right?
We can empower people to create the technology that their community needs and not have to worry about, does it work for any other community?
In the podcast, they were actually framing it like inch wide.
but mile deep change.
They said like, so it's a really small slice that you're looking at, but you really want to think that problem through and really solve it.
They had a bit of a story around share economy and how, for example, you could map in a community or neighborhood who is basically owning what and renting it out to the other neighbors so that not everybody has to have the certain drill that sometimes you use for one special occasion.
And that is one of the use cases that I talked about and that could be supported by mom and dad hack, right?
So that's exactly what they were talking about as well.
Even ride share.
Like ride share companies come into a company, it's like come into a town.
In the beginning, it works for everybody.
The driver makes a good living.
People get rides.
The ride share company only takes a small amount because they're trying to build the market.
And then inevitably what happens, the ride share company takes more and more and more and more.
The consumer pays more.
The driver makes less.
It's not a sustainable model.
But the thing is, ride share is inherently local.
Yeah.
Any town, any town now can have a matching system between riders and drivers.
Yeah.
And the town doesn't need to make a bajillion dollars from it.
Right.
And it can be really specific.
They could wipe out their way to it more or less.
Yeah.
Why not?
Yeah.
Yeah, they will.
So yeah, that's actually, that's, for example, a narrative that I like, right?
And this would be an application of technology that is more familiar to what I was hoping for technology to support.
So if we all can go back to these kinds of things and...
what role would that put on us is more the educator role because then we need to spread the news to mom and dad and our neighbors out there that this is possible and that they could start to play around with it and it's then it's more of an educator role i think and again spreading the positive narratives and inspiring that change um i think that is super important And then having these meta conversations.
So that's why I really enjoyed listening to this podcast episode today because it really was super meta and it's not for everybody.
I love the meta.
But then you need to break it down and bring it into your community.
And they could be the global product community or it could be your local neighborhood.
I think both is fine.
Yeah.
As long as we find these positive narratives and positive use cases for these tools.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't know.
We kind of wandered all over in this episode.
I guess I'm going to go back to what I asked at the very beginning, which is, is technology good?
And if we're going to work in this industry, how can we be a bigger part of making sure it is net positive?
I think that's a good place, I think, to just leave listeners with is just whatever that means for you.
How do we contribute to the positive side of this and mitigate some of the downside?
I love the framing.
Thanks, Teresa.
Thanks, Petra.