Path of Discovery: On Becoming a Product Counsel

It happened naturally. I was doing product counseling before I'd heard of the job title. As with the original product counsels (see origin story), my work environment called for it. Product development at a tech startup flows fast and can leave traditional lawyering floundering in its wake. I love the story of and path experienced by Alexander Macgillivray and Nicole Wong , but at least they had a lot of attorneys at Google and could hire. Most startups only have legal wherewithal to cope with the flow of contracts. My path involved proving value and getting there without having the job posting or title first ... which works since I didn't know about the title yet!

I guess my curiosity got me there. We have an always-learning culture, so I was always peppering Product with questions about data and features, testing our services myself, and taking classes like Coursera on machine learning to figure out what everyone was up to. As a privacy officer, I was also on the receiving end of questions about what they heck they needed to do about CCPA, consent, accessing PII from abroad, and much more. The more we learned about each other, the more I realized that there were many legal issues and risks beneath the surface. It's not hard for any smart person who's been burned by Legal to realize that there's a difference between Legal saying NO and a helpful attorney asking, Have you accounted for biometrics privacy laws? Let me help you build that computer vision product compliantly. One of my go-to's is a persuasive tactic I'm sure we've all used – pull up articles on other companies being sued or investigated for compliance failures.

Then, there were the questions that were never asked. Sometimes, I'd have to look into an area repeatedly before recognizing the legal issue. Machine learning opens the door to matters like model risk management (a financial services framework for using models for decision making) and fair lending disparate impact analysis. The tricky thing here was that the doers, those doing the testing and validation of models, and running the analyses, are already experts, but in data science. What could I bring to the table? (the wood kind, not a data table!) Even after my online courses in machine learning, I could barely figure out what they were doing. But I kept trying and finally realized that if the impetus for all this data science work was legal/regulatory, then we should understand those constructs before expending valuable data science resources trying to meet them. And sure enough, over time, after I convinced others of this, we worked together to improve templates and methodologies, all to the benefit of bringing about good governance and earning the trust of customers.

Over time, I asked to be involved earlier, to learn about data sourcing, product features, infrastructure dependencies, you name it, I'll get nosey about it. I like how Deloitte puts it:

Product counsel are skilled at embedding with the business team, understanding their goals, and intervening early when potential legal roadblocks loom ahead..

There was a time when I had to make decks about why my company needed an official Product Counsel. The title helped me cement regular catchups with product leads and get into go-to-market checklists, but honestly, I would have done that anyway. Once I see a problem clearly, it's like a magnet drawing me to solve it. And of course, one attorney can't cover all the product lines, although I tried for a while, so then I was able to build a team. They're so stellar! ( Ambar C. Alan Tse ) It's a relief to have my templates, playbooks, processes, and customer FAQs tested out by others and improved upon. I do think that repeatability is part of the job. Clients cooperate better with Product Counsel when they know what to expect and get consistent results. Nowadays, I see colleagues Slacking each other and customers about legal risks and why features have been developed to deal with contracts or consent or digital accessibility or whatnot. It's rewarding.

There's so much to say. I'd love to hear your thoughts and experiences too. Take a look at an early inspiration of mine: Adrienne Go's blog post on Product Counsel: How to Manage Risk AND Create a Delightful Customer Experience. There are many ways to get there, but get there you must.