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Inbox fatigue is real. According to one analysis, the average person receives more than 120 emails a day, with some office-based staff receiving even more due to their work environment. From Substack newsletters to marketing emails from local stores (alongside standard business updates), it can be difficult to stay on top of it all. Its a challenge Google, owner of Gmailthe worlds second-most-used email service after Apple Mailhas acknowledged and is now addressing. Beginning this week, the company is rolling out a new feature for Gmail users in select countries: Manage Subscriptions. The tool lets users see all their active email subscriptions in one place, along with a count of how many emails each sender has delivered in recent weeks. From there, unsubscribing takes just a single click. It can be easy to feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of subscription emails clogging your inbox: Daily deal alerts that are basically spam, weekly newsletters from blogs you no longer read, promotional emails from retailers you haven’t shopped in years can quickly pile up, said Gmail director Chris Doan, in a company blog post announcing the feature earlier this month. For users, its a welcome step toward reclaiming control of their inboxes. But for email marketers, this visibilityand the ease of opting outcould signal a reckoning. The feature reflects a broader trend, says Omar Merlo, an associate professor of marketing strategy at Imperial College London, wherein customers are looking for greater control, more meaningful content, and added value in their interactions with brands. If email doesnt meet that standard, people now have a faster and easier way to walk away, Merlo says. This isnt the end of email marketing. It is perhaps the end of sloppy email marketing. And while the tool may accelerate unsubscribes among already-disengaged users, some say its unlikely to trigger a mass exodus, and could, in a sense, help marketers by reducing spam complaints. Unsubscribes are better than spam complaints, says Desi Zhivkova, deliverability team lead at e-commerce marketing platform Omnisend. Giving users easier ways to opt out peacefully helps preserve sender reputation and improves long-term deliverability. Richard Stone, managing director of PR agency Stone Junction, believes it could elevate the quality of email marketing. Email marketing has always been about creating a list of people who actually want to hear from you, he says. All Gmail is doing is making that principle harder to ignore. In the long run, this kind of user control will lead to better relationships between brands and their audiences, not worse.
Category:
E-Commerce
A few years ago, our team was preparing to launch a major update when we hit an unexpected snag. The accessibility team flagged that our new voice search featurewhile technically impressivewas failing users with speech impairments. Marketing was eager to highlight the cutting-edge AI capabilities. Engineering was proud of the breakthrough. But for a significant portion of our community, this “innovation” was actually a step backward. This moment crystallized something I’d been thinking about for years: product development never happens in a vacuum. Every decision we make sits at the intersection of three powerful forces I call the three P’s: People (the communities we serve), Politics (the internal dynamics and external pressures that shape our work), and Product (the manifestation of our choices, trade-offs, and values). Great product leadership isn’t about avoiding these tensionsit’s about navigating them without losing sight of our purpose or compromising our values. The companies that do this well don’t just build better products; they build products that genuinely improve lives and change society. P1: PeopleThe Customer at the Center When we talk about “users,” we often default to thinking about individual consumers. But every product decision ripples outward, affecting not just individual users but entire communities, families, and society at large. Take something as seemingly simple as a default setting. When we design the TV home screen, we’re not just organizing appswe’re shaping how families spend their evening hours together. Do we prioritize the latest blockbuster movies, or do we surface educational content? Do we make it easy to discover local news, or do we default to global content? These choices affect real conversations happening in real living rooms. The rise of inclusive design has taught us that accessibility isn’t just a moral imperativeit’s a business one. When we design voice controls with speech impairments in mind, we didn’t just serve users with disabilities; we created features that helped anyone using the TV in a noisy environment or trying to search quietly while others were sleeping. Designing for the margins often leads to innovations that benefit everyone. But where it gets tricky is balancing individual desires with collective needs. Our data might show that users spend more time on certain types of content, but does that mean we should optimize for maximum engagement, or should we consider the broader implications of what we’re promoting and how do we balance these? The biggest risk I see among product teams is designing for internal stakeholders instead of external users. It’s easy to fall into the trap of building what impresses investors, what satisfies regulatory requirements, or what looks good in quarterly reviews. But products built for boardrooms rarely succeed in living rooms. P2: PoliticsThe Power Structures Around the Work Let’s be honest about something most product leaders don’t like to discuss: every product decision is political, in the sense that it involves navigating competing interests, conflicting priorities, and power structures both inside and outside our organizations. Internally, we’re constantly balancing conflicting roadmaps. The business development team wants partnerships that drive revenue. The engineering team wants to optimize for performance. The design team advocates for user experience. Legal wants to minimize risk. Each perspective is valid, but they often point in different directions. I learned this lesson early in my career when we were deciding whether to optimize for channel placement. The partnership team saw revenue opportunities. The user experience team worried about bloatware. The content team wanted to ensure quality standards. The regulatory team flagged antitrust concerns. No single stakeholder was wrong, but finding a path forward required understanding how all these perspectives intersected. External politics add another layer of complexity. We operate in an environment of increasing regulatory scrutiny, shifting cultural expectations, and evolving privacy norms. What was acceptable product behavior five years ago may be considered invasive today. What satisfies regulators in one market may be irrelevant or counterproductive in another. The challenge isn’t to eliminate these political pressuresthat’s impossible. The challenge is to navigate them with transparency and integrity while staying true to our core mission. This means having difficult conversations about trade-offs, being clear about our decision-making criteria, and sometimes accepting that we can’t make everyone happy. P3: ProductThe Expression of Everything Here’s the reality that many product leaders struggle to accept: your product is never neutral. Every feature you build, every default you set, every interaction you design is an expression of your values and priorities. The product is where the rubber meets the roadwhere all the considerations about people and politics get translated into actual user experiences. Consider the fundamental tensions that every product grapples with: privacy versus personalization, freedom of expression versus content moderation, centralized control versus decentralized empowerment. There’s no “right” answer to these trade-offs, but there are thoughtful approaches and thoughtless ones. When we were designing product recommendation engines, we had to wrestle with this directly. More personalization meant better recommendations but also meant collecting more data about viewing habits. How much personalization was worth how much privacy? The answer wasn’t in our analyticsit was in our values and our understanding of what our users genuinely needed from the product. The most important product decisions are often invisible to users. What you choose to default to, what you decide to hide, what you make easy versus what you make difficultthese are ethical and strategic choices that shape behavior in profound ways. Every “minor” UX decision is actually a statement about what you think is important. This is especially true as we integrate AI into our products. The algorithms we build don’t just process datathey shape attention, influence decisions, and ultimately affect how people spend their time and mental energy. With that power comes responsibility. The Two Questions That Cut Through Complexity After years of navigating these tensions, I’ve come to rely on two core questions that can cut through almost any complexity: “What do our customers really want?” “What’s the best strategy for meeting our goals in a way that is in line with our values?” These might sound simple, but they’re deceptively powerful. The magic happens when you ask both questions together. The first question forces us to look beyond surface-level data and really understand the deeper needs and contexts of the people we serve. The second question ensures that we’re not just chasing metrics or market pportunities, but building something we can be proud of. The 3Pspeople, politics, and productwill always be in motion, and they’ll often be in tension with each other. But the tension is where the interesting work happens. It’s where we’re forced to think more deeply, design more thoughtfully, and lead more intentionally. True product leadership means being willing to have difficult conversations, to push back on stakeholders when necessary, and to make decisions that serve long-term value over short-term convenience. The companies that navigate the 3Ps well don’t just build successful productsthey build products that make the world a little bit better. The choices we make in conference rooms and code reviews ultimately play out in living rooms and communities around the world. In a time when technology’s impact on society is under increasing scrutiny, that’s not just good business. It’s essential leadership.
Category:
E-Commerce
The majority of e-cigarette sales now come in the form of disposable vapes, meaning that when someone has taken the last puff, that vapeand its lithium ion battery and plastic casinggo right into the trash. Americans now throw away an incredible number of these disposable vapes: nearly 500,000 every day, or about 5.7 vapes per second. That number comes from the latest vape waste report from the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), which looked at 2023 data. And vape waste is increasing, the public advocacy group found. In 2022, U.S. PIRG documented that Americans threw out 4.5 disposable vapes per second. Disposable vapes are a particularly insidious form of pollution for a few reasons, says Lucas Gutterman, the Designed to Last campaign director with PIRG. For one, these devices contain nicotine, a toxic chemical that can leach into water and soil, harming wildlife and ecosystems. Theyre also made of plastic that isnt recyclable, and which also spreads toxins and microplastics into the environment. Increasingly, disposable vapes double as digital gadgets, with screens that show animations or include built-in games or speakers to play music. That means all this trash is a type of electronic waste, so each disposable vape tossed is like throwing away miniature computers after a few days of use, Gutterman says. Those lithium ion batteries in disposable vapes are made using critical minerals that require mining. Laptops, cellphones, and electric vehicles all use lithium ion batteries too. The amount of lithium used in the batteries of disposable vapes sold every year weighs nearly 30 tons, according to U.S. PIRGequivalent to the amount of lithium needed to create 3,350 EV batteries. Mining is also tied to human rights abuses, and in 2023, a TikToker explained in a viral video that she was quitting vaping as a way to help people in Congo, which currently supplies 70% of the worlds mined cobalt. When disposable vapes are tossed into the trash and make their way to recycling and waste facilities, those lithium ion batteries can also cause fires because the devices get caught and crushed in machinery. The report estimates that disposable vapes cause $95 million of damage from waste facility fires each year. When disposal vapes dont go into these facilities, they can pollute the environment directly. If a disposable vape is tossed on the street, it can be swept into a storm drain, travel through streams and rivers, and end up in the ocean or along the coast. Predictably, disposable vapes are becoming a dominant source of beach pollution: According to the Surfrider Foundation, from 2021 to 2024 volunteers have seen a 150% increase in vapes among litter collected during beach cleanups. Disposable vapes are a serious threat, says Kelsey Lamp, oceans campaign director with the Environment America Research & Policy Center, because they include three types of waste in one: They’re hazardous waste, since they contain nicotine and heavy metals; they’re electronic waste with batteries and circuits; and theyre plastic waste that never biodegrades, she says. Studies have found that vape liquids decrease the hatching success of fish embryos and cause DNA damage, among other effects, plus the plastic casings can both carry toxins and break down into microplastics. Some states are taking action against disposable vapes. California banned flavored tobacco products, which led to a 52% decrease in disposable vape sales. Massachusetts also banned flavored e-cigarettes, resulting in a 74% drop in disposable vape sales. But Lamp and U.S. PIRG urge legislators to take more action and ban disposable vapes across the country. We wouldn’t dump 30 tons of lithium directly into our ocean. We wouldn’t pour thousands of pounds of nicotine into our waterways. Yet that’s exactly what we’re doing by allowing disposable vapes to pollute our waterways, Lamp says. Our oceans are already under pressure from rising temperatures, overfishing, and land-based pollution. We cannot afford to add this entirely preventable source of toxic waste to the mix.
Category:
E-Commerce
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