Practitioner Fellow Project: Balancing Ethics, Business, and Speed to Deliver in Product Development
This post is written by Lalitha Jonnalagadda of the 2025 Cohort of Ethics and Technology Practitioner fellows and her project team.
For too long product teams have been asked to choose between business priorities, speed, and ethics, as if they are inherently at odds. The pressure to launch quickly, meet business goals, and outpace competitors often forces teams into making impossible trade-offs — ones that can leave real people, and society in general, vulnerable to harm.
We believe it doesn’t have to be this way.
About this Fellowship Project
As part of the Ethics and Technology Practitioner Fellowship, each fellow crafts a project scope that contributes to their specific area of expertise and contributes to the vitality of the tech and ethics community. My project aims to understand how organizations navigate trade-offs between speed, business priorities, and ethical decision-making. My team and I are digging into the structures, cultural norms, and incentive systems that drive how risks are negotiated and decisions are made in global product teams — and why ethical considerations often come too late, or not at all.
Through an inquiry-led approach, I’m here to surface patterns, strategies, and lessons that can inform more ethical, effective, and inclusive product development across sectors and geographies. By centering global tech leaders' lived experiences, the hope is to bridge gaps between theory and practice, and contribute to a more connected and informed global tech ecosystem.
The Vision
A world where responsible, ethics incorporated product development is seamless, where organizations can prioritize safety for users and their communities, without tradeoffs in profitability and reputation.
Call to Action: Seeking Global Product Practitioners and Tech Leaders for User Interviews!
I am currently conducting interviews with global product practitioners and tech leaders who face these ethical questions as they create, launch, and scale products. Your insights will help my team and I understand real-world challenges and inform development of practical tools to help product teams identify, navigate red flags, and reduce harm as they build responsible, socially-aware products. If you’ve ever faced trade-offs between speed, business, and responsibility, or had to make tough calls around reducing risk and harms, then we’d love to learn from you.
👉 Interested? Click here to sign up for an interview!
- Interviews are 60 minutes, conducted online
- Participants will be compensated with a small gift of appreciation as a thank-you for your time.
- Our team is available across all time zones to accommodate your schedule.
Project Team
Lalitha Jonnalagadda: Recipient of Ethics Society and Technology Practitioner Fellowship & Project Lead
Lalitha is a product leader and consultant with experience driving digital innovation and delivering impactful solutions. She approaches complex challenges with curiosity, clarity, and a deep respect for the people behind the problems. She spent her career building digital services that work—whether inside the federal government at 18F and GSA, or with mission-driven organizations like UNICEF and IEEE.
She is passionate about using technology as a force for public good, ensuring that solutions are not only effective but also equitable and impactful for the people they serve.
Eli Saraf: Project Co-lead; UX Research Lead
Eli purposefully seeks projects which do good at scale. From leading AI and Digital Transformation programs across Finance, Government, and Retail sectors, to successfully advocating for social justice causes - with good work, done well, for the right reasons, he sleeps better at night knowing he’s done his best to effect more of the positive change he want to see in the world.
Lauren Y. Kim: UX Research assistant
Lauren is an undergraduate at Stanford University, studying the intersection of technology, ethics, and policy. She passionate about building responsible AI systems and promoting ethical technology development to address systemic inequities embedded in tech. Lauren is a member of the Stanford Ethics Bowl Team and serves as the Financial Officer for the Stanford Practical Ethics Club.
Di Dang: Fellowship Advisor
Di consults for companies on best practices for AI product decision-making, in addition to working as a service designer and ethical leadership coach.
Di launched and landed Google’s People + AI Guidebook, a product decision framework for responsible AI, as a response to Google’s “AI first” strategy. She has worked with internal teams like Google Analytics and Shopping, as well as companies like Spotify, Mercari Japan, and Wadhwani AI, to operationalize their responsible AI decision-making processes.
Di graduated from Stanford University with a degree in Philosophy and Religious Studies. After participating in Stanford’s Ethics, Tech, and Public Policy for Practitioners program in 2022, she joined the program’s Cohort Leadership team in 2023, and she is proud to continue coaching its students worldwide in critically examining the social impact of their roles in tech products and platforms.