Why you should prioritise trust over short-term profit – Simonetta Batteiger

Simonetta Batteiger is a product leadership coach and founder of Inclusive Leaders, with 15 years of product experience spanning a domain name marketplace, a global payroll and compliance platform for CFOs, and an ad-filtering product at IO that reached 250 million users. Before product, she worked in finance and sales — a background that still shapes how she frames product decisions in commercial and strategic terms. These days she works with product leaders on building ethically sound, commercially viable products in the age of AI, and teaches workshops on commercial skills for product people.

We discuss:
— Why trust has two dimensions — character and competency — and what that means for AI products
— How the new vocabulary of AI failure (hallucinations, slop, AI psychosis) all points to the same underlying problem
— The Starbucks South Korea case: how one AI marketing failure cost 26% of weekly revenue
— How to treat trustworthiness as measurable infrastructure, not a values statement
— Why skill atrophy is a product design problem, and how to build workflows that prevent it
— Where trust belongs in product strategy — and why Simonetta proposes it as a first principle above short-term profit
— What mid-level product people can do tomorrow, without waiting for executive permission

Chapters
03:24 — From finance and sales into product
05:14 — Defining trust
09:38 — Trust as a measurable metric
14:06 — Trust as infrastructure
15:13 — The Starbucks South Korea example
16:14 — Building trust without an existing halo
19:12 — Codifying trust in products
22:03 — Polarisation, research, and the diversity case
24:22 — Designing against skill atrophy
26:24 — Making the board-level argument
30:31 — Trust as a leadership task
31:53 — Trust in product strategy
33:41 — Ethics governance in practice
35:14 — Advice for mid-level product people