Bumble Inc. Safety by Design

Safety toolkit of resources and processes to help teams consider safety

Background

Safety By Design was a Bumble Inc. wide initiative aimed at helping product and engineering teams embed safety considerations into everything they build.

All products can be misused or lead to unintended behaviors that put users at risk - especially in the online dating space. In this role, I partnered closely with my Product Lead to establish a structured internal approach. This included developing processes to proactively identify and mitigate potential safety risks from the earliest stages of product development through to launch.

How might we create a set of self-service processes & resources so that Bumble inc. teams can proactively consider safety in their products & features?

Key Product & Features:

Product & Design teams as participants + stakeholders

Establishing a framework of the product development lifecycle

Tool developed: Safety Evaluation

Tools developed: Safety Risk Workshop Template

Product & Design teams as participants + stakeholders 

This was a 0-1 effort without existing structures to build from. As a result, a series of workshops were run with internal design and product teams who articulated challenges when seeking to develop features with safety proactively in mind. Some examples of problems & opportunities identified were: 

• Need for risk severity tiers and types 

• Clearer set of data metrics, guardrails, and thresholds to implement and track

• Overlapping review processes with Brand, Legal and Compliance 

• Awareness of existing safety integrations & features 

Establishing a framework of the product development lifecycle

These problems and opportunities were mapped at different moments within the lifecycle of creating and building a new feature/product. This reflected different needs at different times, and pointed to a multi-pronged approach that broke down into: 

• Risk Evaluation and scoring system

• Recommendations plan

• Integrated safety metrics that teams are required to use

• Plug-and-play safety features like reporting, verification flows and pro-social nudges

Key Features

Safety Evaluation

The structural backbone of the company-wide program. This is an automated questionnaire for teams to fill out and receive customised recommendations based on their answers. Recommendations include: integration of existing safety user-facing features and machine-learning detections - a requirement when dealing with public facing user-generated content like photos, videos, and written text. 

Safety Risk Workshop Template

Workshop format that helps teams identify and mitigate against Safety Risks in their feature or product. This workshop employs the usual ‘diverge’ and ‘converge’ dynamics of other workshops, but has a distinctly Safety Risk angle to it. 

The innovative aspect of this tool was its use of Bumble Inc.’s own Trust & Safety policy as a foundation, transforming it into a repeatable & structured set of proactive questions. This created a more objective framework for teams to assess potential risks and considerations as they developed new features and projects, rather than relying on ad hoc judgement.

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Note: This discovery and programme development took place across 2023–24, at the same time that custom and enterprise GPTs and similar tools were beginning to see broader adoption. If approached today, the method for identifying problems and opportunities would remain largely the same. However, the solutions and tooling would likely lean more heavily on AI-driven approaches.