ShannonWeb Studios: Products Liability, A Managerial Perspective

Products Liability

Episode 1.2: What Is a Product? The Boundary Question That Matters More Than Ever

00:00 / 00:13:00

Is a hamburger a product, or a service? The law actually answers that one cleanly: restaurant food is a good by definition. But that clean answer is the exception, not the rule, and this episode uses it to set up one of products liability law’s hardest boundary problems: distinguishing goods from services under the “which predominates” test for genuinely mixed transactions, illustrated through a hair salon selling product alongside a styling service. It then pushes the test to its breaking point with software, SaaS subscriptions, and generative AI. Using the FAIR Framework’s Imagination lens, it argues that managers must anticipate where courts will draw lines the law hasn’t yet settled. The episode anchors this frontier question in a real March 2026 verdict, K.G.M. v. Meta, where a jury found Meta and Google negligent over social media’s addictive design, without ever having to decide whether a platform counts as a “product,” a case this series returns to throughout the semester.

Products Liability

Episode 1.1: The Map of Products Liability: Three Defects, Three Theories

00:00 / 00:12:14

When Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7 batteries started catching fire, the company faced a question every product manager eventually confronts: what kind of defect are we actually dealing with? This episode maps the foundational architecture of products liability law through the three ways a product can go wrong: manufacturing defects (unit-specific production errors), design defects (flaws built into an entire product line, illustrated through the Ford Pinto), and failures to warn (inadequate disclosure of known risks). Using the FAIR Framework’s Flexibility lens, the episode shows why each defect type demands a different managerial response; misdiagnosing the problem wastes resources and multiplies liability exposure. It closes by previewing a question that runs through the whole semester: how this decades-old taxonomy holds up against software, algorithms, and AI systems that resist tidy classification. When Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7 batteries started catching fire, the company faced a question every product manager eventually confronts: what kind of defect are we actually dealing with? This episode maps the foundational architecture of products liability law through the three ways a product can go wrong: manufacturing defects (unit-specific production errors), design defects (flaws built into an entire product line, illustrated through the Ford Pinto), and failures to warn (inadequate disclosure of known risks). Using the FAIR Framework’s Flexibility lens, the episode shows why each defect type demands a different managerial response; misdiagnosing the problem wastes resources and multiplies liability exposure. It closes by previewing a question that runs through the whole semester: how this decades-old taxonomy holds up against software, algorithms, and AI systems that resist tidy classification.