Why the best Trust & Safety teams aren’t blockers – they’re product enablers

Trust & Safety has a branding problem. In too many organizations, it is still seen as the department of no: the team that arrives late in the process, raises red flags, adds friction, and slows down the launch timelines. Product teams want to ship. Commercial teams want growth. Leadership wants momentum. And Trust & Safety? Too often, it is treated as the function that gets in the way.

That reputation isn’t just unfair, it’s also bad for business.

When Trust & Safety is viewed as a blocker, teams end up working around it. They bring it in too late. They treat safety as a compliance hurdle instead of a design principle. And by the time real risks are identified, the choices are usually worse. Product teams can either delay the launch, accept the risk, or bolt on protections that feel clunky for users and frustrating for internal teams.

This is exactly the stereotype Emer Cassidy, Head of Trust & Safety at Zalando, wants to push back on. Cassidy, who was also previously in trust and safety and compliance leadership roles at Google, Meta, and TikTok, argues that the strongest T&S leaders do not define their job as stopping things from happening. They define it as helping the business move forward safely.

“You don’t want to be a group that people are trying to get by or sneak past,” she explains. “Instead, you want to be a really effective partner. And that’s how we make exciting product launches happen in a safe way.”

To this end, platforms need to turn Trust & Safety from a reactive enforcement function into a proactive partner in product development, user trust, and sustainable growth.

From “no” to “yes, this exciting product can happen”

Cassidy does not dismiss the frustration product teams sometimes feel when Trust & Safety enters the picture. In fact, she starts by acknowledging it.

Product managers, she says, are usually trying to build exciting, innovative things on a tight deadline. “They want to drive user growth, engagement and revenue, and they are often operating under intense pressure to get features into the market quickly.”

That makes it easy to see why late-stage safety requirements can feel like an unwelcome drag on momentum. “And we need to acknowledge that this can be challenging,” she adds.

But her answer is not for Trust & Safety teams to retreat, or to soften their standards. It is to change their posture. “We should never be a team that says no,” she says. “We shouldn’t be a team that’s trying to block launches. We should be a team that says, yes, this exciting product can happen. And how we do it safely is…”

That “yes” matters. It shifts Trust & Safety away from being framed as a veto point and toward being framed as a problem-solving partner. It also puts more responsibility on Trust & Safety teams themselves. If the default stance is no longer “that seems risky,” but “how could we do this in a safe and regulatory-compliant way?”, then safety leaders need to be more proactive, more collaborative, and, in Cassidy’s words, “quite creative.”

The real problem is often timing

One of Cassidy’s key points is that much of the tension between Trust & Safety and product teams is not really about values, but rather about timing.

When a team has spent months building a launch, aligning stakeholders, and working toward a deadline, it is never going to feel good if another function arrives late in the process and says several more things need to be done before launch. Even sensible safeguards can feel like roadblocks when they appear at the eleventh hour.

Cassidy has seen this problem repeatedly. As she explains, “It’s never been easy to get access up the funnel to product and engineering teams.” Too often, Trust & Safety isn’t involved at the ideation stage at all. By the time it enters the conversation, there is less room for thoughtful trade-offs and more pressure to patch issues quickly. 

This is why the best Trust & Safety teams don’t just argue for better decisions. They argue for earlier involvement.

Product enablement starts with understanding the business

For Cassidy, being a better partner to the business doesn’t mean giving teams whatever they want. It means understanding what they are actually trying to achieve.

“You need to build relationships, and you need to work hard to understand the business needs – whether that be growth, revenue, etc – and to advise the business based on what they are trying to achieve.”

That’s an important distinction because there is sometimes a lazy version of “alignment” in which Trust & Safety simply bends to commercial pressure. This is not what Cassidy advocates. Her point is that if a business goal is to grow the customer base, improve engagement, or launch a new feature category, Trust & Safety has to take that goal seriously in order to help the company achieve it safely. It cannot operate as if business realities are someone else’s problem.

This is one of the clearest ways the function shifts from reactive enforcement to proactive enablement. Instead of waiting for risk to materialize, or stepping in only when asked for approval, Trust & Safety becomes part of the process of balancing ambition with safeguards.

Safety should work for users, not just for policy teams

Cassidy also believes Trust & Safety needs to push the conversation beyond internal process and into product experience.

“I think you have to be creating safety experiences that are effective for users,” she says. “If you create a really clunky experience, that’s not success to me.”

This is an important standard. It suggests that Trust & Safety cannot measure success solely by whether a control exists. A control that frustrates users, interrupts flows unnecessarily, or feels bolted on at the last minute may technically reduce risk while still weakening the product.

For Cassidy, this is where the work becomes more nuanced than the old “allowed, not allowed” model. “Trust and safety needs to be creative,” she says, reflecting on how the field has evolved. Safety is no longer just a hammer. It has to be designed into the experience in a way that actually works.

This is another reason the “blocker” label is so unhelpful. It makes Trust & Safety sound like the opposite of product thinking, when in reality the most effective teams are doing exactly that: balancing friction, trust, usability, risk, and long-term platform health.

Good Trust & Safety work is often invisible, which is why leaders have to talk about it

Part of the issue is that it can be hard for Trust & Safety teams to celebrate or even communicate their wins.

“It’s very easy to move past your wins because there’s always a new problem to solve,” Cassidy says. She encourages teams not to let successful policies, escalations, or interventions disappear into the background just because another issue is already emerging.

And that advice is more strategic than it might first appear. Trust & Safety is one of those functions whose best work often goes unnoticed. Users don’t see the harm that was prevented. Product teams may not even fully grasp the downside that was avoided. Leadership may only focus on Trust & Safety when something goes wrong.

Cassidy repeatedly comes back to communication and storytelling as part of the answer. “Tell your leadership, talk about this because it’s really, really important,” she says.

She illustrates that point with an example from her time in advertising policy at Meta. During the opioid crisis, she recalls, the team found that a lot of low-quality addiction treatment centers were advertising on the platform. Her team’s response was to launch a policy requiring addiction treatment centers to be verified before they could advertise. She still sees it as one of the pieces of work she is most proud of, because it struck a balance: people could still find help through the platform, but with a greater level of assurance about the quality of the providers behind those ads.

It is a strong example because it shows Trust & Safety not as a blanket ban, but as careful intervention.

If teams avoid T&S, the culture is already broken

The heart of the problem is that if internal teams experience Trust & Safety as an obstacle, they will naturally try to minimize contact with it. They will bring it in late, present decisions as faits accomplis, or avoid engagement until there is no other option. At that point, even a good Trust & Safety team is stuck operating reactively.

Cassidy has seen the value of countering this dynamic through visibility. She explains that “in the past Trust & Safety has been a bit hidden, and the field suffered as a result.” When she joined Zalando, she went to team meetings with a presentation explaining Trust & Safety and how teams could engage with it.

That might sound simple, but culture change often starts with approachability. If Trust & Safety wants to be invited in earlier, it has to make itself easier to understand and easier to work with.

The first practical step? Go talk to people

If there was one practical step teams could take today to start shifting their organization’s mindset, it’s simply, “Go talk to people. Work on your elevator pitch,” Cassidy says. Trust & Safety work can easily become abstract, sprawling, or jargon-heavy when practitioners try to explain it. She believes that leaders must be able to describe the work clearly and quickly, in language that product teams, engineering teams, and executives can easily understand.

“Think about how you could describe trust and safety work, or in particular, your work to someone in a really easy-to-understand, digestible way,” she says. “And then take that and go and talk to people, go and talk to the product teams, the engineering teams, your leadership.”

Part of reframing Trust & Safety is changing how others see the function, but another part is changing how the function shows up: earlier, more clearly, and with a stronger grasp of the business problems it can help solve.

At its best, T&S helps organizations grow more sustainably by asking better questions sooner. It helps teams think through trade-offs. It pushes for safety measures that are effective for users. It protects against regulatory, reputational, and user-trust risks that can derail growth if ignored. And crucially, it does all of that without losing sight of the fact that businesses are trying to build, launch, and compete.

That is why the “department of no” label feels so outdated. The goal is to be ready to say yes, and then help the business figure out how to do it safely.