My process

I don’t believe in a rinse and repeat process for building products. That approach works for manufacturing, where assembly lines are designed for repeated output and the same steps producing the same results over and over. But when designing something from scratch each instance is different. The starting point may be different, the amount of information you have available and all the twists and turns will require an ability to adapt and pivot, not just follow the next step. Too often though I see the industry preaching a new step by step process and this becomes something we are measured against, as if that is what consists the basis of our skills over knowing what good product design is or our ability to make continued progress on a project.

The truth is, making products is far more messy, nuanced, chaotic and complex than a perfectly formulated siloed design process can account for. Which is why I don’t have a strict process that I just follow over and over again and lean on to get results. What I do have is experience and principles.

Underlying everything, I think the role of a product designer is to keep the product moving towards shipping and then refining the shipped experience. Design’s superpower is to make something tangible at every stage, something people can look at, play with, test and discuss. It helps define the vision and get the whole team aligned on something everyone can better understand. This becomes a consistent and unique way design can continuously contribute throughout a project.

The principles (in no particular order):

• Make the best decisions you can based on what you know right now. Ambiguity is always going to ebb and flow as you work on various products and features. You won’t always have the answers, the road to the next feature may not be clear but there is always some information you can use. It may range from intuition to objective data but the key is to keep moving and making decisions based on what information you have. You will rarely have a perfect situation where everything is known, if ever to be honest.
• Be creative, explore wild ideas, create discussions, look for new patterns and solutions. If anyone on the team has space to be an artist and creative its us designers and we should lean in to that when we can.
• Iterate, iterate, iterate. Make a version, the best version you can think of, share it to whoever you can or whoever you need to. Take some feedback leave some aside and design another version. Keep going, this never really stops, even after you ship. Design is a super powerful tool to drive ideas and influence the product direction by showing what that vision is and continuing to evolve it.
• Ensure people understand the narrative and product direction. This is an underrated one but after pitching many ideas I’ve learned that sometimes it’s not that people don’t believe in your idea it’s just that sometimes they didn’t follow the narrative, design comps or presentation. Learn from this and refine one of those things, re-pitch and lots of times the conversation is completely different. The understanding of a product is no different than a pitch deck, you need to accommodate it for your users.
• Spend as much time understanding the problem as possible. Try to internalize it and don’t rush to solutions. Don’t let the nerves take over.

How is AI changing this:

I can’t talk about process without talking about AI, truth is I think the above principles are going to evolve as we use AI more and more to build products. For example, AI’s ability to create prototypes extremely fast is going to drastically change how fast I can iterate, how many ideas I can explore and help me navigate all the ambiguity that we often find in the product world. But I also think that spending time to understand the problem space is still relevant and a core principle. As product designers (makers, design engineers, whatever the role changes to) understanding the space we are trying to innovate in doesn’t cease to be a need because we can vibe code something, but I do think how we get to that understanding will change and already is as AI becomes a great tool for brainstorming and collaboration. Things are changing pretty much daily so for now my main focus is to keep experimenting with, thinking about and learning all of this AI stuff.