How To: Design In Context
I'm not a product designer, but I play one for VC's.
This article includes experience-based advice regarding product development from a “brand person” perspective. Since I normally charge for consulting work in the same vein, I’m going to paywall half of the article.
I have at least five more articles in this series on designing/inventing/developing products, and several more articles in the pipeline on professional topics. I have articles about unprofessional topics, too. I’m making things up as a go along, but the goal is to provide a fair trade of ideas for a small fee, which also includes access to private chat forums where we can discuss the content of the articles. If you find this sort of advice useful in your work, become a paid subscriber.
Free subscribers will still get an occasional email (maybe of a favorite product when I find something you will like, or if I want to take a poll), and previews to paid articles.
If you aren’t already a subscriber and want to read more about me, along with some free advice, please see the article Playbook-itis.
Special thank you to everyone who pledged and paid to subscribe prior to this email. Your encouragement has been energizing. —Annie
I have no training in design, I have only ideas and opinions.
My design approach is rooted in two principals:
1. Things that make sense please me.
2. Things that are beautiful please me.
Sometimes those are the same thing, and sometimes they are not (which can be a source of great displeasure).
Context, problem-solving, gestures, pleasure—these topics come to mind when I think about making something useful and beautiful, which is my understanding of product design. I’m making a tool, that someone will use, to achieve some goal, in the best way possible, which makes them feel good.
This framework is useful in optimizing product design, and helps reason through the moral conundrum of participating in The Capitalist Machine. A personal challenge at this point is that I want to design a thing of such quality, that it will be the last one ever needed. I know it’s not unique, and worse: it’s terrible for business. Ever heard of repeat rate? Consumables? There’s a reason you don’t see gravestone startups. No, if anything startups should make their customers feel like they’ll live forever.
Startups, though, are not meant to live forever. I’ve learned that most startups are created with the overarching goal of an acquisition, which causes short-sighted decision making to beef up the next investor update. This is poison for your product, your brand, and in the worst cases this can be literal poison for your customers.
I might never accomplish it, but the “last one” challenge keeps me focused on longevity, because I don’t want to be a serial founder. I don’t want to inflate a business with a massive fundraise and a massive marketing effort to match so that I can show fast growth rather than focus on quality. Quality is sacred. It’s the promise made between two bartering individuals; truly a measure of one’s moral constitution. It’s the reason engineers in ancient Rome were made to stand under the bridges they designed while heavy wagons were first driven across. Who are you if not for your commitment to quality? Dead. My financial goal, if I were to ever to create a new business, is to have it make enough money for employees (myself included) to live comfortably, and offer me the flexibility to do other things with my life (make movies).
I love making hardware. I even prefer people who make things with their hands, because using tools is the most critical part of the human experience. Be cautious around people without callouses, burns, scars, and pigments staining their nails. It’s not because the people who do are morally superior*, it’s because they are the ones who will survive evolution, and you should mate. In the four years since $14bn worth of Chromebooks have entered the US school system, “educational technology has had no effect on scale, on reading outcomes, on reading difficulties, on equity issues,” and the tech elite have been sending their kids to tech-free Waldorf schools since the mid-80s.
With digital technology becoming so efficient, compressing hardware into soft (FWIW I didn’t hate the iPad commercial, I found the honesty refreshing), it’s causing a regressive split in the history of human evolution. Being exposed to too much of it prevents one from building critical thinking and problem-solving skills, keeps people ignorant to the realities of their fellow man (“It’s one banana, what could it cost?”), and it creates a dependence on technologically-induced dopamine. I’ve said before that a life lacking friction is that of a perpetual tadpole, and being chronically tethered to digital technology—constantly engaging, always downloading improvements for a more frictionless experience—will turn you into a soupy, sickly little protozoa with no hands at all. To reiterate: I like making things physical things.
Which reminds me: Don’t take a digital approach to physical product launches. It’s how Cybertrucks (December 2023—April 2024) happened. You simply cannot “ship” the minimally-viable version of a physical product, and make updates later, without causing incredible damage to your brand, your company, your customers, and innocent bystanders. It’s fascinating to see how much a consumer product startups (ostensibly existing to provide a physical goods) are willing to invest in digital product—research, testing, updates—while shoestring-ing the things their customers are actually purchasing and living with. It’s almost an “out of sight, out of mind” blind spot for companies, whose leadership is addicted to the gamification of the Shopify app, dinging each time an order is confirmed. There’s certainly a correlation between the distance leadership is from the physical product and the quality of that product.
Meanwhile, it’s clear that there are plenty of paying customers with incredibly low standards—how else could Shein be valued at $100 billion, and Temu 147 billion? Product quality is not always a blind spot, it’s clear that low product quality can be a critical part of the strategy, and synonymous with a successful brand. That’s not to say you shouldn’t be open to making improvements as time goes on, of course. Just don’t overpromise and underdeliver with V1, unless you want to be a spandex-shilling robber baron.
Quality is not instant, and you have to achieve it at scale. It’s terrifying to make thousands of something, and then send it off into the world where it is subject to not only digital human error, but human error in all three dimensions, the elements, the passage of time, politics, trends, and forces majeure. It takes patience, it takes thoroughness, it takes decisiveness, and it takes confidence to make a product. It takes trust in your partners—and not blind trust, you should really perform an audit.
The real surprise is that even if you do everything “right,” your product might not sell. Meanwhile, people who do everything wrong sell a lot. Capitalism is so random in that way.
When I develop a product, these are the things that keep me up at night.
I have not discovered a clean, repeatable method to inventing successful products, but I’ve had a front seat for enough to form some thoughts. It helps that I’ve seen a lot of unsuccessful product launches, too. Inventions don’t always begin with a distinguished hypothesis, or by identifying white space. The great thing about startups is that they are uniquely suited to take advantage of random sparks of genius—it’s expected that they take big swings in terms of product. I’ve heard the same complaint for over a decade about working with former L’Oreal employees