For Product teams, making good decisions is only possible with good information. Our understanding of users, technology, and the broader business context must be rooted in provable facts.

Everyone on the team should be able to understand and communicate the context, constraints, and strategy of a given design. We hold each other accountable for weak decisions and push each other to strengthen the work.

We are in a time of immense technological disruption. It is far to easy to let the power of technology overshadow the needs of the people who use our products, including our own needs in the design process. We have to shape our Products and Practice to make the most of AI, without losing the strengths we bring to the table.

Effective design turns our understanding of users into a product experience that resonates accordingly.

Product Design is executed in the broader context of a user, customer, company, and industry. Effective design will require balance to find the best solution given that context. If tradeoffs must be made, then those design decisions must be as explainable as any other.

Design has tremendous power to make things easy, but this can come at a price. And that price may not be realized right away, only downstream. It is the Product team’s responsibility use the tools of Design Thinking, Lean UX, User Research and so on to identify, assess, and manage those risks.