Hard-earned insights from leading 6 product design teams in tech
By Meem Nordin / September 30, 2024 / Reflections, Design Leadership
I’ve had the opportunity to lead 6 different product design teams in 2 tech companies. One is a leading consumer superapp tech company and the other is a B2B fintech Y Combinator startup.
While no two teams or companies are the same, product design teams often face similar types of challenges. Over the years, I’ve made many observations, but in this article, I’d like to share three hard-earned insights.
1. Designing the right thing vs. designing it right. It's critical to get both right.
I see two broad categories of responsibilities that a product design team needs to perform well:
- Figuring out what is the right thing to design
- Figuring out how to design it right
Each of these categories of responsibilities require different but complementary and important skill sets.
The responsibility of getting the design right is something that many product design teams are familiar with. Good design leaders can help guide the team design an experience that is easy-to-use and if the team is really good, even lovable.
If a team doesn’t get it right in the first version, an iterative product design process can progressively help them get it right for their customers.
The next type of product design capability is figuring out what is the right thing to design & build for their customers and for their market. This responsibility requires experience in product design strategy, ability to identify gaps in the market and in the product, figuring out which gaps are worth addressing and which are not, developing solid customer value propositions, communicating & executing the value proposition in the product in a way that resonates with customers.
Teams that lack this capability will risk building features & products that don’t add substantial value to customers and the business, costing the company valuable time & financial resources and worse, tanking retention and growth potential.
2. Products degrade incrementally over time
Without a conscious effort to prevent it, all products—including software—will degrade incrementally over time. This degradation happens so gradually that it may catch companies by surprise when it becomes obvious.
You may notice signs of product degradation in increasingly negative customer reviews or declining retention rates.
Incremental degradation can happen for various reasons:
- Cutting corners and relaxing standards. When teams start cutting small corners in areas that directly or indirectly impact the customer experience, it can degrade the product over time. This may happen intentionally to cut costs or chase short-term goals. While it’s important to cut down on unnecessary costs and wasteful spending, cutting costs in critical areas can harm the product and customer experience.
- Becoming out of touch with customers and the market. Degradation can also occur unintentionally when teams become too comfortable and stop paying attention to changes in the market or customer feedback. Product design teams must ensure they avoid getting stuck in a bubble and stay engaged with customer needs and market shifts.
- Reluctance to invest in product upgrades. When things are going well, companies may feel there is no need to take on product upgrades such as a UX or brand refresh, code refactoring to improve software loading speed for example or reluctance to prioritize minor technical bugs which will accumulate over time. Over time, this reluctance allows product and brand degradation to creep in, causing the product to be perceived by customers as being more outdated, sluggish and worse off than competitors.
- Accumulated tech and design debt. When allowed to grow unattended, tech and design debt will lead to incremental product degradation which impacts customer experience and the company’s reputation.
Design leaders need to work with stakeholders to educate them on the real risk of incremental product degradation. Regular design and brand audits—especially on core customer journeys and critical touchpoints—are crucial.
3. Design debt compounds
Whether a tech company is 5 months old or 5 years old, it will likely have some form of design debt. The risks of design debt include:
- Incremental product degradation. As mentioned earlier, design debt contributes to product degradation over time.
- Slowing down the execution. Design debt slows down a company’s ability to ship features and products, making it less competitive and slower to adapt to emerging customer needs and market changes.
- Non-cohesive brand and product experience. Design debt, particularly in the form of a poorly functioning design system, results in non-cohesive customer experiences and impacts brand reputation.
One of the responsibilities of design leaders is to work with stakeholders to ensure design debt is addressed and not ignored. Left unchecked, design debt compounds over time, becoming harder to manage and resulting in companies becoming less competitive.
In my view, it’s critical for companies to view design and tech debt as a form of organizational debt. It’s an important business problem to solve, especially as a company scales.