Walk along a tropical shoreline and you’ll find thickets of mangroves where the sea meets the land. Their roots form a knotted shelter where juvenile fish hide from predators. Strip those mangroves out and the reef looks fine for a while. But without nurseries, young fish never reach maturity. A few years later, the reef collapses.
Every designer has felt it: that pang of frustration when you’re asked to make a product worse. Maybe it’s hiding a feature behind a paywall. Maybe it’s adding extra steps to the sign-up flow to capture more data. Maybe it’s cramming in additional ads in places you know will annoy people, just to squeeze out more revenue. It can feel like the opposite of what we signed up for. We’re here to improve things, not to degrade them.
The way we interact with the web today is surprisingly manual. Want to book a flight? You’ll probably head to a familiar airline’s website or open Google and type in your dates. If that site also offers hotel and car rental options, great—you might stay and book everything in one place. But more likely, you’re picky. So you go off searching for that perfect boutique hotel or the restaurant you’ve read about. Click by click, tab by tab, you stitch your trip together.
I recently watched a demo of a new AI-enabled recruitment tool. It used a synthetic avatar and voice to run a mock Zoom interview with a designer. Technically? Very slick. But something about the experience left me uneasy.
And no, it wasn’t the AI.
It starts, as these stories often do, with a bold vision.
A founder has an idea — one they’re convinced is going to change the game. It’s innovative. Disruptive. The kind of idea that turns heads and opens investor checkbooks. Before long, there’s money in the bank, a team in place, and the runway to bring this vision to life.
From the founder’s perspective, the stars are aligning. The idea has been validated — after all, someone just put money behind it. Now it’s just a matter of execution.
But this is where things often go wrong.
Peter Merholz recently published a thought-provoking article suggesting that “Product Management is UX Design.” While this may hold in certain contexts, I believe it’s largely meant to spark debate rather than capture a broad truth.