The first question I ask when a client talks to me about a digital product is not “what do you want it to do?” It’s “what specific problem does it solve for whom specifically?”
That uncomfortable question separates products that make sense from those that simply exist.
The Digital Product Is Not the Interface
There’s a tendency to talk about “product” when really we’re talking about screens. The interface — the buttons, the colors, the spacing — is just the most superficial layer of a digital product.
What makes a product actually work lives underneath:
- Information architecture: How content and features are organized so the user finds what they need without effort.
- User flows: The sequence of decisions and actions the user makes to achieve their goal, and how much friction exists at each step.
- Data model: How the information the product manages is structured and related.
- Technical performance: How fast it loads, what happens when there are errors, whether it works consistently across all devices.
All of that is product. And all of it is invisible to the user — until it fails.
Designing for the Real Use Case, Not the Ideal One
The most common error in product design is designing for the ideal user in the perfect scenario.
Ideal user: knows exactly what they want, has a fast connection, uses the right device, doesn’t get distracted, never makes mistakes.
Real user: arrives with doubts, gets interrupted, sometimes the battery is at 5%, makes mistakes and expects the system to be smart enough to help them recover.
Designing for the real user means anticipating error states, alternative flows, moments of doubt. It’s less glamorous than designing beautiful screens, but it’s what determines whether the product works in practice.
The Product as a System, Not a Collection of Pages
A well-built website or app is not a sum of screens: it’s a system with its own logic.
Each screen exists because it solves a specific need at a specific moment in the user journey. Each flow has a beginning, a goal, and a closing state. Each component has clear behavioral rules.
When this systemic vision is missing, the product grows organically and chaotically: pages are added without criteria, features are duplicated, navigation loses coherence. The result is a product that technically “exists” but that nobody uses with ease.
When It Makes Sense to Talk About Professional Product Design
Not in every project. A corporate website doesn’t need the same level of product rigor as a SaaS platform.
It makes sense when:
- There are recurring users who interact with the system regularly (not just “visit”).
- There are conversion, onboarding, or retention flows that are critical to the business.
- Functional complexity is starting to create real friction measurable in metrics.
- You’re planning to scale the product and need to establish principles before it grows in an uncontrolled way.
Good product design is, to a large extent, a work of subtraction: eliminating what has no reason to exist, simplifying what is unnecessarily complex, clarifying what generates confusion.
The interface that represents it well is the consequence, not the starting point.
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