Well-Designed: Complete Summary of Jon Kolko’s Design Process for Creating Products People Love

Introduction: What This Book Is About

Well-Designed: How to Use Empathy to Create Products People Love by Jon Kolko presents a powerful and repeatable design process for product management. This book teaches how to identify critical insights about people and translate these insights into meaningful, emotionally engaging products that people love. Kolko, a Vice President of Consumer Design at Blackboard Inc. and founder of the Austin Center for Design, argues that design should be viewed as a strategic competency that transcends surface beauty and form, becoming a way of thinking about problems and people.

The book is for anyone involved in creating and providing products or services to customers, including practicing designers, product developers, and those approaching product management from marketing or brand management perspectives. It offers a structured approach to product development that is centered on empathy and built on deep research with real people in their natural environments. Readers will learn how to apply a design-focused sensibility to deliver useful and delightful products, ultimately leading to unprecedented media fascination and consumer adoption.

Kolko emphasizes that empathy is the key to building meaningful products and can be taught and learned. The book guides readers through the complexity of human and qualitative research to arrive at the simplicity of a new offering, showing how a product’s personality can be established through rigorous ideation. Ultimately, this comprehensive summary will provide a complete overview of Kolko’s design process, detailing each step and providing actionable advice for creating well-designed products that resonate deeply with users.

Introduction: From Design Thinking to Design Doing

This chapter highlights the dramatic shift in consumer expectations toward products that are simple, robust, and delightful, a stark contrast to the complexities of past technology. Traditional product development processes, like the “product requirements document” from the 1980s, are outdated and fail to deliver on these modern demands, leading to endless arguments about features and time-to-market. Current agile methods, while promoting speed, often result in incomplete and “half-baked” products, creating anxiety among developers and marketers who feel the process lacks structure.

The Rise of Design-Driven Companies

Companies like Nest, Square, and Airbnb represent a significant change in consumer product development by focusing on deep, meaningful engagement rather than just adding features or boosting sales. Nest, for example, transformed the unexciting heating and cooling market with a “sexy” and “beautiful” learning thermostat that CNET reviewers experienced “startling joy” using. These companies succeed because their products are the result of a design process that imbues products with personality or “soul,” making them feel less like manufactured artifacts and more like good friends.

A New Way of Developing Products

Design, traditionally associated with aesthetics and usability, is redefined as a powerful way of getting things done that drives innovation and emotional engagement. In many organizations, designers’ roles are often prescribed, limited to skinning products developed by others, leading to a lack of strategic view. This book champions a design process centered on empathy and deep research with real people in their natural environments, generating meaningful insights into human behavior. It is an iterative process that uses visual thinking to explore future possibilities and celebrates creativity across all roles in product development.

Key Elements of the Design Process

Kolko outlines four key elements of this powerful and repeatable design process that product managers can apply:

• Determine a product-market fit by seeking signals from communities of users.
• Identify behavioral insights by conducting ethnographic research.
• Sketch a product strategy by synthesizing complex research data into simple insights.
• Polish the product details using visual representations to simplify complex ideas.
  This end-to-end process provides specific, proven methods and techniques for conceiving, designing, and producing better products.

The Philosophy of Design-Led Product Management

A core argument of the book is that designers can make great product leaders, and product leaders should adopt a design-focused sensibility. Nondesigners can easily adopt this design process and way of thinking, which is becoming increasingly necessary with the rise of digital technology. A design approach to product management is the most effective in both driving market fit and identifying behavioral insight, focusing on human feelings and experiences rather than just utility. This empathetic approach allows product managers to understand what people want, need, and desire, crafting products that genuinely help and delight them.

1: By Design

This chapter introduces Joe McQuaid, a chief product officer at the small start-up LiveWell, who is tasked with pivoting the company’s direction after a period of failure. Joe’s background as a senior interaction designer positions him uniquely to lead product development, emphasizing his shift from engineering toward understanding people. The narrative follows Joe as he grapples with defining “what a product actually is” and how to successfully lead product development from a design-focused perspective.

The Scope of a Product: Beyond the Physical

Defining a product extends beyond its physical form. While traditional “hard goods” like a couch or a lamp are clearly products, digital goods complicate this definition. A phone, for instance, serves primarily as a conduit for digital content, and its physical presence is often less significant than the digital photos, emails, and apps it contains. The “product” in a digital world becomes amorphous, referring to the software applications that help users accomplish specific goals, such as Facebook’s mobile product enabling users to connect emotionally or waste time.

What is Product Management?

Product managers are in charge of a product’s entire life cycle, from identifying goals and overseeing its creation to understanding its market performance. Unlike project management, which focuses on dates and budgets, or product advertising, which aims to inform consumers, product management is about becoming content experts who deeply care about what the product does and how it does it. This role requires articulating a clear vision and ensuring that builders align with that vision, ultimately focusing on a good fit between a product, a person, and the market.

Product-Market Fit: Macro View

Product-market fit describes the broad relationship between a product and the market, encompassing competitors, stakeholders, suppliers, and distributors. It considers the financial success and market adoption of a product, acknowledging that a market may not be ready for a certain technology, as seen with GPS systems or microwave ovens which took decades to gain widespread cultural acceptance. This fit is also contextual to geographic region, time, cost, and execution, and can be influenced by infrastructure limitations, like the “last mile” problem in cable delivery.

Person-Product Fit: Micro View

Person-product fit focuses on the individual’s experience with a product, encompassing features, evoked emotions, style, integration ease, and the product’s ability to help a person achieve both utilitarian and aspirational goals. This fit represents a micro view of the world, preparing product managers for detailed and tactical decisions. The focus is on understanding specific user wants, needs, and desires, ensuring the product resonates deeply on a personal level.

Design Thinking: A User-Centered Approach

The design approach to product management emphasizes a user-centered philosophy, prioritizing decisions that support the people who will use the product over business drivers or technological advancements. Unlike traditional marketing or engineering approaches, design thinking uses a human-centric lens to resolve conflicts and prioritize decisions. For example, a design-focused product manager might delay a product launch to resolve usability issues, prioritizing user experience over internal schedules, even if it creates organizational challenges. This approach implies a broad philosophy that champions users in all aspects of product building, often requiring the product manager to navigate internal organizational silos.

Characteristics of Design-Led Product Management

Designers bring unique qualities to product management, including an optimistic view of the future, a skeptical view of technology for technology’s sake, and a process that is simultaneously iterative, divergent, and integrative. They learn to trust their informed intuition and move forward with incomplete data, accepting the inherent risks in driving innovation. Visual artifacts serve as their primary communication mechanism, making ideas accessible to everyone involved. This approach humanizes technology, ensuring it fits appropriately into human interactions and helps people achieve their goals and dreams.

Embracing Integrative Thinking and Innovation Risk

Successful leaders, as described by Roger Martin, exhibit integrative thinking—the capacity to hold two opposing ideas simultaneously and creatively resolve the tension into a superior new one. This approach allows product managers to navigate complex decisions, embracing the “in-between” ideas. Design-led product management also inherently involves innovation risk, the chance that a new product or service may fail. While failures like Apple’s Power Mac G4 Cube demonstrate the potential repercussions, designers learn to make informed intuitive leaps, knowing that larger risks can lead to more significant and obvious successes.

Integrating Design Thinking into Product Management

While “lean” methodologies advocate for rapid development of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to test and iterate quickly, design-led product development pursues a different, more reflective, contemplative, and methodical approach. This process encourages “marinating and stewing” ideas, exploring and dreaming, rather than just optimizing for speed. The table highlights key transitions:

• Traditional: Focuses on what the market seems to need.
• Lean: Focuses on what people say.
• Design: Focuses on what people do.
  Design embraces outliers, views technology skeptically as a means to an end, operates in a highly visual culture, attempts to provoke market behavior, and defines value in terms of emotion.

2: Product-Market Fit: Finding Broad Appeal

This chapter delves into product-market fit as a crucial component of product development, distinct from behavioral insights. Joe McQuaid, leading LiveWell, aims to understand the health and wellness market to carve out a viable space for their new software-based tool. His goal is to gain enough confidence in a direction to then engage with real people, focusing on understanding broad community trends and market forces before solidifying product functionality.

What is “The Market”?

“The market” is an amorphous idea encompassing a complex ecosystem of:

• The community: Both paying and non-paying individuals who interact with the product and influence its reputation.
• Customers: Those who perceive enough value to pay for the product, holding high expectations for quality, service, and value.
• Competitors: Companies offering similar products that will analyze and react to market disruptions.
• Trends: Market tendencies over time that can lead to larger events like new laws or acquisitions.
• Policies: Market-led artificial constraints (e.g., Apple’s App Store rules that can subjectively reject apps).
• Laws: Government-led artificial constraints that can limit or defeat a product’s market entry.
  Achieving product-market fit involves launching a product in a manner that gels with all these facets, ensuring it aligns with the intricate web of market constraints, including timing.

Heyride: A Case Study in Market Fluctuations

The case of Heyride, a ride-sharing application launched in Austin, Texas in 2012, illustrates the complexities of product-market fit. Heyride aimed to disrupt the traditional taxicab industry by allowing individuals to offer their cars as taxis via a mobile app. This aligned with the growing trend of collaborative consumption or the “sharing economy.” However, Heyride faced significant challenges, including a cease and desist letter from the City of Austin for violating taxi regulations, ultimately leading to its acquisition by SideCar, which also struggled to operate in Austin. Brian Romanko, formerly CTO of Heyride, noted that existing policies often become “protective shields” for incumbents and advised focusing on user growth and passionate advocates to drive policy change rather than directly confronting regulations.

Seeking Signals from the Market

Product managers must actively track signals in the market—small pieces of data that, when thoughtfully interpreted, drive market strategy. These signals can come from press releases, user interface decisions, or competitive blog posts. Interpreting these signals is subjective and carries risk, but it’s essential for building insights around a product vision. The key is to select signals that are useful for building insights while shrugging off overwhelming distractions.

Ignoring Competitive Functionality

It is crucial to avoid using competitors’ product functionality as a primary benchmark for product development, despite the temptation. Copying features is detrimental for three main reasons:

• Development efforts are zero-sum games: Focusing on parity means neglecting unique innovations, leading to a “race to the bottom” in features, similar to pricing wars.
• Added complexity diminishes user experience: More features exponentially increase the time users take to make decisions, as described by Hick’s Law.
• Product character is irreproducible: A product’s unique character is shaped by company values, culture, and specific employees, which cannot be copied simply by replicating features. The customer service and trust associated with Zappos, for instance, are deeply tied to its culture, not just its inventory.
  Instead, focus on the community’s response to the competition and the competition’s engagement with technological advancements.

Embracing Signals from the Community

The richest source of market signals comes from observing shifts in attitudes, changes in rules, and challenging of conventions within a community. These changes indicate evolving values and offer valuable product insight. The response of the Tumblr community to Yahoo’s acquisition—with 72,000 blogs switching to WordPress in an hour—is a powerful example of a community reacting to perceived changes in platform values. Similarly, the Digg community’s revolt against censorship of HD DVD decryption code forced the site founder to reverse policy, demonstrating the pivotal role of community shifts in shaping product decisions. To understand these shifts, product managers must immerse themselves in the community.

Absorbing Patterns of Technological Advancement and Design

Design helps humanize technology, a process that is easier when the target market believes the technology will help them. Tracking market signals reveals how widespread this belief has become. Examples like the cultural acceptance of Bluetooth headsets or the pervasive nature of the computer mouse demonstrate how initially strange technologies become normal over time. Product managers should actively seek out “technological research that’s not generally known”—published in niche journals and presented at esoteric conferences—to catch early signals of technologies before they become mainstream products. This slow process of technological humanization provides valuable insights for product development, enabling proactive strategic action rather than reactive feature-for-feature responses.

Frameworks to Synthesize Product-Market Signals

After gathering signals, the next step is to synthesize them into actionable insights. Joe, leading LiveWell, uses thinking artifacts like whiteboards to develop frameworks that place broad constraints around a product direction, aiming to understand the market space without committing to specific functionality. His team aligns around a vision: “Help people understand their own health and wellness.” These artifacts, while visually complex, serve to inform strategy and are not merely for presentation.

Developing a Value-Goal Statement

A value-goal statement frames the value a product strives to deliver, speaking to human characteristics like love, connection, respect, or pride. This value differentiates a product in the market. Instead of thinking about utilitarian value (“helps people find information”), focus on emotional value: “What can someone feel after using or acquiring your product that he couldn’t feel before?” For LiveWell, this means helping people feel more connected with their body rhythms and more in control of their mental health. This exercise forces an honest assessment of a brand’s promise and identifies key emotional facets for product differentiation.

Describing the Community with a 2×2 Matrix

A 2×2 matrix is a simple diagramming technique to synthesize product-market signals and understand communities. The process involves:

• Listing community segments: Joe’s team identified 16 communities in health and wellness, such as “Endurance triathletes” and “Yoga students.”
• Identifying factual and emotional attributes: Differentiate communities based on attributes like “quantity of population,” “cost necessary to participate,” “social stigma of joining,” or “accompanied by anxiety.”
• Sketching the matrix: Place communities on a 2×2 grid based on two selected attributes (e.g., “quantity of population” vs. “accompanied by introspection”).
  This visual tool helps to gain a sense of the market space, identify potential opportunities or areas to avoid, and understand how various communities intersect. The goal is playful exploration and informing broad trajectory rather than definitive answers.

Playing “What If?”

“What if?” provocations are a generative design activity that involves exploring multiple potential futures for market strategy. Unlike engineering, which is reductive, design encourages examining variations of ideas. By asking questions such as, “What if Yellow Cab releases a similar app?” or “What if users don’t trust our product offering?,” product managers can envision new scenarios and plan preemptive actions. This type of thinking allows for strategic, rather than merely reactive, responses to potential competitive moves or market challenges.

Imagining Losing to Develop a Defensive Strategy

A powerful strategic exercise is to imagine your product losing miserably to a new competitive offering. Start by visualizing your product alongside a hypothetical competitor’s in a store setting, and then tell a story about why shoppers chose the competitor. This involves analyzing aspects like messaging, features, pricing, brand reputation, or packaging. By writing a fake press release for the competitor’s successful launch and a fictional article about your product’s failure, you can identify the weaknesses in your own strategy that allowed the competitor to succeed. This exercise provides a scaffold for a defensive product strategy, allowing you to proactively address vulnerabilities.

3: Behavioral Insights: Identifying Latent Needs and Desires

This chapter shifts focus from broad market trends to individual behaviors, aiming to gain deep behavioral insights. Joe McQuaid, at LiveWell, realizes his initial focus on personal tracking might be too narrow after observing a yoga instructor’s class. He discovers that participants are more concerned with mental well-being and minimizing anxiety than with tracking physical impacts, highlighting the importance of observing actual behavior in context rather than relying on assumptions or hypothetical discussions.

Observing Human Behavior

Gaining behavioral insight requires spending time with people who will use your product and watching them perform their activities in their real environments. The goal is to both understand and empathize. To optimize this process, product managers should:

• Build a behavioral profile based on assumptions about what people currently do, why, where, how frequently, and when they do it. This serves as a starting point, acknowledging that initial assumptions are often wrong.
• Focus on real-time observation: This is distinct from interviews or focus groups, which tend to gather retrospective or hypothetical information. The aim is to capture what people actually do, not what they say they do.

Gaining Empathy and Understanding

Behavioral research serves two distinct, though often intertwined, goals:

• Understanding is about gaining knowledge: This involves learning facts about a context (e.g., microfinance in South Africa) to identify “low-hanging fruit” design opportunities where existing systems have clear flaws.
• Empathy is about acquiring feelings: This aims to approximate what it feels like to be another person. It involves putting oneself into similar situations, even through role-playing or simulating physical conditions (e.g., taping fingers to simulate arthritis to understand an 85-year-old’s experience). The more immersive the experience, the closer one gets to genuine empathy, which provides richer, harder-to-explain insights.

Gathering Behavioral Signals

The process for gathering behavioral signals is straightforward and involves:

• Establishing and articulating a focus: A succinct description of the research scope helps identify the appropriate context and guides conversations.
• Preparing open-ended questions (but trying not to use them): Develop 10 broad questions that provoke action and direct conversation towards reality, serving as a mental role-play and a backup.
• Getting in context and recording everything: Conduct research in the actual environment where behavior occurs, capturing audio, pictures, and video.
• Asking to see examples: Ground conversations in action by asking participants to demonstrate activities or use tools.
• Asking to try it: When observing novel situations, ask to perform the activity oneself to gain valuable experience and push closer to empathy.
• Watching at the extremities: Seek out anomalies, outliers, failures, or unique behaviors from diverse participants to uncover provocative new frames of understanding.

Learning from Signals of Product Usage

For existing products, insights can be gleaned from usage data in two ways:

• Broad usage patterns (analytics data): Examining aggregate data (clicks, event flows) highlights where people change their minds or which buttons are used most. This data shows what is happening but not why.
• Specific one-on-one evaluation (think-aloud usability tests): Formalizing usability tests around observed broad patterns allows users to verbalize their thoughts while performing tasks. This helps understand why users make specific decisions, complementing large-scale data with qualitative depth.
  These methods require intimate interaction with users, moving beyond abstract data to engage with real human experiences, which can be challenging but ultimately rewarding.

Frameworks to Synthesize Behavioral Insights

After collecting behavioral data, rigorous interpretation is key to identifying needs and insights. Joe’s team, for instance, transcribed research verbatim and “exploded” it into individual utterance cards, then organized them into categories on a “product synthesis wall.” This externalization is crucial for discovering hidden connections, patterns, and anomalies across data, allowing the team to “marinate in the work” and question preconceived understandings.

Interpreting to Identify Needs

Interpretation to identify needs focuses on uncovering areas where current products or services fall short. For example, observing subway users struggling with ticket kiosks or juggling belongings reveals unmet needs like the desire for simpler processes or surfaces to place items. This type of interpretation leads to safe interpretations, where the observation directly points to both the problem and its solution, resulting in small innovation risk.

Interpreting to Identify Insights

Interpretation to identify insights aims for provocative statements of truth about human behavior, lifestyle choices, aspirations, and desires. Unlike needs, insights involve a large amount of inference between observations and interpretations. For instance, observing subway riders reading or working might lead to insights about their desire for personal space or focused productivity. These interpretations carry higher innovation risk because they do not directly identify a problem or solution, but they are the source of innovation and, when accurate, can tap into powerful human motivators.

The Product Synthesis Wall

A product synthesis wall is an invaluable tool for externalizing research data from heads and laptops, creating a tactile, collaborative, and highly visual representation. Its primary goal is to discover hidden connections and outliers in a large body of data. Jon Freach highlights three reasons for its criticality: it provides a common space for team collaboration, signals the importance of the work to the organization, and enables forced comparison of information and dialogue, essential for sensemaking.

Transcribing and Exploding Research Data

The process starts with transcribing each research session verbatim, a tedious but crucial step that forces a “meta-analysis” and integrates interview contents into the researcher’s worldview. After transcription, the research is “exploded” into a nonlinear, modular form (e.g., individual 2.75″ x 4.25″ notes) by copying paragraphs into a spreadsheet, adding participant initials and unique identifiers, and then merging them into printable labels. These individual notes are then placed on the wall, allowing them to be moved around freely to find patterns and anomalies.

Identifying Patterns and Anomalies

With notes on the wall, the next step is to read each note and highlight interesting elements, such as surprising details or those with emotional, financial, or logistical impact. Physically move similar notes together to identify patterns across different participants, even if it means losing individual participant context. Name these emerging patterns with rich, behavioral intent names (e.g., “People seem concerned by their stressful jobs, but they don’t seem to do anything to fix their situations”). While product ideas may naturally arise, the primary goal at this stage is to develop and extract insights about why people behave as they do. This process is time-consuming, typically taking 20-30 hours for 8-10 participants.

Visualizing Behavior Across Time

As patterns emerge from the data, product managers can visualize behavior across time by drawing simple diagrams. These diagrams, created on whiteboards or butcher paper, use circles for stages and lines with arrowheads for connections, representing flows of data, emotions, and decisions. These visualizations can span seconds (e.g., user goal achievement) or reference phases of a person’s life or career. Their purpose is to represent time-based behavior observed in the collected data, providing a deeper understanding of dynamic human interactions.

Making Succinct Observational Statements

After identifying patterns and visualizing behaviors, the next step is to make succinct observational statements. These statements generalize findings from the research participants to a larger population, even if they are biased. They should be observations, not solutions, and subtly concerned with both behavior and time. For example, Joe’s statement, “People seem concerned by their stressful jobs, but they don’t seem to do anything to fix their situations,” identifies a state of mind and a causal chain, serving as a bridge to extracting insights.

Extracting Insights

Insights are provocative statements of truth about human behavior, presented as facts but derived from inferences. To extract insights, take an observational statement and ask “Why?” The answer is an inference, a guess that, while potentially wrong, serves as the source of innovation. For example, the inference “People are generally aware of the stress in their jobs, but aren’t specifically aware of the stress at any given moment or day. They feel the cumulative emotional burden of stress only after it’s too late to do anything about it” transforms an observation into a declarative truth about human motivation. These authoritative statements then lead to product constraints that dictate how a product or service should act and feel. The larger the inferential leap, the riskier but also more unexpected and differentiated the innovation.

Communicating Your Results

Communicating behavioral research results effectively is crucial, whether for team alignment, client engagement, or job qualification. Instead of typical spreadsheets or bullet-point slides, use pictures with real quotes to provide context and intent. Emotions are best conveyed through time-based media like video clips, comic strips, or timelines, offering a baseline and point of comparison. Interpretations should be illustrated with visual diagramming (maps or charts) to show provocative connections. Finally, communicate the implications of these interpretations through sketches, translating data into actionable design ideas. This approach offers an incomplete vision that invites audience participation, making the future more tangible.

4: Product Strategy: Sketching a Playbook of Emotional Value

This chapter focuses on developing a design strategy as a long-term plan for taming technology and realizing the value proposition of products and services. Joe McQuaid at LiveWell, with his clear product vision, now needs to formalize this strategy to guide his expanding team. He understands the challenge of communicating the “feeling” or “soul” of a product to developers, recognizing that features alone are not enough for success.

Understanding Design Strategy

A design strategy complements and intersects with business and technology strategies, acting as a lens focused on how best to humanize technology. It outlines a path to realizing value, emphasizing the minimization of technological seams to ensure a positive user experience. Josh Norman, previously at Procter & Gamble, highlights that designers in large companies operate strategically, using intuition and empathy alongside structured processes to influence business choices and simplify complexity. A design strategy is fundamentally a form of storytelling, illustrating how technology disappears and people experience a positive future.

Formalizing Design Strategy as an Artifact

Unlike often scattered or spoken strategies in start-ups, a design strategy must be formalized in an artifact for it to be remembered, believed, and acted upon. This artifact should be more engaging than a conventional PowerPoint presentation. Kolko suggests using a large, floor-to-ceiling timeline of value-based activities displayed prominently, which can communicate both vision and realism by showing the road map for achieving strategic results. This visual approach highlights that strategy is long-term and requires patience, becoming a powerful reminder of purpose for the entire company.

Key Artifacts of a Design Strategy

A comprehensive design strategy combines three crucial artifacts into a single tool:

• An emotional value proposition: Defines what someone will feel after using the product.
• A concept map: Visually shows relationships between conceptual sections of the product.
• A product road map: A horizontal timeline of capability and strategy changes.
  Together, these artifacts serve as a powerful reminder of purpose, giving teams a reason to go to work and connecting daily tasks to a grander, more purposeful intent.

Identifying the Emotional Value Proposition

The emotional value proposition defines what a user will feel after using your product, moving beyond simple utility. While Google’s value proposition focuses on “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” an emotional value proposition for LiveWell states: “After using LiveWell, people will feel more connected with their body rhythms and will feel more in control of their mental health.” This emotional promise becomes a critical differentiator, informing product decisions and acting as a vetting criterion for new features and company organization. It pushes companies to articulate deeper human connections rather than just practical functions.

Developing a Product Stance

The product stance is the attitude or personality your product takes, influencing features, language, imagery, and design qualities. This highly subjective quality is manufactured and designed, often through anthropomorphism, where users naturally assign human characteristics to inanimate objects. To define a product stance, product managers should:

• Imagine the product as a person: What kind of person would it be? How would it react in anxious situations?
• Identify aspirational emotional traits: For example, Lexus aims for “luxurious, sensual, coy, aloof, elegant, smooth, romantic, and slightly out of reach,” while Mini Cooper exhibits “childlike wonder, carelessness, and lightness; spirited, lighthearted, playful, and free.”
• Establish emotional requirements: These “sentences of fact” dictate every product, quality, usability, marketing, and design decision, serving as the “soul” of the product that cannot be cut. Examples for Lexus include: “Our product will always be revered in a crowd,” or “Our product will always tempt users to do slightly illogical things.” Joe’s LiveWell aims to be “supportive, lighthearted, warm, dependable, and casual,” leading to requirements like: “Our product will converse with the user in chatty, natural, conversational language.”

Product Stance Depends on Framing and Play

A strong product stance leverages framing (an active perspective about a situation, person, or product) and play (exploration for its own sake) to create a sense of opportunity. When a new frame is assigned to a product, it develops an autonomous personality. If this personality is consistent and credible, the user experiences a rich interaction, and the aspirational emotional traits can transfer to the user. For example, Burger King’s “Whopper Sacrifice” campaign exhibited a highly irreverent product stance that transferred to its users, while MailChimp’s whimsical humor (e.g., monkey arms falling off if screen is stretched too wide) supports its playful friend persona. These non-utilitarian functionalities are purposefully designed to enhance emotional appeal and reinforce the product’s character.

Considering Analogous Situations

A key part of design strategy involves understanding analogous emotional experiences. This means thinking about insights and goals identified through research (e.g., “People want to stay healthy with minimal effort” or “Safely treat a disease”) and describing the uniquely human interactions and emotions involved. Then, product managers should consider comparable situations that have nothing to do with the original context. For instance, the goals and interactions related to treating a disease (remembering to take a pill, feeling confident of progress, checking in with a professional, understanding treatment plans) can be analogous to training for a marathon or gardening. By analyzing the artifacts and processes that support people in these analogous situations (e.g., tracking devices, calendars, support groups, inspirational magazines), product managers can steal and repurpose ideas for their new product, leveraging the brain’s ability to use analogy for innovation. This technique encourages broadening one’s worldview beyond their immediate industry.

5: Product Vision: Crafting the Product Details

This chapter focuses on defining the product vision by crafting intricate product details, serving as a bridge between strategic intent and tangible execution. Joe McQuaid at LiveWell grapples with the transition from a strong product idea to a concrete, yet functionally complete, application. He remembers past struggles to communicate the “soul” of a product to developers, highlighting the need to solidify the product’s essence beyond just features.

Defining the Product

Unlike physical products, which are easily understood through their tangible boundaries and features, digital products are elusive and difficult to fully grasp in their entirety. There are no easy metrics to measure their size (e.g., lines of code, number of screens), and inconsistent visual elements can go unnoticed. As a product owner, it is crucial to have an accurate mental model of your product, understanding its size, features, code, and visual consistency. A product concept map becomes a critical tool for managing this complexity, offering a visual abstraction of screens, features, flows, or people, allowing for a definitive understanding of scope and consistency at a glance.

Building a Product Concept Map

A product concept map visually persuades audiences by educating them and helping them make sense of your vision. To create one:

• List nouns and verbs: Extract language describing people, artifacts, systems, processes, actions, and reactions from your product stance and emotional value proposition.
• Order lists by emotional value: Prioritize nouns and verbs based on their value to the user or their importance in driving desired outcomes.
• Sketch the main armature: Create a sentence connecting key nouns and verbs (e.g., “LiveWell helps people learn about their body rhythms and mental health by giving them an easy way to track their feelings…”). Represent nouns as circles and connecting verbs as lines.
• Add missing nouns and verbs: Integrate additional words (e.g., SMS, alerts) to refine the map, connecting them logically to the existing diagram.
  This iterative process, moving from sentences to diagrams, serves as the backbone for visually representing your product’s conceptual framework.

Using the Product Concept Map Effectively

While an initial product concept map can be complex and overwhelming to new audiences, its power lies in its strategic introduction over time. Joe’s final map (Figure 5-3), though comprehensive for him, needs to be simplified and introduced gradually to others. Begin with a very simplified version (Figure 5-4) to introduce the core concept, then progressively add layers of detail (Figure 5-5, Figure 5-6) over weeks or months. The goal is not a grand “unveiling” but rather a slow, methodical, and purposeful organizational change through design proxy. The map becomes part of the organizational language, a shared understanding that acts as a proxy for complex discussions and helps rally participants around the product vision, allowing strategic product work to shape the company’s dialogue.

Sketching the Hero Flows

To solidify the product vision, sketch the “hero flows”—the main, idealized paths a user takes through the system to achieve their goals. This visual representation draws the interface a user will see and experience, explicitly ignoring edge cases or less ideal paths. The process involves:

• Creating a list of verb-noun activity pairs: Cover the entire product life cycle, from purchase to discard.
• Identifying core hero flows: Mark the most common, idealized, and relevant product usage pairs (e.g., “First-Time Use,” “Everyday Use” for LiveWell).
• Writing stories for each flow: Describe step-by-step how a user successfully completes the activities, being pragmatic yet aspirational in technology use.
• Drawing the hero flows: Use simple sketches (one piece of paper per step) to visualize the product interface.
  These hero flows act as bridges between conceptual product vision and tactical product definition, clarifying functionality, interactions, and product stance. They are iterative “thinking artifacts” for exploring ideas.

Defining the Visual Mood

The visual mood of a product—communicated through color, typography, composition, balance, saturation, and imagery—is a crucial and obvious piece of emotional design. To define it, product managers should:

• Revisit emotional requirements: For LiveWell, requirements include “chatty, natural, conversational language,” “anticipate negative emotional reactions,” “feel less loneliness and more togetherness,” and “always be affirming.”
• Think metaphorically about related situations, places, objects, and people: For example, “casual conversation” might evoke a car or couch, while “sunny togetherness” might evoke yellow colors or skin tones.
• Abstract these ideas into visual qualities: Translate concepts like “smiling” to “warm, direct, engaging, organic” or “hugging” to “joining together, warm, embraced.”
• Develop visual mood boards: Collect images, colors, shapes, textures, materials, and patterns that match these abstract qualities.
  These mood boards help visual designers clarify fuzzy conversations about aesthetics and emotions, setting a thematic tone for the product’s visual language and ensuring alignment with its emotional goals.

Exploring, Through Iteration and Variation

Iteration and variation are two fundamental principles of the design process.

• Iteration: Involves making informed changes to an existing design, often provoked by user testing or internal critique. It is a pursuit of perfection that refines details within an established framework. While the first pass captures the essence of an idea, subsequent iterations solidify details, leading to a sense of ownership that can make letting go of ideas difficult.
• Variation: Explores alternatives to an idea, moving the design “left or right” rather than forward or backward. This is not productive in a typical engineering sense, as most variations will be rejected, but they act as “provocations for what-if scenarios.” The A-B-C-Q approach to variation involves creating expected variants (A, B, C) and then a “wild or surprising jump” (Q) that purposefully rejects constraints, leading to risky but exciting innovations. Both iteration and variation are crucial for allowing design to work effectively and are not a “waste of time.”

Recruiting People to the Product Vision

Recruiting people to the product vision is arguably the most important part of the entire design process. Once concept maps, hero flows, and mood boards are created, they must be shared effectively. David Merkoski of Greenstart uses massive, semi-permanent posters (e.g., 30 feet wide by 15 feet high) in public office spaces to communicate complex product strategies and visions. This physical artifact serves as a “model of a complex business strategy,” allowing it to act as a proxy for conversation and recruit people to the strategic vision without direct interaction. Product managers should:

• Display artifacts prominently: Place them in high-traffic areas like lobbies or break rooms.
• Hold formal and informal walk-throughs: Explain the vision and solicit feedback.
• Make changes publicly: Use tools like a Sharpie to incorporate coworker feedback, showing that input is valued.
• Integrate artifacts into daily work: Refer to them in meetings and emails, and encourage others to use and modify them.
  This active dissemination ensures that the product vision becomes ingrained in the company’s DNA, fostering alignment and a sense of shared ownership.

6: Shipping

This chapter focuses on the crucial final stage of shipping a product, emphasizing the importance of meticulous detail and effective communication to ensure a successful launch. Joe McQuaid at LiveWell navigates the pressures of a committed launch date, reminding himself and his team to “nail the details” despite fatigue. He recognizes the critical need to help everyone visualize the finish line and maintain motivation as the product comes to life.

Building and Leveraging a Product Road Map

The product road map is a visual, forward-looking tool that communicates capability and strategy changes, managing product complexity and aligning current tactics with broader goals. It serves as a visual means to build consensus around the future vision. Key characteristics include:

• Horizontal timeline: Typically spanning three to six months for realism.
• Capability blocks: Rectangles representing development efforts, with width indicating time taken.
• Swim lanes: Horizontal sections describing organizational responsibility (e.g., individual, team, business unit).
• Goal connection: Visually links functionality to larger business and user goals, demonstrating strategic importance.
  The road map is a living document, adapting to business needs and evolving product vision, and requires constant management to ensure alignment.

Starting with a Capability List

To build a product road map, begin by creating a comprehensive capability list that details all functionalities, both user-facing and maintenance-related. For LiveWell, capabilities might include “Send text messages,” “Pull in athlete data from Nike+,” and “Log-in and authentication.”

• First, ignore time: Create a draft road map on a large sheet of paper with unlabelled time units. Use Post-it notes for each capability, including an “entire capability list implemented” note for the final state, placed at the far right.
• Add swim lanes: Draw horizontal rows representing engineering resources available to work in parallel.
• Sequence capabilities: Place Post-it notes logically, grouping similar efforts. Prioritize by asking: “Can you achieve the value proposition without this capability?” Shift crucial capabilities to the left (earlier completion) and less critical ones to the right.

Adding Time to the Road Map

After sequencing capabilities, add time to the road map by engaging developers in informal, one-on-one meetings. Present the “no-time” draft and solicit their feedback on prioritization and sequencing, making changes directly on the map to show that their input is valued. Then, ask them to estimate time for each capability. While initial guesses may be off, this creates a baseline understanding and fosters a sense of shared ownership and respect for the plan. The road map, though a living document, becomes a shared plan that the team wants to achieve, constantly used for strategic and tactical decisions.

Moving from the Ideal to the Achievable Through Iterations

Realizing that the full product vision may take longer than expected, the strategy shifts from an “ideal” to an “achievable” state. Instead of cutting broad functionality, separate a single capability into iterative phases. For example, “Send text messages” can be broken into:

• “Send texts to all users at the same time throughout the day.”
• “Send texts at various times, when the user schedules them.”
• “Send generic, hard-coded message.”
• “Send custom texts based on user activity.”
  This allows for quick functional strides and a broad stroke across all functionality, with refinement of individual features occurring later. Iterations ensure continuous progress without abandoning the comprehensive road map.

Translating Capabilities to Stories

User stories translate capabilities into specific feature requirements from the user’s perspective, zooming into the hero flow. For LiveWell’s “Create visualization of insights” capability, tied to the hero flow of Mary reviewing her progress:

• The user should be able to view a graph that displays her emotions over time, with time on the x-axis and emotional responses on the y-axis.
• The user should be able to ask the system to analyze the graph to identify trends or anomalies.
• The user should be able to easily identify periods that are particularly high or low on the emotion graph through color.
• The user should be able to visually compare the emotion graph to regular activities on her calendar app, linking calendar events to emotional moments.
  These stories bridge conceptual design decisions with tactical production activities, guiding designers, copywriters, marketers, and developers.

Prioritizing Functionality and Managing a Backlog of Good Ideas

Once a product is functioning, a product backlog becomes essential for managing countless ideas for improvement and expansion. It is a living, constantly changing list of good ideas that need to be defined, designed, and ready for development. Product managers should:

• Prioritize ideas based on emotional value proposition: Rank ideas by how much they support the product’s core emotional value, ensuring alignment with the “North Star” goal.
• Depoliticize suggestions: Add all suggestions, even “left-field” ones, to the backlog (prioritizing them towards the bottom) to show consideration without debating their immediate inclusion.
• Prune regularly: Review the backlog daily and set aside time weekly to remove irrelevant items.
  This ensures that development efforts remain aligned with the product’s strategic goals and emotional value.

Publicly Tracking User Value

To understand if a product is delivering on its emotional value proposition, establish guiding indicators of value that reflect user feelings rather than just business metrics. For LiveWell, Joe tracks:

• “Happy customer percentage”: The percentage of users who explicitly renew their monthly membership after the first month (excluding auto-billing). This directly indicates perceived value.
• “Global wellness number”: An aggregated average of individual user wellness scores, adjusted for membership duration. This reflects if people feel more in control of their bodies.
  These metrics, when publicly displayed and regularly communicated, help align the team, motivate engineers, and provide clear quantitative measurements of success. Celebrating victories when numbers go up further reinforces positive internal momentum.

Sweating the Details

Caring about every tiny detail a human encounters when using your product is critical because small details have large impacts on user experience. This includes aesthetics, usability, language, pricing, and information hierarchy. Product managers must be “constantly in the weeds” to ensure these details don’t fall apart. This involves:

• Keeping lists: Track visual defects (e.g., dummy text, unresolved visuals) and follow up to ensure they are completed.
• Tracking visual and usability defects: Prioritize these defects in bug-tracking systems, explaining their impact on trust and product success to developers.
• Producing relevant design documentation: Instead of full specs, use five lightweight artifacts:
  • Bubble diagrams: Show hero paths and data flow.
  • High-level wireframes: Describe screens and back-end services.
  • Detailed wireframes: For critical or intricate interactions.
  • Visual design documents (pixel-perfect comps): Show key screens with redline specifications.
  • Visual design tear sheets: Document all standard and nonstandard components and controls for consistency.

Teaching and Evangelizing

Part of a product manager’s role is to educate the team to see the importance of small details that contribute to the larger whole. This involves:

• Helping developers to see: Developers often focus on functionality and may not notice visual nuances. Overlay screen shots of their work with comps at 50% opacity to visually highlight differences and explain why each detail matters, connecting it to trust and overall product success.
• Setting an example: Model detail-oriented behavior in your own work (backlog, requirements, user stories, wireframes) to encourage the team to uphold high standards.

Taking a Proactive Stance

Product management requires a proactive stance to increase the chances of market success, rather than passively reacting to events. This means actively taking actions to achieve desired outcomes.

• Short-circuiting debate with artifacts: Use diagrams, sketches, or high-fidelity design artifacts to formalize intent, reduce ambiguity, and establish consensus during discussions, preventing endless verbal debates. Whiteboards are effective for forcing conversations into a visual medium.
• Bringing ideas to life by socialization: Actively “shop around” the product road map, describing what’s coming, soliciting feedback, and explaining how product decisions support individual colleagues’ goals and the company’s strategic objectives. This fosters alignment and a clear narrative of how planned product changes contribute to the larger business story.
• Establishing a launch cadence: Regular interim releases (e.g., weekly or daily) enable quick changes, signal product malleability, and drive positive internal momentum by empowering the team with emotional ownership.
• Motivating engineers: Clearly explain the rationale for product changes and how they provide emotional or utilitarian value. Provide measurable indicators of success for each road map item, helping engineers understand the relevance of their work and judge its success quantitatively.

Sniffing Out User Behavior from Usage Data

Once a product is live, analyzing usage data becomes crucial for understanding if the emotional value proposition is being delivered. Product managers should:

• Tie analytics queries directly to emotional value proposition and success metrics: Focus on key indicators (like Joe’s “happy customer percentage” or “global wellness number”) to optimize time spent on analytics.
• Dedicate time for free-form analysis: An hour a week for “playing with your data” can reveal unexpected patterns or trends.
• Investigate causality: When numbers change or fall short, conduct further research (e.g., usability tests) to understand why changes occurred. Small interface details can have large impacts, as seen in the “300 million dollar button” example.

Reading Every Support Ticket

Reading every single support ticket that comes in provides invaluable qualitative data. This allows product managers to intuitively understand behavioral trends and how product changes impact usage. Feedback from customer support can drive new product changes, though it’s important to judge each request to determine if it represents a larger product problem rather than an isolated comment.

Celebrating Victories

Finally, celebrating team victories is essential for maintaining morale and recognizing progress in the emotionally all-encompassing process of product building. Whether it’s a successful launch or achieving significant usage milestones, these moments of celebration and reflection foster pride and reinforce the deep care and dedication required to deliver emotional value to users.

Conclusion: The Future of Product Management

The Evolution of Design as a Strategic Competency

This book has detailed a design process that is human-centered, celebrates emotional value, and fosters optimism through divergent thinking. It emphasizes building understanding and empathy through direct engagement with users, translating observations into powerful insights that drive innovation. This approach frames products not merely as utilitarian objects but as entities that deliver deep emotional value, guided by a “North Star” goal that unifies the team.

Product Management: A Converging Discipline

In the future, more jobs will leverage this empathetic process for managing ambiguity and driving creativity. The methods presented, while illustrated through digital products, are broadly applicable to creating new services, policies, business models, and value delivery systems. This wide applicability highlights that we are all becoming product managers in an increasingly complex world.

The Design Process: A Platform for Success

The core argument is that the best process for success is a process of design—a creative endeavor fundamentally built on a platform of empathy. By embracing design as a strategic competency, individuals and organizations can navigate complexity, spark innovation, and create truly engaging solutions that resonate deeply with people, ultimately making our world more delightful and meaningful.

Key Takeaways: What You Need to Remember

Core Insights from Well-Designed

• Prioritize empathy: Building products people love starts with deeply understanding and feeling what users experience in their natural environments.
• Focus on emotional value: Differentiate products by what users feel after using them, not just what they do. This emotional connection is the product’s “soul.”
• Embrace design thinking: Adopt a methodical, iterative, and visually driven approach that challenges assumptions and explores multiple futures, accepting innovation risk for greater reward.
• Synthesize complex data into simple insights: Transform raw behavioral observations and market signals into provocative statements of truth about human behavior, which then guide product constraints.
• Communicate visually: Use concept maps, hero flows, and mood boards to articulate product vision and strategy, making abstract ideas concrete and rallying teams around a shared purpose.
• Maintain a living product roadmap: Visualize capabilities and strategic goals on a timeline, fostering alignment, managing complexity, and ensuring continuous progress through iterative development.
• Sweat the smallest details: Recognize that tiny interface elements, language choices, and aesthetic decisions have a significant impact on user experience and trust.

Immediate Actions to Take Today

• Observe user behavior in context: Identify an assumption about your target users and spend time watching them perform relevant activities in their natural environment, taking notes, photos, and videos.
• Start a product synthesis wall: Transcribe your observations into individual utterance cards and begin grouping them to identify patterns and anomalies, focusing on “why” people behave a certain way.
• Draft an emotional value proposition: For your current product or a new idea, complete the statement: “After using [product], people will feel [emotion] that they couldn’t feel before.”
• Sketch a simplified product concept map: Identify core nouns and verbs related to your product and draw a basic diagram illustrating their relationships and how they create value.
• Create a hero flow story: Pick the most common or ideal user path through your product and write a simple narrative describing each step, focusing on the user’s actions and feelings.

Questions for Personal Application

• How can you integrate empathetic observation into your weekly routine to uncover latent user needs?
• What is the true emotional value your product delivers, beyond its functional utility, and how can you articulate it more clearly to your team?
• How might you use visual artifacts (like concept maps or hero flows) to foster better understanding and alignment within your organization?
• Which “small details” in your product’s user experience are currently overlooked but could have a significant impact on user perception and trust?
• How can you proactively shape the market’s perception of your product, rather than merely reacting to competitive moves or trends?