Building a product that doesn't exist

"We operate under the illusion that we're all working towards a single, shared vision of the product. The reality is, we're not. The designer, the product team, and the engineer are each guided by their own 'Product Ideal' - a perfect, internal vision of what the product should be, seen through their own perceptual lens. This perceptual gap is the source of our most expensive problems: the misaligned meetings, the frustrating compromises, and the hurt egos."

"The designer, the product team, and the engineer are each guided by their own 'Product Ideal' - a perfect, internal vision of what the product should be, seen through their own perceptual lens. This perceptual gap is the source of our most expensive problems: the misaligned meetings, the frustrating compromises, and the hurt egos. This article is an attempt to make those invisible ideals visible, exploring a shared language to diagnose this friction and begin building an ontology for the practice of digital product design."

We operate under the illusion that all team members share a single product vision, but designers, product managers, and engineers each hold distinct internal "Product Ideals." Designers prioritize aesthetic coherence, user experience, and crafted details; product teams prioritize market fit, metrics, and roadmap trade-offs; engineers prioritize feasibility, reliability, and technical constraints. Those different ideals create systematic friction manifesting as misaligned meetings, frustrating compromises, delayed timelines, and damaged morale. Making the invisible ideals visible, adopting a shared language to diagnose misalignment, and building an ontology for digital product design reduces costly conflict and enables more coherent cross-functional decisions.

Read at Medium