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."

Designers, product managers, and engineers each maintain a distinct internal 'Product Ideal' that shapes how they perceive the perfect product. These divergent ideals create a perceptual gap that causes misaligned meetings, frustrating compromises, damaged egos, and expensive project friction. The root cause lies in a systemic clash among three role-specific ideals rather than random disagreements. Making these invisible ideals visible and developing a shared language and ontology for digital product design can help teams diagnose friction, align expectations, and collaborate more effectively toward a coherent product direction.

Read at Medium