Product
Definitions
Goals
Questions to Ask
Without a clear target, you're designing for 'everyone', which ends up pleasing no one. Business-wise, vague targets equal wasted budget. Knowing your customer means targeted marketing, focused development, and a product that truly resonates. It's not just about who clicks, but who converts and becomes a loyal advocate. Bottom line: Know your audience to maximize impact and ROI.
Solve real problems, not imagined ones. Without a core value proposition, you're just wasting resources.
Emphasize effective solutions, not just solutions. Ineffective solutions waste resources and erode trust.
UX strives for solutions that resonate with user needs. Business demands market validation for sustainable growth. Product-market fit isn't a 'maybe', it's a 'must-have'. It's about ensuring your product addresses a real market need, is competitively positioned, and has the potential for scale. No product-market fit, no sustainable business. It's that stark.
You need to know how you know you succeed or fail. If you can't measure it, you can't manage it, and you certainly can't improve it.
Consider the user journey beyond the product itself, including reach, user acquisition, momentum.
Conserve resources and minimize losses. Test early by putting your product in your users' hands as early as possible.
The shorter the timeline, the faster you can get feedback, the faster you can "fail fast".
Not all problems are worth solving. A problem that affects few people might not be worth your while.
Understand user alternatives, identify gaps, opportunities, and your unique selling proposition (USP).
New is not better.
Learning from surprises is how we get smarter, faster, and more effective.
Most people won't stay on the "long march" unless they see compelling evidence that the journey is producing expected results quickly.
Alarm Bells
No prioritization, no user research. Feature-driven, not problem-driven.
You're optimizing the wrong bottleneck. The real problem is elsewhere.
Internal employees are 'captive users'—they are forced to use the system and often know too much about how the organization works. They are rarely representative of actual public users, leading to skewed feedback.
Classic 'Second System Effect'. Justifying massive rewrites based on 'ugliness' rather than user value. Rewrites often fail because they underestimate hidden business logic.
No you (yall )are not representative of all users, no matter how experienced and frequently you use.
Users aren't using it because it doesn't solve a real problem or the friction outweighs the value. No amount of executive pressure will fix this.
This is the XY problem. We're focusing on the customer's attempted solution (Y) rather than the root problem (X).
You're trying to recreate something that's presumably solved well. And doesn't seem like you did your competitive audit. Even if you're satisfied with your solution, you should say why yours works better, eg from user research.
They're very different things! The person saying this betrays a lack of understanding of what these 2 acronyms mean. UI is a part of ux. UX is far more than just tinkering with screens, colors, typography, spacing on figma templates. And this lack of clarity prevents us from going into what needs to be solved and how we should solve them.
Over-engineered (too complex).
Fixing the wrong problem.
Process over value.
Wrong metrics (users complain).
Dealbreakers
Nobody wants it.
Useless product.
Users hate it (forced).
Outdated, better options exist.
Zombie product.
Fake user numbers (forced).
Tiny gain, huge cost (pointless).
Great products fail if the org rejects them. (See Guide: Transformation).