Relatedly, for most designers leverage over existing products is not available in the UI. Rare is the scaled product which, thanks to some new gesture, affordance, visual treatment, or interaction changes meaningfully. Most of what influences these products is upstream of this: less “where should the button be” and more “what is the privacy model”; less “what does the animation for this transition look like” and more “how can we align user outcomes with business outcomes”; and so on. Snapchat’s UI is not that important; the fact that they have no profile and therefore you can’t be searched and judged by others is. We should try to learn more about business, sociology, psychology, economics, and technological history than we maybe thought we should! If we understand how development works (and fails), how people form mental models, and what the most usable patterns for our platforms are, we’ll be in good shape.
As a product designer guard Story thought over System thought. This is not because engineers, as people, or PMs, as people, are “prone to system thought”; they may or may not be, but their disciplines and the configuration of their organizations almost always are. This means that over time, best practices accumulate that favor system thought, and many of design’s partners will favor the measurable, the reducible, the general over the ineffable, the holistic, or the narrative in how they make decisions. (Bad designers will only favor the latter, giving their thinking a precious, privileged, arbitrary quality which can be costly).
Referring to Story thought vs. concept thought