Design products with opinions

Just a thought, but if your product has a teeming third-party consultant network, is that not an UX issue?

I'm not talking about all third-party partners here. It makes sense that products like Webflow or even Framer have agency partners. Or third-party service providers who connect to the product through a persona-specific interface. I'm talking about products that have third-party consultants with the main value prop of "we simplify the complexity of the product."

It reminds me of a funny situation my friends and I got into when traveling in Japan. Japan's known for being very process oriented and thoughtful about their implementation. They are also known for their excellent always on-time train system. Once, with our Suica passes, we swiped into the wrong train station. Luckily, some of us realized and did not enter. But here was a situation where the system completely broke down.

• Friend A had swiped in and could not "leave".
• Friend B had swiped in, but did not pass the folding turnstile.
• While the turnstile had the Tap-To-Pay module on both ends, Friend A could not Tap-to-Pay to leave.
• The Call Attendant button was also on the outside and not within reach of someone who had swiped in.
• There was no attendant on site.

Now what? Welcome to the hellscape of designing only for a happy path.

The point here is that third-party consultants often are hired to implement a specific happy path for a complex product. Said products are often marketed as having ultimate flexibility through custom fields, primitives, automations, and more. That level of flexibility is often overwhelming and requires users to express an process methodology onto it.

I've quite literally have hired a process agency to come help us with this before. They copied over templates and loom videos that sat in a workspace never to be touched again. For us, it was for an all-in-one sort of project management tool. Their templates broke down marketing and design deliverables into specific tasks. Each task had a set amount of estimated time, specific blockers, custom fields to communicate if it was informational or an action item, and more.

The problem wasn't the specificity and rigidity of the processes (I was happy to imagine a world where we were able to break tasks down to these bite sized chunks handled by multiple team members). The problem was the ability to adhere to this level of granularity. Task creation became a point of friction as it meant filling out more and more custom fields. And a lack of real guardrails meant that it was easy for a non-user to break something.

Btw, this isn't a call-to-action for anyone to go and build a better project management or second brain solution. Refer to the xkcd comic below:

It does almost make me wonder if there's ROI to creating the confusion. A network of third-party consultants means they are also inclined to push your product to clients. It creates this symbiotic relationship where the sucker really is the end-user who has to either learn to swim in the complexity or pay the premium.

It does leave the door open for an opionionated upstart to come rock your world (see Linear v. Jira).

And that's the point I'm trying to make here (and as a written reminder to myself). It's more effective to start with a point-of-view. Sure, some customers will balk at the lack of an earphone jack or physical keyboard. But it also means your specific thinking will find a stickier tribe who buy into your Airpods.

These opinions are often what I have to extract out of startup founders during my messaging workshops with them. "What's your view of the problem?" and "What's your way of solving it?". The ones that are able to really answer that are often the founders we see make it past their seed round.

Over the next couple years of vibe coding and the new AI space race, I think these sorts of opinions will become increasingly important and part of how companies can uniquely differentiate themselves.

Here's a good litmus test for whether or not your product has opinions:

What does your product's default state look like? Is it empty and requires the user to build their own dashboard? Or does it reflect your opinion about the best way to use it? Is it so on the money that users rarely even need to change the defaults?