The best product designers I’ve worked with—and learned most of my product design fundamentals from—have this annoying ability to notice when the company itself is creating the problem.

They have this obsessive need to keep working at the experience until the user actually gets it.

What I like is that they don’t let that obsession turn into perfectionism.

They still ship by the launch dates. They still iterate long after the feature release is done. They still make tradeoffs.

They’re thinking about what shipped yesterday, what needs to happen today to make sure it can support features they’ll work on 3–4 sprints from now, how to make engineering’s life easier, where to remove a bottleneck, and what the business needs next.

And somewhere in all of that, they’re still asking:

Does this actually make sense to the person using it?

I think that constant movement between the user, the product, the business, and the people building it is such an underrated part of being a really good product designer.

And the more I’ve worked with really good designers, the more I’ve realised that a lot of their edge comes down to something deceptively simple:

They observe, perceive, and notice things other people don’t.

They have an incredibly trained eye, but also this gift for perception and intuition into the human mind and the systems around it—from products to businesses to entire industries.

They’re super dialled into not just what users are doing, but what they’re assuming, what they’re afraid of, what they’re trying to get done, what they’re willing to pay for, what makes them trust something, what they’ve built a workaround for, and what they don’t even realise is a problem yet.

They’re also constantly picking up on small inconsistencies, behaviours, patterns, assumptions, constraints, and signals that are easy to miss when you’re only looking at the problem directly.

The best ones are constantly making little bets in their heads.

→ What if this behaviour actually means something else?

→ What if the problem isn’t the workflow, but the mental model behind it?

→ What if the thing we think users want isn’t actually what makes them buy?

And they’re constantly flipping the problem around. They're constantly thinking forwards, backwards and sideways.

They really know that an inference isn’t an insight.

One of my best mentors taught me that an insight should give you that little “aha” moment. It should change how you see the problem, not just describe what’s happening.

I think this is a big part of why the best product designers generate so much momentum around them.

They’re always bringing another observation, another question, another possibility into the room.

But more importantly, they’re able to turn those observations into something useful.

A really good insight shouldn’t die with a trend cycle or a sales target. It should outlast at least 3–4 cycles, if not decades, and still be useful when the context that produced it has completely changed.

That’s also why they don’t just design the answer.

They keep making the team better at understanding what the question actually is.